Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
Barbara Cawthrone Crafton continues her teaching and group interaction on the subject of forgiveness.
Process Stuff (from Embracing Forgiveness, Morehouse):
A powerful thread running through Barbara’s teaching in this session emerges from the story of Joe and Erwin, the two evening prayer officiants in one of Barbara’s parishes. You have heard the story of how Joe became a spiritual allergen for Erwin. And you have heard how Barbara provided Erwin with a kind of ‘homeopathic cure’ for this spiritual allergy in the form of a tiny prayer: Just say his name, “Joe.”
Barbara offers a thoughtful progression of insight as she opens for us this concrete way of getting started on our forgiveness projects:
Putting a tiny bit of the offensive substance into the system repeatedly, bit by bit, over times helps the swelling to go down. The swelling has to go down in order to get healed from the allergy itself.
Using this prayer of the name means you can let God do the work. Don’t you do the work.
Over time you will change. This prayer will change you for sure. It will also change the one whose name it is.
Prayer is energy. It’s the gift of God’s energy. Love is energy. We are made of God’s energy and love.
In saying the name, “Joe,” you begin to create an opening through which this energy can flow.
Over time you change. Something good will happen to the person you are praying for; the energy of God does not create evil.
In these intractable situations where forgiveness seems impossible, step back and let God do some work. The sufficiency of God is bigger than ours.
It involves not trying to run everything ourselves, not thinking that forgiveness is a job we need to do. All we have to do—like all the spiritual practices—is to ask for it.
You say the name and you allow God to do the healing. You are patient with it.
You expect a miracle but you don’t know what it is because prayer isn’t shaping; we don’t order stuff and send it back if it’s not what we want.
It is just coming into the presence of God and allowing ourselves to be open channels for the love of God.
What are your “Joe” stories where you might have responded to a “spiritual allergy” through something as simple as saying the name of the other as part of your regular prayer practice?
Barbara clearly has a way of “seeing” prayer: prayer is energy; prayer can flow through an opening which you create with just one word; prayer allows the strength and power of the universe to move through us if we allow it; and we can get into this river of life and love and go with it.
Where does Barbara’s teaching on prayer practice intersect with your experience of Prayer?
What new possibilities of prayer are opened in you as you listen to Barbara?