I am noticing that I am responding to this on several levels and so this is rather a long posting.

First, I don't think anyone here has reflected what it actually is like to pray a prayer like that, and I don't think this is a place where that can be discussed openly.

Also, I find this discussion a little like using a fogged up telescope with today's measuring points etched into it, to look into the heart and soul of a man of another time, culture, and orientation that not only measures things differently, but measures different things.

I have been exploring the mystic side of my own Christianity, and I am finding that whenever I try to discuss it, Christian mysticism is far removed from the main of most people's knowledge, experience, and stereotypes... and I think that a quote like this serves as a pretty poor starting point for getting anything out of the subject.

There is still no substitute for talking to people you can know, in a present time relationship, about things as deep as this. In fact this sort of approach to it makes me less willing than I would have been otherwise, to participate in a discussion of my own experience. And that is a sad thing, because the sharing of what we ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE is the fastest way to find the common ground in Truth and to exchange anything of real value.

However I will offer this for your consideration, and it is an example of trying to use the right telescopes. Call up in your mind the concepts you carry about God, obedience, submission, giving in. That is to say, use the telescope that comes to hand first. Now here is another one to try using. In the original languages, the concepts of obedience and submission, of subordination, are expressed in different terms than we understand today from these buzzwords. What we translate as these words can mean several quite different things. (And the KJV threw them around without even consistently matching up which ones to use in which circumstances.) The loveliest image is one of yieldedness, of giving way graciously as one would before a narrow open door, so that two may pass through it in turn. Picture a courtly bow (or curtsey) of manners and kindness, a gesture that might have been used in a later century of sweeping off a plumed courtier's hat, yielding one's right of first passage in free will, before someone valued highly.

I'll tell you something else, dear friends, for friends ye be. If I had the nerve to dig up a quote from someone else's religious tradition, that I did not understand, and held it up for a discussion such as this, I would request that you bring me up very short.

If you want to understand anything about Christianity, of course the quickest way is to know Jesus in prayer; He is there to talk with anytime, and he is a lot less bristly than you or I. Or, if you prefer flesh and blood discussions, how about getting to know someone actively and positively practicing the Christian faith, in a mutually open and respectful dialog, and asking them what they actually experience? What we believe comes after what we experience. What we live is what we can really know, yes?

And, finally, how about wondering, did this French mystic experience something important that this prayer commemorates but does not describe? I am far more interested in contemplating what happened AFTER the prayer, than in what happened before it to make it a necessary and effective prayer.

And Peter, if you think about it again, do you still think toning it down was a good idea? Would any of us know what he meant better than he did?

~S~