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Latest News
The changing of the (Arena) seasons...
Arena season 16 (Warlords Season 1) has ended and season 17 begins this week. Mounts and titles for season 16 are expected to be awarded next week. Congratulations to everyone who receives their Primal Gladiator's Felblood Gronnling and good luck to everyone vying next season for the Wild Gladiator's Felblood Gronnling!
Terror is coming to the skies of Draenor!
Flying is coming to Draenor in the next patch! It won't be easy to attain, but you can prepare now - by working on the requisite Draenor Pathfinder meta-achievement.
New in Patch 6.2Patch 6.2 is here. It brings a number of important mount changes and additions, including improvements to boar running animations and nineteen new mounts :
The Soaring Skyterror is earned by a meta-achievement Draenor Pathfinder. The same achievement will reward Draenor flying in an upcoming patch.
Saturated with fel energy, the Deathtusk Felboar is available at Exalted with new Tanaan factions for both Horde and Alliance.
Demonic bacon on legs, the Bristling Hellboar is available at Exalted with the a new Tanaan reputation faction, Saberon Stalkers. You can purchase it with 5000 Blackfang Claws, obtained by killing Saberon in Fang'rila.
The Wild Goretusk is available at Honored with the Saberon Stalkers. You can purchase it with 1000 Blackfang Claws.
A fel version of the Dread Raven Mount, the Corrupted Dreadwing can be purchased for 150 000 Apexis Crystals from a Order of the Awakened reputation vendor in Tanaan. Requires Friendly reputation.
The shiny green Infernal Direwolf is the reward for the new raid meta-achievement 'Glory of the Hellfire Raider'.
The Primal Gladiator's Felblood Gronnling is the reward for PvP Arena season 16, which has just ended. The Wild Gladiator's Felblood Gronnling is for season 17.
A new model of mecha-suit, the Felsteel Annihilator uses the same animations as the Sky Golem. It's drops from Archimonde in the new Hellfire Citadel raid, Mythic mode only.
The Coalfist Gronnling is a reward from a new rare garrison mission.
The Mudback Riverbeast is a reward from a rare naval mission, which is a new feature added in 6.2.
The Witherhide Cliffstomper is sold by a new garrison trader for 20 000 gold.
The Rocktusk Battleboar is available from the same new garrison trader for 10 000 gold.
Three more mounts, the Warsong Direfang, Tundra Icehoof and Armored Razorback drop from four rare elites in Tanaan Jungle. It appears that all four NPCs have a chance of dropping any of the three mounts. See any of the mount pages for the names of the rares. We're not yet sure of the drop rate.
Finally, two more rated battleground ('Vicious') mounts are now available. This time they represent the Tauren - Vicious War Kodo, and the Gnomes - Vicious War Mechanostrider. Perhaps Draenei and Blood Elf mounts are next.
Coming later...
The Warmongering Gladiator's Felblood Gronnling (longest mount name ever) is for PvP Arena season 18.
Ongoing Armory Bugs. Our mount import service is still unable to find certain new mounts. These are due to issues with the Armory at Blizzard and there's sadly nothing we can do to fix them sooner. As a temporary measure we've enabled manual addition of the Voidtalon of the Dark Star, Chauffeured Mechano-Hog and Felfire Hawk via your account page. The Acherus Deathcharger has also been missing for some years. Please let us know if you find any others that are still problematic. Thanks!


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Original recipe yields 4 servings
Amount per serving ({{servings}} total)
Based on a 2,000 calorie diet
Ready In
I made these with whole wheat flour, and 1T honey instead of sugar. Great recipe for light and fluffy pancakes!
These were a nice change to the standard pancake recipe. They were light and fluffy with a nice flavour. The lemon was a nice addition; present but not overpowering. I used all lemon juice rathe...
I'm always on the lookout for lemon-flavored ANYthing as I (heart) lemon. When I tasted the raw batter, yowza -- it packs some serious zing! And even cooked, there is no doubt you are dining u...

