Of Prayer

My old friend The Anchoress is the only blog contact I have retained. She has followed my ups and downs, some unfortunately, on her own blog when my emotions got out of control, and has always kept an eye on me through e-mail. Earlier this month she put a request in her blog for prayers for me.

She has just renewed this along with requests for others. No one ever feels as morally good as they actually are, and Elizabeth Scalia, to give her real name, is just as weighed down with the guilt of her life's transgressions as any one of us. But she is morally good. She is a Catholic, a lay Benedictine, and works hard both to pray and to be ready to accept the Sacrament regularly and with Faith.



I have kept but the minimum vows of a Buddhist lay practicioner and an aspiring bodhisattva, and those not very tidily. But I work dilligently, using the skillful means I have been taught, to purify my obscurations and transgressions.

She and I have obvious and deep karmic links. When these are present "something comes of" the relations between individuals. Most others have slipped from me, or are slipping fast. Two just broke their real connections with me last week--for not only can the karma between individuals in a given life run its course, we generally have the power to refuse to let it go further in this particular life if we so choose.

I will take a moment to wish the two who left me well and say that I stand ready to work out whatever may be left between us when karma brings us together again in whatever future life.

And I will take another moment to thank all of the Anchoress' readers who have prayed for me. May the good they do with all their prayers return to them when they need it most.

Finally, I will thank the Anchoress, for what and why she already knows, and it all got far too complicated for a blog post years ago.

All this having been done, I will withdraw into the darkness, the silence, and the emptiness that I now need regularly to be able to abide the light, the noise, and the crowded human life for any but a couple of hours.

With only a few hours a day to spare for everything external, it takes the strongest of karmic connections and the most deliberate intent for anyone to follow me, even at a distance on my journey into night.

Thanks for keeping an eye on me, Lizzie.