Agape for a stranger

I finished a rough draft of Chapter 4 of my book. For this chapter I bought River Jordan’s “Praying for Strangers” and enjoyed quoting from it.

This 4th Step in the 7-step agape prayer practice is about holding in prayer a neutral person who is either merely an acquaintance or even a stranger. The purpose of this step is to practice letting the flow of agape help you want the well-being of this stranger equally as strongly as you did for the persons you chose for the other steps. In order to accomplish this, a person needs to visualize participating with this person in the spiritual flowing of agape until finding the spiritual concern that this chosen person will find personal well-being and deep sense of peace.

For this chapter, I did a verse-by-verse careful and detailed study of 1 Cor. 13 (especially verses 4-8). Here is a quote from that study: “agape was implanted in each of our hearts for the purpose of making it possible for us to wake up to the trust that God is gently and persistently accepting us and helping us find spiritual power to help us in life. And it’s a good thing that patience is at the heart of agape, because most of us usually make it harder for ourselves to let agape flow in our lives. That’s also why nobody should get discouraged when there are a lot of missteps, start-overs, and stops, and restarts that come with the agape prayer practice. That just seems to be the way it happens when trying to do this in our confusing, overly pressurized modern world.”

When I searched for what caused the negative emotions mentioned in those verses, I said, “So first, agape overcomes any neediness that a person may let build up from the many fears we let grab ahold of us. It provides us with a sense of fulfillment that cuts through any tendency to desire to try building up ourselves by putting down someone else. Of course, Paul never heard of the concept of self-esteem, but when we read those verses after having heard about the modern emotional need to be strengthened in our sense of self-esteem, we can see how connecting with the power of agape can give us a basis more eternally sound than we could ever find by inventing ego-identities constructed from the experiences we have in early childhood and the fears that keep plaguing us from infancy. There is also an underlying meaning running through those verses that agape opens a person’s heart-sense to supply the basis for working to achieve what is best for the human community. That sense of common humanity is meant in the Greek expression ‘to me ta heats’ of verse 5, so that when we translate it as applying to agape, we see it means: ‘agape works against seeking selfish advantage over the common good.’”

Then I got such enjoyment from reading River Jordan’s “Praying for Stranger” that I used several quotes from it.

Agape for a friend

I finished a rough draft of Chapter 3 of my book. That helped me develop even more deeply my understanding of agape as I examined Rom. 12:9-19a and Gal. 5:13 & 22.

This 3rd Step in the 7-step agape prayer practice is about holding in prayer a friend and then a family member.

Part of the deepening of understanding was expressed this way: “As you practice this for many days, try to find a deep sense of your relationship with this person strengthening and growing. If this person is geographically near enough that you can be with them, then let this prayer practice lead to action -- to the power of agape actually flowing to this person when you are with them. Over the course of several months, you should do whatever is necessary to deepen your relationship. But if you are not geographically near this person, don’t let that be a problem, because God’s agape is not limited by space or time. The important point for you is to visualize what it would be like for this person to receive God’s agape, no matter where this person is. This works because you are praying with the attitude of spiritually following agape as it flows in the person’s life.

“Because some relationships that have developed over many years go through different periods of agreements and disagreements, and there may even be times of difficulties or even hurt feelings, you may experience, during this practice, the surfacing of memories that carry with them confused feelings toward the person. If these feelings begin to interfere with your sensing the flow of agape, then you may want to stop the practice long enough to work through any sensation of blockage. In fact, if a memory surfaces of some act that requires forgiveness, then you may actually need to contact the person and seek whatever forgiveness or reconciliation is required. This is necessary because you need to be completely honest with yourself in order to be honest with someone else. But especially, you need to be completely honest with yourself in order to be able to be open to the divine Presence. You need to be honest with yourself in order to truthfully experience the flow of agape.”

Then when I got into the part about holding a family member in prayer, I was able to look back over my family memories, and also I reflected on watching children grow and realizing how completely vulnerable human beings are in the first year of life. All humans literally could not survive without some form of nurturing. Our utter dependence on others is established at the beginning of life, and it is meant to continue on throughout our lives. All attempts to deny that we depend on one another can lead to very destructive behavior in society. If we don’t learn trust and patience very early and then don’t continue developing that into adulthood, we end up having a lot of problems relating with other people.