Pray for Agapé to be felt by others

Recently a friend loaned me Anne Lamott’s book about prayer, Help, Thanks, Wow.  I was very inspired by her words. But I want to do something different with a few quotes from her book. I do this because there were places where she seemed to be referring to what the original New Testament called ‘agapé’ — like when she talked about Love with a capital L. Even though she didn’t ever use the Greek word, I decided to see how her words could take on increased meaning by changing ‘love’ to ‘agapé.’

When Anne Lamott talked about how she prayed for people, she described that as asking for health and happiness for them, and for their children; and for them to have help to have a sense of peace; and for them to feel the agapé of God. I consider that the basis for holding others in prayer.

And the way she described spiritual power, I could see she was meaning the animating energy of agapé. Also I think she was referring to the light of agapé when she talked about the energy and motion that have called us to prayer, allowing us to perceive at least bits of deeper reality. 

She talked about the mystery of people surviving unsurvivable losses and finally coming to happiness again. And I interpret her as marveling that the only way that was at all possible had to do with agapé coming to them through their closest people and through a community of support, helping them and surrounding them with agapé.

Then when she described the wonder of our hearts dealing with the extreme tragedies of any historical moment, she gave an inspiring statement of how we keep from being crushed by overwhelming international news reports, which I interpret as: agapé falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. As she does whatever she can to help people survive, she claims that agapé pulls people back to their feet — so bodies and souls are fed — bones and lives heal — new blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.

And so, even though she never uses the Greek word, we can find a deeper spiritual awareness to her inspiration when we can read her insightful wisdom without getting bogged down in thinking about common love the way it usually comes across in modern society. When our reading is shocked a little by coming across the unusual word, ‘agapé, we are sent into a different perspective and so are able to see the spiritual meaning of Lamott’s insight.