Authentic Prayer and Global Healing (Full Sermon)

Comm-Unity On the Hill Congregation, Washington, D.C.*
Rev. Robbins S. Hopkins, Ed.D.

Thank you for asking me to speak.  It is delightful to be here this morning. The question I am exploring today is, “What is authentic prayer”?  Just plain and simple, authentic prayer is prayer that works.  It is prayer that brings results. It is prayer that produces energy shifts.  Authentic Prayer is powerful business.  Well then, how do we accomplish this?

The Bible has a few things to say to us about prayer.

“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us – whatever we ask – we know that we have what we asked of him.” (1 John 5:14-15)

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds ….” (Philippians 4:6-7)

“And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. (Ephesians 6:18)

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8:26)

The week before Hurricane Irene, exactly 7 days before it hit this area, we decided last minute to book a house in North Carolina for the week for my husband and myself.  We have been going to the beach in August for 41 years and we realized we were not going to go because none of our family were free to join us.  We discussed this at length and decided to make a reservation and take a weeks’ vacation just for us. That felt very wonderful, celebratory in fact! One day later, we realized that there was a Tropical Storm in the Atlantic. We thought, we had better arrange for trip insurance in case something more serious became of this storm. We called for the insurance and were told that we could not get insurance now because there was a named storm in the Atlantic, specifically now called IRENE.  So, my energy was very focused on this storm not only because of this reservation but also because I had been going to the North and South Carolina coasts literally all my life except for 4 years when were lived overseas.

So the prayers began in earnest.  Every time I went into prayer, I got the feeling I was simply nipping at the heels of Hurricane IRENE. I did all the things I usually do in working at the global level but I could not feel any shifts in energy which is how I know the prayers have been effective.  One day about the 4^thday into the prayer effort, I finally asked in sacred space, “How do we do this?” I was feeling overwhelmed and completely under effective.  Someone had shared with me that the Hurricane itself covered an area as large as Arizona.  This left me totally amazed.  I could feel the power and strength of Irene when in prayer and something I called powerful fury but I did not know how to address it in prayer.

Immediately after this question was asked, I was shown an aerial view of the Hurricane with me above it looking down. Awesome, truly awesome!  I saw a pattern of thousands of overlapping energy patches of two different colors moving to completely to surround and insulate the Hurricane.  I understood that what was being taught is that the spiritual energy of both conscious sentient beings and that of Divine Beings had to work in partnership to bring about a shift in the Hurricane Energy.  The two different colors of the energy fields, yellow and white, were respresenting consciously aware humans and Divine Beings working together to quell the hurricane. The energy was eternal energy in both instances, meaning that most of the humans participating in the healing were doing so from their eternal spiritual selves and many were not aware of this on the conscious human level.  That was really interesting to me.

I watched as these patches of different colored energy completely surrounded the Hurricane deeply into the ocean and high up into the air.  The prayers given were, “We are sorry for the imbalances we have created, Peace be with you.”  Over and over again, “We are sorry for the imbalances we have created, Peace be with you.”  It became a powerful energy chant which took on a life of its own.

Then other prayers were given for the clearing of blocked emotional, mental, self-protective and spiritual energies manifesting as this Hurricane.  The clearing of these energies went back to the 19^th century and included extensive clearings from both the 20^th and 21^st centuries as well.  More prayers were given for the people of the United States who were attracting this Hurricane energy to the Atlantic coast.  These prayers were also for the clearing of blocked emotional, mental, self-protective and spiritual energies of the US population from the 19, 20 and 21stcenturies manifesting as the imbalance in our weather known as Irene.

These prayers went on for several days with other aspects added each day as given in the meditative state.  One prayer focus was for the rebalancing of the energy manifesting as an imbalance in an oil refinery in Massachusetts which was shown to be unstable and potentially disastrous with such a storm coming.   There were calls to move the storm “further east, further east, further east”. There were prayers chanted such as “Forgive us, we know not what we do”, “Have mercy on us, this day” and others.

During the last 2 days of conscious prayer, the prayers were specifically for the mitigation of the intensity of the storm as it hit land.  Two days before Irene came ashore, I got energetic confirmation through Silence and again through a spiritual colleague that the storm would mitigate in intensity at the 11^th hour. I waited then through the last hours in tense anticipation as the news came in about the severity of the storm and the ensuing damages. When it was declared that is was officially a Category 1 Hurricane, a huge whoop and holler went up from my house and then immediately, I fell down weeping with gratitude and relief. It was truly, truly going to be bearable. We had been heard. We were most assuredly, One with All That Is.

As most of you know, Hurricane Irene at numerous points was being described as a possible Category 4 Hurricane and even until the day before it came to land as a Category 3 Hurricane. There was a lot of speculation about this. There were many dire predictions.  This is because those making the predictions were operating without the knowledge of the “Power that the world knows not of”.  The news casters are precisely trained and paid to look at appearances of the facts before them with little balancing spiritual education in keeping one’s eye on the Power of the Most High.   In the end, as I said, Irene came onto land as a Category 1 Hurricane.  This is not an accident, a stroke of luck, or a happy coincidence.  This is a Holy Coincidence due to thousands and thousands praying for the mitigation of the Hurricane and praying for protection and balance for our people and our property.  So, we claimed the victory through emails and celebrated in our ways as to the Power of Prayer to heal all imbalances.

So what can we make of this?  To restate, authentic prayer is prayer that works, prayer that brings results, prayer that produces energy shifts. Authentic prayer comes from the power within and the knowing of our Oneness with All That Is. Authentic prayer is not supplication.  God we need this.  God make this go away. God do this or God do that.  None of this is authentic prayer because God is not separate from us.