subset: commoncrawl


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MobileVOIP is the first real VOIP app for Windows Phone 7, beating Skype to Marketplace.
The app works over 3G or WIFI and allows 100% free phone calls to some destinations using VOIP gateways, such as 2voip and Actionvoip. For those areas where calls are not hundred percent free very cheap calls can still be made.
The app unfortunately continues to have the issues common to VOIP apps on Windows Mobile – the sound is only piped through the speaker, so headphones are still suggested.
The app features:
The app is free and can be found in Marketplace here.
Via Moviltoday.com


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Written on: 11/07/2013 by johnkirk (1 review written)
bought pair of walking shoes off website after review said they where good, only lasted 3 weeks and split and wore away, i then left a review to warn other people and found that sports direct dont put any bad reviews up. so beware, i have stopped buying their now.
As rated by our community of reviewers


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Monday, November 15, 2010
Six Reliable Dividend Growth Stocks Raising Distributions
Just because a company pays dividends however, that doesn't automatically make it a good investment. A company has to have some competitive advantages, which allow it to grow earnings, which translates into higher dividends down the road. Few companies can afford to grow dividends for more than several consecutive years. Companies that can do this should be regularly monitored and screened against an objective set of criteria in order to weed out the weakest links. As a result I regularly highlight stocks which have announced dividend increases over the preceding week. The companies which approved dividend hikes include:
Sysco Corporation (SYY), through its subsidiaries, markets and distributes a range of food and related products primarily to the foodservice industry in the United States. The company raised its quarterly dividend by 4% to 26 cents/share. This was the forty-first consecutive annual dividend increase for this dividend champion. Yield: 3.60% (analysis)
Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) provides technology-based outsourcing solutions to employers, and vehicle retailers and manufacturers. It operates in three segments: Employer Services, Professional Employer Organization Services, and Dealer Services. The company raised its quarterly dividend by 6% to 36 cents/share. This was the 36th consecutive annual dividend increase for this dividend aristocrat. Yield: 3.20% (analysis)
MDU Resources Group Inc. (MDU) operates as a natural resource company in the United States. The company provides electric retail, natural gas distribution, and natural gas transportation services. The company raised dividends by 3.20% to 16.25 cents/share. This dividend achiever has consistently raised distributions for 20 years in a row. Yield: 3.20%
Tennant Company (TNC) engages in the design, manufacture, and marketing cleaning solutions worldwide. The company boosted its quarterly dividend by 21% from 14 cents to 17 cents/share. This marks the thirty-ninth consecutive annual dividend increase for this dividend champion. Yield: 2%
Intel Corporation (INTC) designs, manufactures, and sells integrated circuits for computing and communications industries worldwide. The company raised its dividends by 15% to 18 cents/share. The world's largest chip manufacturer has raised distributions for 8 years in a row. The stock yields 3.30%
AmerisourceBergen Corporation (ABC), a pharmaceutical services company, provides drug distribution and related services to healthcare providers and pharmaceutical manufacturers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The company raised its quarterly distribution by 25% to 10 cents/share. Amerisource Bergen has raised distributions for six years in a row and currently yields 1.30%
Of the six dividend raisers listed above, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), MDU Resources (MDU) and Sysco (SYY) seem attractively priced at the moment. I would also start researching Intel (INTC) in order to evaluate whether it would be a good fit for my dividend portfolio.
Full Disclosure: Long ADP and SYY
Relevant Articles:
- Automatic Data Processing (ADP) Dividend Stock Analysis
- Sysco Corporation (SYY) Dividend Stock Analysis
- Three Dividend Growth Stocks raising the bar
- Nine Consistent Dividend Raisers in the News
4 comments:
your blog has become a daily read for me. Thank you very much!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousNovember 15, 2010 at 10:03 AM
I changed some of my concepts about investment after reading your post. Enjoyed it. Just wonder where to find the data of the annual dividend distribution for the last 10 years? Thanks.ReplyDelete
So, good blog.ReplyDelete
I notice most of these picks have dividend yields of just over 3%.
