Praying for the “Bad People”
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Praying for the Bad People
I am not — and never have been — a Christian. That said, I am a huge fan of Jesus. I have a good bit of wall space devoted to him in my studio. My mother did her best to make me Catholic. The effort began with my baptism and, later, confirmation, as well as dragging me to mass on a daily basis when that was something that was convenient for her as, for a number of years when I was very young, there was a small chapel literally across the street from our house and she visited E-V-E-R-Y day that wasn’t Sunday because on Sunday we went to the Big Church. She had me in Catholic schools — both parochial and private — from kindergarten until, when I was a senior in high school, we moved to a spot that was so close to an actual public school that I could walk there… and I did.
So, I grew up with pretty darn regular sessions of being required to pray for this, that, or the other thing. I didn’t get it. Nobody explained anything to me about how this ‘praying’ did anything at all. Plus, I rarely saw actual results from all the goal-oriented praying that I was required to be a part of… that “Cuban crisis”, for instance, just kept on keepin’ on despite the thousands of prayers directed that-a-way. The kid who was dying of cancer, died.
Now, had anyone taken the time to educate me as to what this ‘prayer’ actually was, or to the fact that we all come here with very different agendas and that, in fact, that there was a distinct possibility that we come here more than just the once, and stuff like that, I might have known way earlier what it took me about 40 years to learn on my own. Had someone explained the concept of ‘energy’ to me… I would have understood prayer better.
I know… you may well be thinking, “Well, how could a child grasp such a concept?”
I know I could have. I was a strange child. I know that. I did things that were weird, things that no one ever talked about happening… or even being able to happen, but they could happen, and they did happen… to me. The best thing I discovered that, as far as I knew, no one else new about, was that I could leave my body and ‘swim’ through trees and the earth. That’s how I “got away” from men who were doing horrible things to me. In the long run, though, that experience broadened my horizons about all kinds of things. Not that what was happening to my body didn’t complicate my mind and my life… oh, it did for sure! I was waaaay messed up well into my 30’s as the result, probably, of managing to repress any memories of the abuse, but eventually I got enough distance on it — and the memories returned — and I’d gotten enough qualified professional help — that I got to be a little closer to “normal” while still maintaining my ties to the more ephemeral aspects of life.
I had a little bit of a mental set-back in 2016 owing the more-or-less-constant in-my-face presence both on television and online of a man whose very visage was reminiscent for me of the faces of all the men who’d taken advantage of my sister’s body and mine in the woods back when we were kids. I recognized what I’ll call my grandfather’s “energy” and that of his friends in that man that I kept seeing on TV. It’s an energy that radiates the need for power and a sense that that person assumes they can do no wrong. I’d gotten very good at recognizing that kind of aggressive, take-what-I-want energy when I was a kid and, happily, since then I’ve rarely encountered it up close but, suddenly, there it was, every… damn… day for four years on my television, online, on the radio… because even the voices of such people resonate with their inherent evil. (There’s that ‘energy’ thing again.) I finally succumbed to profound anxiety despite my best attempts to avoid visual or audio exposure to this living reminder of the absolutely dreadful experiences I’d been through as a child.
Just this year I have begun to feel ‘safe’ again… and, interestingly, I have also begun to feel sorrow for whatever awful circumstances must have created my grandfather and those men in the woods — and that man who was running the country. In order to be the way that they were/are, they certainly could not have received the best upbringing ever. Heaven knows, I spent quite some time behaving very badly in my own way because of the bad things that had happened to me and that I’d hidden from myself. For quite a few years, I put myself in harm’s way on a pretty regular basis, though, as opposed to harming others.
Thinking on that, I realized that all the “bad men” had probably been ‘created’ to be the way they were by their childhood experiences, in whatever ways that may have manifested for them. With that realization, compassion hit me like a bolt of lightning, so today I began ‘sending’ compassionate energy to the man who unintentionally re-terrified me as an adult… essentially, I realized, that I was praying for his soul just like the nuns used to make us do. It feels more natural now, doing it of my own accord, from my own heart. I wish I’d been educated about spiritual energy and the way it works, how it exists outside of the so-called normal parameters of life that we’re taught about as kids, when we were taught that we have to go ‘through’ some entity greater than we are in order to tap into that cosmic energy that is, in fact, within us as well.
Life… energy… and the transmission of energy… it’s all really quite amazing! Too bad they don’t teach that in school.