We are the embodiment of that Divine Energy.  God is constant, we are the ones busily separating our lives from Divine Love and Presence.  Where there is enough worry, anger, imbalance and darkness, the Earth manifests imbalances at a huge scale and we are the only ones together with Divine Energy who can restore the balance.  I have a few observations and thoughts about authentic prayer.

1.  We may think we do the praying but really God does the praying through us.  The love that brings us to the Silence is God’s Love, God’s Knowing and God’s Creativity manifest in us.  So authentic prayer requires us to listen with our hearts in the Silence as we begin to hear what is to be prayed for and how.

1. 1. 1. • “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8:26)

2.  We may feel that since the prayers come from Divine Knowing/God/Great Oneness why do we need to participate?  We have to participate to give form, power and meaning to the love vibrations known as prayers in this dimension. All imbalances of any kind must be re-balanced in the dimension of their creation.   The true reason we need to pray is that we are creating Love Energy and Balance through the verbal prayers we receive and form together with God.  We are in partnership with All That IS and we can choose to further the goodness or not.  If we choose to further the goodness, our giving verbal form to feelings, thoughts and unseen energy is the completion of our part of the bargain with All That Is.

1. 1. 1. • “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” (Ephesians 6:18)

3.  The imbalances we see in our thoughts, our bodies and our earth are our doing, the result of the blocked emotional, mental, self-protective and spiritual energies we have created in this dimension. To undo the imbalances, we need to call for the re-balancing of the blocked energies we have created in order for balance to reestablish itself.  When all the blocked energy is cleared, re-balancing can occur spontaneously.

• • • • “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us – whatever we ask – we know that we have what we asked of him.” (1 John 5:14-15)

4.  The same principles we see with healing for individuals and organizations applies directly to global imbalances.  The unseen blocked energies are the reasons our earth is hurting and manifesting imbalances everywhere we turn. For example, the world economies are out of Right Relationship with All That Is.  I know this from prayer again and again, and we all know this from the news.   Why? Because of blocked emotional energy, stagnant mental energy, feelings of self-protection and gnarled doubt and fear both of which are blocked spiritual energies. Not for one second does perpetual worrying get us any closer to what we would like to see before us, healthy economies.  No nay saying, no ranting or raving, no criticism of any kind will help the economies of the world to heal.  Prayers however can produce powerful clearings for blocked energies from this century and from previous centuries and can contribute to huge positive changes for our world’s economies.  This is because these things are unseen energies we have created, nurtured and kept alive.  Take these issues and all like them into authentic prayer.

1. 1. 1. • “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds ….” (Philippians 4:6-7)

5.  We are all called to keep our eye on the Love of God. We are reminded,  “do not judge by appearances”.  Do we live this way?   Not usually.  If we could, however, find it within ourselves to keep our eye on Divine Oneness and to refrain from judging by appearance,  we would see an end to worrying, blaming, posturing, bluffing, obsessing, and even to impatience and irritation and in this case to devastating Hurricanes.  Truly, our intention to return to Peace and balance again and again through the ages, eventually makes these outcomes of imbalanced energy completely obsolete.  We have to truly live out our dreams, commitments and hopes for balance and Peace through our daily life choices.

Just in case, this one little Hurricane prayer example is not convincing enough concerning the total power of prayer, I have one more example that came immediately after Hurricane Irene.  I spent two days in September feeling angry, prickly, impatient and completely unsettled.  This is very out of the norm for me.  I finally realized that the imbalance was a sign of an impending disaster at the global level.  I sat and listened and finally got that there was to be a powerful earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Australia with potentially devastating effects for thousands of people. The spiritually given images were overwhelmingly traumatic,  to underscore the devastating  potential of this impending situation.  This information came to me on September 11, this year, 2011.

I immediately sent out an email to many folks who have worked with global healing prayer.  We used the same process as was first given for Hurricane Irene, that of opening sacred space, calling for sentient awake beings and Divine Beings to work together to clear the blocked emotional, mental, thermal and spiritual energies back 4 centuries to manifest as a potentially devastating earthquake and tsunami.  By September 12, 24 hours later, the spiritual information came through that the situation had been mitigated.  My understanding of mitigation means that the severity of the impending disaster has been addressed. I sent out a second email to this effect and thanked all those who had been in prayer.

Then on September 15, three days later, there was a news report from CNN on line sent to me by one of those praying that there had been a 7.3 earthquake off the coast of Australia , South of Fiji, over 390 miles below the earth’s surface. The report said  NO TSUNAMI WAS GENERATED!!  It was fully expected that with these conditions, a tsunami could have been a normal aftermath.  That was such powerful feedback that our prayers do really, really make a powerful and immediate difference in our world. We were exceedingly thrilled.

A final spiritual lesson was given for us through the medium of meditation and was then  reconfirmed by a clairvoyant colleague of mine.  The teaching was that peoples of  the East need to pray for those of the West.  Those of the North need to pray for those of the South, those of the South need to pray for those of the East and on and on.  We need to pray for those who are suffering even when they are not in our own areas or own countries.  This will bring forth the awakening of the peoples as to the Power and real Presence of God in our lives.

So make one of your choices, authentic prayer.  Prayer is God’s Love manifest in this dimension for grace, balance, wholeness and peace.  Who could resist such wonderful outcomes!

 

Post Script- Though we lost our week at the beach in August, the owners of the house have graciously offered us another week in the fall in replacement for that lost vacation!

* Comm-Unity on the Hill is a Unity Congregation. All are welcome.

** This sermon was preceded by a guided meditation for the congregation. This sermon was offered in October 2011.