So does the more diversified SDY dividend ETF.
Just thinking out loud.
- AnonymousNovember 16, 2010 at 7:46 PM
I'm a believer (and investor) in Intel's dividend. Although it doesn't have a long history of raising dividends, they have grown from 2c/qtr in 2003 to the new 18c/qtr in 2011.ReplyDelete
My feeling is that Intel's stock is being punished for maturing from a high-flyer growth company into one willing to share its massive wealth with its investors. That seems to be a compelling time to buy into a strong company, like Intel.
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text: 000 WGUS84 KMEG 060216 FLSMEG FLOOD ADVISORY NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MEMPHIS TN 916 PM CDT SUN JUL 5 2015 ...The Flood Advisory continues for the Tennessee River... Tennessee River at Perryville affecting Decatur and Perry Counties PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... The next River Statement will be issued tomorrow morning or sooner if conditions warrant. For graphical river and flood information...please go to www.weather.gov and click near Memphis on the map. Then select Rivers and Lakes AHPS under current conditions. Do not drive through flooded areas...turn around don`t drown. Stay tuned to your weather radio and your local news media for the latest river information. && TNC039-135-070216- /O.CON.KMEG.FL.Y.0044.000000T0000Z-150708T2123Z/ /PRVT1.N.ER.000000T0000Z.000000T0000Z.000000T0000Z.OO/ 916 PM CDT SUN JUL 5 2015 The Flood Advisory continues for the Tennessee River at Perryville * until Wednesday July 08. * At 08 PM Sunday the stage was 361.4 feet. * Flood stage is 365.0 feet. * Forecast...The river will rise to near 362.1 feet Wednesday July 08. * At 362.0 feet...In Perry County, Crooked Creek Campground and marina near the boat launch area flooding along with the access road to the camping area near the mouth of Crooked Creek. && LAT...LON 3588 8822 3588 8785 3548 8787 3548 8824 $$


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Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros' Way
Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros' Way
Publisher: RGE Publications | ISBN: 0910575045 | edition 1997 | File type: PDF | 268 pages | 28,7 mb
The most important book available to blackjack aficionados since Beat the Dealer by Ed Thorp, Blackjack Attack has been praised by every prominent blackjack expert. In it, Schlesinger answers virtually all of the thorny mathematical questions that have puzzled serious players for years: optimal betting, camouflage, risk analysis, team play, systems comparison, and much more. With twice as much material as its predecessor, this third edition contains new studies bound to intrigue even the most knowledgeable pro, including a complete reexamination of the late Peter Griffin's work, and the publication of the most accurate basic strategy and effects of removal charts ever devised.
To thank me use this links!
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Man Attempts to Cut Off His Own Arms at Home Depot
This is disgusting.
This is disgusting.
Dog lovers in Argentina are shelling out hundreds of dollars for loveable toy poodle puppies, only to get them home and discover that they're actually ferrets on steroids.
Well, the dogs don't seem particularly unhappy, so we guess this is okay. As long as dogs don't understand what dignity is, they'll probably be fine.
Owners in China have been stuffing their dogs into stocking and high heels, taking pictures of them, and putting them on the internet, because this is the world we live in now. Since you know you secretly want to see more of these, here you go:
Thanks to a mugshot from three years ago, Meagan Simmons became an internet star late last week.
A Reddit user noticed that Simmons, then named Meagan McCullough, looked unusually good in the booking photo that was taken after her arrest for reckless driving in 2010. So they made it into an advice animal meme, with the caption "Wanted...in 50 states."
Poor Emily Marsh. Her condition has left her at a loss for words.
