Prayer box

Recently I’ve been reading a book about prayer by Anne Lamott, in which she summarizes all prayer types into 3 main categories. She names them simply, as in the title of her book, as Help, Thanks, Wow. On page 36 she described a material tool she uses to assist her with the toughest prayers of “help.” She said that tool is a box.

She uses that box to help let go of something that troubles her. Into the box she puts a written page onto which she describes whatever kind of internal struggle she is having. That’s a way to give a physical action for the process of psychological or spiritual letting go. The point is a material tool can help with the big struggles that mess up her well-being.

Such a tool helps because it becomes a way to see and feel the letting go process. She remembered a time of extreme stress when someone said to her, “Just let go and let God,” and the feeling that came over her was to hit that person. In that moment her thought was, “If it were that simple, I’d had done it.”

So how the box process works is first to actually write down a description (in as much detail as possible) of what you need divine help with — and why you can’t do it yourself. Merely admitting on paper the need for help brings about the beginning of a more effective way of letting go. The next step is to hold the paper next to your heart for several seconds. Next comes the prayer or time for meditation that begins by reading slowly what is written; followed by closing your eyes and meditating on those written words. Finally, slowly place the paper in the box. Take a deep breath as you close the lid then sigh the breath away as you pray the message to be ‘sent.’

Ms. Lamott then explained that an agreement needed to be made with yourself to not open the box until you sense that something happens to make you think the prayer has been answered. Of course, she admits that time is often a problem for us because there may be a long time before we sense that answer.

She said this box helps in cases of being worried, obsessed, angry, or distressed so much you feel like nothing can be done to stop your anguish. Also, she has used it to help with a relationship that upsets her so much she can’t see a way for reconciliation — that’s when she writes down a description of what the relationship problem is, then puts that in the box.

To all of this I would add the power of agapé. The prayer I could see as helpful for letting go would be something like, “I pray for the power of agapé to work on this.” And here again is where we need to remember (as that ancient religious leader, Paul, said) agape is patient. We need to be patient with agape because the answer we sense may take longer to fulfill than we wish it would.

Agapic Self —having agapé for oneself

Each of us is created in such a way that we have a special spiritual power deep in the center of our being. This blog is based on the 2,000-year old Greek tradition of designating that power with the term “agapé.” I call it a spiritual power because it is capable of opening us up spiritually.

When we fully, honestly accept the transforming process that agape [for convenience I decided to drop the accented é], can do for us, we usually experience that process as having agape for oneself. Sometimes a person’s early childhood experiences and training and indoctrination causes a life-long search to be able to have agape for oneself.

The first awareness of that search is expressed as “loving oneself.” Such a search is advanced tremendously when we can deeply believe that we can have agape for ourselves as God has agape for us. But eventually, as we are able to let agape work within us, we experience agape opening us up spiritually. Then we are able to gain the realization that agape is transforming our ‘sense of self’ so that we find out that what we thought of ‘our self’ is not our true self.

I call this the beginning of agapic transformation. (“Agapic” is a new word that came to me the other day. I’m not familiar enough with Greek to know if there actually is a word to express what I was wanting to describe, so I’ll just stick with that word and use it for the expression “Agapic Self.”) In agapic transformation we learn that our true self is spiritual, and thus we are able to get beyond any false identification with the defense mechanisms that developed within us from early childhood experiences and became very confused during and shortly after puberty.

What I’m trying to describe is the original core of the being each of us was created to be. We were created with agape “poured into our heart-center” (as the ancient religious leader, Paul, would say). So that at base of our being we are agape. We can describe that self, which is meant to develop from that new beginning — our true self -- as our “agapic self.” When I capitalized it in the previous paragraph, I was expressing my belief that it is divine: we are a small part of the one, flowing, vast Agapic Self.

But of course, something must have gone wrong in most of us because we grew to think we could ignore the spiritual power of agape in our heart-center. Such ignoring happened as our defense mechanisms grew stronger. Many spiritual traditions give such a process of false identifying the name “ego-identity” (or abbreviated, “ego”). At an important point in your adulthood, you find a deep-seated need to make a choice: either continue trying to function with the dangerous ego-identity or fully accept a new identity with agapic self.

If you have the strength and courage to choose to get beyond any ego-identity, at first you will experience an internal struggling. We are told in Western Civilization that we have to fear the loss of identity. The internal struggling comes from such fear. So first we have to face then overcome that fear. What helps is the realization that such a fear is unfounded.