There's a famous short story by Ursula K. LeGuin about a man who wakes up each morning to discover that his dreams have become reality. He meets with a psychiatrist and they decide to use subliminal methods to try to shape the man's dreams for the betterment of mankind. There intentions really were good; the results? Eh.
They started by trying to solve the world's overpopulation problem - the dreamer dreams that a terrible plague kills ninety percent of all the people on earth. They try for world peace - aggressive aliens land on the moon and prepare for an apocalyptic attack on earth, a threat which binds all nations together in self-defense. Frustrated, the psychiatrist screams: "Just get the moon off the moon!" They launch their attack. It goes on like this for a while. The results are always a little skewed off center.
I think of this story often when my praying gets a touch too specific. My HP has a great sense of humor. For instance, if I pray for my work life to get better I might get fired. It never comes out quite the way I want. I'm always getting burned by some weird loophole when I try to tell god what god should do, something that god does not find helpful being as that god has been in god's position for a very long time and is quite happy with how things are working out.
SuperK and I have our home for sale. This is a situation that I did not envision when I was 28 years old and waking up penniless in my childhood bedroom. It definitely falls in the BMW Flat Tire category, which is not an especially rough category to fall into. Anyway, someone looked at the place twice and we were hopeful that they might make an offer to buy the place so that we can do . . . we're really not sure what we're going to do. Something else. Something other that what we're currently doing.
My understanding of prayer is that the problem isn't the praying for specific things but the praying for specific things without attaching the caveat "if it be your will" or something in that vein. The problem is insisting on a certain outcome. My wise mama tells me that I can pray for a safe trip or a favorable interview if I add that crucial, crucial addendum. And I have to be careful that I pray only for myself and not for others, unless I'm praying for something good to happen to them. It wouldn't be good, for instance, to pray that someone who cut me off in traffic contract bubonic plague. That would be a selfish prayer even if the person really deserved to be struck down. Today I don't pray for someone to get the Black Death although I confess to wishing a nasty case of stomach flu - with The Diarrhea and projectile vomiting - on the odd driver or two.
Anyway, I decided to pray for an offer on the place, quickly adding "if that's what you want to happen." And guess what? An offer came through, although the buyer's agent has warned us that "it isn't perfect."
Damn it. I KNEW I should have prayed for the perfect offer. See what happens? God gets it all twisted up and I don't get exactly what I want and if I want it, then it surely must be good for me. Right? Right?
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