Earlier this year the internet brought something very important about goats to our attention. When the can-eating animals scream they sound an awful lot like a person who has either witnessed a great horror or suffered a devastating injury.
Sure, he's got major golf skills, but oter than that we haven't spent a whole lot of time being jealous of pro golfer Bubba Watson. Now that he's driving around in a hovercraft, though, we're thinking we should be focusing on becoming his newest best friend. Or caddy. Either one.
Last night, I had the weirdest dream about Robert Downy Jr.
Life is all fun and games for one man in China.
It's becoming harder and harder to pull a good April Fool's Day prank. We blame the internet for this, as not long after you log on you are reminded of the tricky nature of April 1 and thus put your guard up.


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Obituary Archives
Mount St. Francis, Dubuque, Iowa
commend to your charity the soul of their beloved
who was born May 22, 1931, and
who departed this life May 7, 2015,in the 62nd year of her religious life.
Visitation: 4-7 p.m., Sunday, May 10, with a wake service at 7 p.m.
Mass of Christian Burial: Monday, May 11, at 1 p.m.
May she rest in peace
Patrick Carney left the home farm in Fillmore, Iowa, to work first at the Rock Island Arsenal and then the Ford Motor Company in Detroit for $5 a day. Here he met and married Elodie Frappier, who had moved there from Pennsylvania with her family. They had five living children. A sixth child, Lydia, died at two years of age. The Depression hit them hard, taking Patrick's job, their savings, and their home. Patrick's oldest unmarried brother invited them to live with him on the family farm. Rose Mary found life on the farm difficult, but she was thankful that her parents were strong enough to make a home for them and recover financially.
Rose Mary and her siblings attended Sacred Heart School at Fillmore. It was there that she was greatly influenced by Sisters Callistus, John, Margaret Louise, and Leonine. She found them warm, friendly, and happy in their ministry. She and her sisters went on to Immaculate Conception Academy, while Ray attended St. Mary's High School in Cascade.
When she graduated in 1949, her two sisters, Helen and Elodie, entered the Victory Noll Sisters. She was sad to see them leave, and had some thought of going with them. However, after working in an office in Dubuque for two years, Rose Mary entered Mount St. Francis. She was received August 12, 1952, and given the name, Sister Mary Alodia.
Her first mission was to teach sixth grade at St. Christopher School in Midlothian, Ill. She was grateful for the cultural, educational, and entertainment opportunities in the Chicago area. Her next two assignments- elementary principal at Sacred Heart, Pocahontas, and St Paul High School at Worthington –were less rewarding. Being an elementary principal or teaching in high school was not her preference, but she was thrilled to be sent to study Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where she joined hundreds of people seeking to be taught by Fr. Bernard Cook. The Vatican Council call to renewal brought exciting times in the Church, and Sr. Alodia's horizons were expanded by her association with men and women from across the country. Her study culminated in a trip to the Holy Land, Greece, and Lebanon with her good friend, Sr. Peggy O'Neil, who later worked with Srs. Pat Farrell and Nancy Meyerhofer in San Salvador. They sought financial help for the trip from various sources, and succeeded in getting their round trip flight paid for by Aristotle Onassis.
Sister Rose Mary taught in the summer renewal programs at Regina Convent in Dubuque and participated in Common Venture in Arkansas and Mississippi. At her request, she was transferred back to the Chicago Metropolitan area where she taught sixth grade at St. John Brebeuf in Niles, Ill. Following this, she completed a CPE program and became a chaplain at Resurrection Medical Center in Chicago. She enjoyed over 25 years at this hospital where she made many friends among the staff and the patients to whom she felt privileged to minister. When her health became a problem, she retired to Mount St. Francis in 2009, and moved to Clare House in 2014.
She is survived by her sisters, Sister Alodia Carney, OLVM and Florence Smith, and her Franciscan Sisters with whom she shared 62 years of her life.
