Having recourse to prayer amid escalating devastations has been besmirched in our minds as a fool's last desperate measure; and more, a fool's giving up; and further, a fool's past neglect in prayer now being remedied, too late, for selfish reasons.
The above quantification only goes so far as a sign of how much credit and trust we are willing to give to prayer itself and the diminution we are willing to give to the media's importance (and all the world characters portrayed therein).
If we regard prayer as just the means of getting a solution, only after our trust in man has failed, then it is perhaps an imperfect prayer. But what if the prayer, the trust that goes into it, is fueled more and more, increased in proportion to the rise in chaos and fear, indeed, increased to the apparent silence one receives in return - when one gets to the point of forking over radical trust where one has never really done so before, and at that, with joy and gratitude?
It is then that even the latest, too-late prayer extends back into the past and becomes the literal prayer of your entire life, your entire being; not your entire being as some emotive collection of your present faculties, but of the being of you that has been in time since conception - you on the swing-set, you stealing some candy, you at a party. It is not something that needs to be imagined; it is already there when we pray. All of one's life, every breathing minute in time past, now being prayed and now all real. (This is obviously not something summoned through one's own powers, for it has nothing to do with one's own powers.) If "love covers a multitude of sins", then think about what prayer covers.
Then one can accept the thought, without a hint of presumption, that it is never too late to repent, and therefore never too late for the world to be completely turned around.
It is to be wondered, whether the ever-present News is nothing more than an ever-deepening, insinuating distraction away from the strongest solution that has been at our disposal since the beginning - prayer.
To be wondered, because there is the subtlest temptation that comes with every single little bit of information we receive through the media. I am not referring to despair, but to something like a horrible blasphemy. The temptation is to be prodded into a kind of awareness that is in fact an insistence on greater separation from God: as our colossal failures and offences stare us in the face through all kinds of unexpected disasters, we do not merely cling to our ways, but increase the arrogance of our ways. It is not a loud arrogance, but a steady, silent one, wearing the face of care.
We have been deceived into thinking we are just reading, or hearing, or seeing facts and events when we heed the News. I refer not to media lies and deception, but to the initial fact of what the News is. To watch the News without detachment is to pretend that you are connecting with facts and events around the world through a channel that is completely inadequate to even the beginning of such a connection. And often the major event that has occurred is the unperceived alteration in one's own mind.
Prayer connects us with our entire past life, in a way that frees us, as our entire being prays in the present; we are ushered into reality. The News - deceptions and spin, agendas and biases aside - the News, just by dint of what it is, ushers us into a dream world.
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