Let's Get Mystical ...

The Anchoress has been praying and fasting for the nation and will do so until the election.

...what I have not written about this regimen is that these 16 days have brought such a sense of interior peace that I almost cannot describe it.

Grounding myself in prayer, examining every odd yearning (and not just for food) and choosing to surrender that yearning rather than gratify it has had an empowering effect, and a clarifying one.

What I am reminded, repeatedly, is that time is a construct - that everything is happening simultaneously. Right now, I am writing at my computer. Right now, I am voting at my local school. Right now, Christ is dying on a cross. Right now, He is making a covenant and receiving a kiss. Right now, Napoleon is heading to Waterloo. Right now, George Washington is facing defeat for the umpteenth time. Right now, I am being needlessly cruel to someone. Right now I am being born. Right now I am 78 years old and grousing that my kids never visit me. Right now, Obama has won the election. Right now John McCain has won the election.

This is why prayer has power. In the quantum world, where everything is occurring all at once, prayer changes things. Sacrifice changes things. Wisdom knows this - it is why every religious tradition, Eastern or Western, encourages prayer and sacrifice - because this is how you pierce illusions.

Last week Pope Benedict XVI said: ”He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand”…money vanishes, it is nothing. All these things that appear to be real are in fact secondary. Only God’s words are a solid reality”.

Yes. Everything is happening, all at once. What appears to be solid and three-dimensional would does not even exist between its busy atoms. That which the world regards as most ephemeral, and least grasp-able, is actually the solid platform upon which all illusions spin. ...

This is powerful and somehow it also makes me feel peaceful as well.

I also have been praying with increased zeal that feels akin to the praying I did during the papal election for God to guide us, for the election to send us the direction he wants us to go ...

Though I'm not fasting.