She was preceded in death by her parents Patrick (Elodie) Carney, her brother Raymond (Nancy) Carney, and her sisters, Sister Helen Carney, OLVM and Lydia Carney.


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Photo by Sara Bonisteel
Note that raw eggs are not recommended for infants, pregnant women, the elderly, or those with a compromised immune system. To avoid the risk of salmonella infection, use pasteurized eggs instead.
Leave a Review
Really easy and very very good. I will probably never buy commercial Mayo again - I think the canola/soybean oil used in grocery store mayo is hard on the digestive tract. For fun on my second batch I added 1/8 C truffle oil. Yummyflag if inappropriate
this is good ¿ with good texture and much easier on wrist and elbow than wisk version. Going to work on my oil combinations to get it just right.flag if inappropriate
This worked exceptionally well as written. Beautiful thick creamy mayo! Used high quality eggs and a mix of 4:1 peanut to olive oils. You may need to push down the mayo with a spatula as it thickens and control the speed of the Vitamix to ensure good mixing. Couldn't be easier.flag if inappropriate


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Nice place to stay. Perfect of a family; we had a small apartment with two double rooms (big windows, nice view, Flat-screen, desk, pretty quiet) and shared a small kitchen (microwave, water cooker, water basin, table, two chairs) and a small bathroom.
Thanks to the kitchen we could easily prepare a small breakfast for ourselves (there's also breakfast buffet for 15€ available). The bathroom was very small for four persons and (as usual in Finland) there isn't a separation between shower and the rest of the bathroom. Therefore the bathroom will be completely wet after one has showered.
There's a tram and bus station near the Hotel, you can easily get to the city center (about 15-20min).
- Official Description (provided by the hotel):
- We offer you comfortable accommodation in peaceful Vallila near the centre of Helsinki. We have comfortable saunas ja meeting rooms to different kind of happenings. We do offer to you free parking as well. ... more less
- Reservation Options:
- TripAdvisor is proud to partner with Booking.com, Expedia, Priceline, TripOnline SA and Odigeo so you can book your Ava Hotel reservations with confidence. We help millions of travelers each month to find the perfect hotel for both vacation and business trips, always with the best discounts and special offers.
- Also Known As:
- Ava Hotel Helsinki


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My Account - Publishers Clearing House
My Account. It's easier than ever to manage your PCH account! You can view your order status, check your account balance and pay by check, debit, or credit card.From:http://info.pch.com › Customer service
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PCH - Pay Your Publishers Clearing House Bill Online
View your entire PCH account, history of all orders, and make a payment.From:http://www.pch.com/mypch
PCH My Account Page — So Easy To Use In So Many Ways!
PCH My Account Page — So Easy To Use In So Many Ways! Who doesn't love Publishers Clearing House merchandise? PCH products are a tremendous value, …From:http://blog.pch.com › Behind the Scenes at PCH › Shopping at PCH
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Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed! You may return any merchandise item ordered through Publishers Clearing House up to 120 days from receipt of shipment, if not ...From:http://pch.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/138/~/how-do-i-return-my...
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View the basic PCH stock chart on Yahoo! Finance. Change the date range, chart type and compare Potlatch Corporation against other companies.From:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=pch
Publishers Clearing House:::
Win and you'd receive $5,000.00 A Week for your life, then after that, someone you choose gets $5,000.00 A Week for their life, too! See Official Rules for entry ...From:http://lw.pch.com


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You can now filter search results with text. Example: "person: john" will search only person pages for "john".
Doc Green and Steve Rogers go on an adventure!
As the world comes to an end, Widow flashing back to one of her first jobs for the Red Room.
How did the Ultrons rise to power?
Character »
Tiboro appears in 22 issues.
Baron Mordo is an accomplished user of magic who was trained by the Ancient One. He was a long time foe of Dr. Strange.
A Physicist and master swordsman, Dane Whitman is the latest in a long line of heroes and villains known as the Black Knight. As the modern, heroic Black Knight; Dane has been an Avenger, a Hero for Hire, a member of Excalibur and the Champion of Avalon.
