When You Pray

Dare To Ask To Whom You Speak

By James Donahue

Readers of this site may find it hard to believe, but some years ago I taught an adult Bible class in a fundamental Bible church in Michigan.

There was an elderly man named Archie Dorman in my class who I admired, not only because of his sincere interest and concern for the people around him, but for his ability to pray. When Archie prayed he seemed to bring the entire class in direct contact with a higher authority. His prayers were so moving that I sometimes thought I observed a soft glow coming from his face.

Archie was dying. He had an illness that was sapping the life out of him slowly. He made frequent visits to the local hospital were my wife, Doris, worked as a medical technologist, so we were more aware of the seriousness of his condition than most others in our church.

A few days before he died, Archie was in the hospital and Doris was alone with him for a few moments, once again drawing blood from his arm. He looked at her and said something very strange. “When you pray,” he asked, “have y ou ever asked who you are praying to?”

“No, I never have,” she answered. After all, we always assume we are praying directly to God. Who else would we be praying to?

“Why don’t you ask the question the next time you pray. Then let me know what you find out,” Archie said.

Doris told me about this strange conversation that night when she arrived home. Mostly out of curiosity, I suppose, we both prayed and asked the question posed by Dorman.

We didn’t get an answer right away. Archie was long dead and buried before it came to us. But the answer did come and it changed our lives. It took us a while to accept it.

Since that fateful encounter, we now have opened our minds to an entirely new understanding of just who God is, and the flawed role of existing and archaic religious systems in world affairs. I will attempt to explain:

The late author and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson once told of an experiment he tried with prayer. He said he declared that God was Isis, an ancient Egyptian Goddess, and began praying regularly and fervently to her. After a few weeks he said he noticed that his prayers were being answered.

After that Wilson said he changed his focus and began praying to another thing. It may have been a rock or a stone statue in the local park. Again, after a few weeks of fervent prayer, he noticed results.

No matter who or what Wilson chose as his god for the experiment, he said his  prayers were eventually answered.

A few years ago when Art Bell was still hosting the Coast-to-Coast all night radio show, Bell tried a similar experiment with his radio audience. It was the summer of 1998 and both Florida and Texas were suffering from severe drought. Florida was so dry the state was literally on fire. Bell asked all of his radio listeners to think very hard about rain in Florida. He asked for collective thought, with hundreds of thousands of minds from all over the world thinking about rain in Florida at the same time.

The next day it rained in Florida. Bell was astounded to think that his experiment may have worked. In case it was a coincidence, however, he tried the experiment again. He had his listeners think collectively of rain in Texas. And sure enough, the following day it rained in Texas.

What Wilson and Bell discovered was the same thing that Doris and I had learned. God is not a big spiritual grandfather looking down on us from the clouds. He exists in us and in everything around us.

This is what is meant in Genesis 1:26-27 when the Bibls says: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness?” and “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

Thus we exist in the image of God. And we appear to be the creators of everything around us. Collectively we make up the total of what God is. The Creator exists within us all. Our thoughts, collectively, have the power to make the world, the universe and everything around us exactly what we want it to be.

Taking this concept even farther, we appear to be capable of creating our own individual universe. Everything we see is observed and experienced from our own personal perspective. Nobody else can envision things in the same personal way that we see them. What may be lovely to one person may appear ugly to the person standing next to us.

We have great power within our mind. Mere thought, if applied in the correct way can bring dynamic change. This is why people have been known to heal themselves by serious illness, even cancer, by merely thinking the disease away. Others are healed of various maladies at religious prayer meetings. Sometimes just wishing hard for something makes it come true.

Mental thought is so powerful that I believe people, collectively, can head off wars and change the course of history. This is what has been so disturbing about the Christian teaching of a looming apocalypse. With so many “believers” wishing for a great world war so that Jesus will return, such an apocalyptic event may just occur.

Indeed, God manifests Himself in us as the very light within every cell in our bodies. We all have an aura of light emitted from our bodies.

My fear is that we, as humans, have failed our destiny. We were supposed to be so much more than we are. Instead of using our powers and abilities, we have created a religiously oriented social order that demands suppression. The theology of ancient religious orders teaches fear and peccability, thus creating a society of slaves.

These religions are so filled with rules and restrictions we have become prisoners within them. What is worse, each religious group thinks it is right and all the others are wrong. Most wars have been fought over religious differences.

It was never supposed to be this way.