Clea is the heroic daughter of Umar and the niece of Dormammu. She is also Doctor Strange's estranged wife and was the ruler of The Dark Dimension until her Uncle usurped her throne and regained his.
Dr. Stephen Strange was once a gifted but egotistical surgeon who sought out the Ancient One to heal his hands after they were wounded in a car accident. Instead, the Ancient One trained him to become Master of the Mystic Arts and the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth.
Dormammu is the Ruler of the Dark Dimension, a being of immense mystical power. He uses his vast powers to conquer other universes and dimensions, earning himself the enmity of Doctor Strange in the process.
The Dweller In Darkness is an incredibly powerful demon who originates from a dimension that is said to be higher than the sixth dimension. He was responsible for assembling the Fear Lords.
Clea's mother and Dormammu's sister who briefly was the Queen of the Dark Dimension.
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text:
But in the 1990s, the English word "earworm" gained the meaning "a song or melody that keeps repeating in one's mind."
"Cups" has had the unlikeliest of journeys to summer earworm.
The newer sense of "earworm" is actually influenced by the German word for this phenomenon—a word that translates to "earworm."
a song or tune that gets stuck in one's mind and repeats as if on a tape; also written ear-worm , ear worm ; also called cognitive itch , sticky tune
The song played in the grocery store became an earworm for her.
German ohrwurm


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In Silence: Why We Prayby Donald Spoto
View All Available Formats & Editions
The literature of prayer has an old and rich tradition, but Donald Spoto's extraordinarynew work of scholarship and devotion may be the first book to explore not only what prayer says about God but what it reveals about us and the universal experiences that have moved us to call on God throughout the ages.
Drawing on the words of religious thinkers of both East… See more details below
The literature of prayer has an old and rich tradition, but Donald Spoto's extraordinarynew work of scholarship and devotion may be the first book to explore not only what prayer says about God but what it reveals about us and the universal experiences that have moved us to call on God throughout the ages.
Drawing on the words of religious thinkers of both East and West, from the author of Psalms to Rumi and from Teresa of Ávila to Chögyam Trungpa, In Silence explores the nature, quality, history, and effects of prayer: as petition, as forgiveness, as cry of suffering, as abandonment, as serenity, as loving, as silence.
Erudite, beautifully written, and filled with wonder, this is a ringing celebration of our most precious habit of being.
Author Biography: Donald Spoto earned his Ph.D. in theology at Fordham University. He is the author of nineteen books, including The Hidden Jesus: A New Life and Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi.
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
- 9780670033478
- Publisher:
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Publication date:
- 10/07/2004
- Pages:
- 272
- Product dimensions:
- 5.56(w) x 8.56(h) x 1.08(d)
Meet the Author
More from this Author
Read an Excerpt
�Faith itself is the soul�s true country, and prayer is its native language.�
With those words I concluded a chapter of an earlier work, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life. That book considered certain specific questions about the ancient Hebrew notion of the mystery of God, and about the earliest Christian assertions concerning God�s continuing activity in Jesus of Nazareth. The questions and the assertions, taken collectively, comprise the basis for Judeo-Christian faith.
Faith, I suggested in The Hidden Jesus, is primarily an attitude about reality�a refusal to admit that life has no meaning and that everything is doomed to extinction; faith then involves a willingness to wonder, to ask questions rather than simply to deny what the senses do not immediately validate. Faith goes further and more deeply than belief; I hope to make this the subject of a future book.
The apparent problem of the hiddenness and silence of God runs like a motif through the entire range of the Jewish-Christian Scriptures; they very much concerned me in The Hidden Jesus. Hiddenness and silence do not imply nonexistence, absence or a sort of divine detachment. On the contrary: people have become aware, however dimly, of the reality of God, and have realized a relationship with Him, only in silence. Hiddenness and silence are not nothing, nor are they to be taken for God�s remoteness; they are in fact the condition of our meeting with God in time, amid the chaos of the world.
If the silence and hiddenness of God are signs of His presence and the key to understanding the deepest meaning of our lives, then we may indeed listen for God, hear Him in His silence, and find Him as the ultimately real Reality precisely in that silence and hiddenness. In other words, communication with God may be not only possible but also necessary; indeed, it may be actual long before we realize it is as so. Hence the book you are now holding�an inquiry into the meaning, nature, history, quality, types and effects of prayer in human experience.
If one wishes to approach prayer as an intellectual construct, it can be studied as a psychological phenomenon, a theme in the history of world religions, a subject for academic theological discourse or simply in its most familiar form as written or spoken entreaties or formulas directed to a higher being. In this book I have chosen to examine the subject from a different perspective. My aim is not to present yet another history of religion, nor an analysis of the sociological aspects of certain forms of institutional religious life or formal worship. Likewise, I do not offer a history of mysticism: the rarefied language of many mystics is too idiosyncratic to be adequately treated in this book. But some mystics are more accessible than others, and because sometimes they have cogent and powerful things to say about prayer, their writings will be considered here.
I have elected to treat prayer as an expression of an individual�s inner life as it develops within the contexts of several dimensions of human experience. Dialogue is one mode of discovery about oneself and others, and prayer may be spoken of as a profound sort of dialogue. Asking, needing and desiring in some ways characterize every life in its ordinariness, and this implicit sense of one�s contingency relates directly to our sense of a relationship with God. Suffering often makes people turn to God, or at least wonder about His presence or absence, and a cry amid suffering is among the commonest kinds of prayers. Love, too, in all its guises and categories, makes us somehow aware of the inevitability of connection with another and others: this human experience cannot be separated from a sense of the divine. Reflection on our experience, on what we do or feel or endure or receive, forms what we call our inner life. That reflection is the first and basic kind of prayer.
The primal awareness of the Beyond is sketched in the first chapter, which offers selected moments in the spiritual history of humankind, but only insofar as they illuminate the interior mystery of prayer. In the chapters that follow, then, I try to trace our inclination to pray out of certain basic universal experiences, for I believe that it is in dialogue, petition, forgiveness, suffering, abandonment, serenity and loving that we not only act and endure but also reach the depths of being truly alive. Transformation�not just of our outlook but of our very selves�then occurs inevitably. At the level of everyday, common hu- man experiences and in our very particularity, we meet the living God.
In a way, I am attempting a new understanding of the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of a universal language that we are, as individuals and as a species, always just beginning to fathom. Among the central motifs of this book is the notion that it may well be impossible to consider prayer apart from life as a whole. We are as we pray, and our prayer is always in a state of becoming. Prayer parallels and enriches the process by which we discover the depth and breadth of what it means to be human.
Any attempt to speak of prayer in the 21st century is likely to lead to a confrontation with a cluster of objections�the two most notable being that prayer is irrelevant in a sophisticated age of science and technology; and that prayer is primarily a solipsistic dialogue with the self. Both rest on a belief that prayer is by its nature psychologically suspect. But its critics, if they are intellectually honest, ought to ask themselves whether they can dismiss or deny profound interior experiences claimed by others merely because they themselves are strangers to those experiences.
We should not lose sight of the fact that psychology itself is a remarkably fluid and mysterious discipline, one that deals with all manner of highly variable conjectures and subjective interpretations. Various schools of analysis have emerged, and partisans often apply their own fixed systems as templates for interpreting each and every human life or dilemma. This methodology, however, tends to reduce the unique human person to a standard issue that can be �treated� by certain established principles. But good science does not proceed in so reductive a fashion.
Just so, it is helpful to recall that no less a figure than Albert Einstein observed that human awareness of the divine could not be summarily discounted, and that in fact (as he wrote) �science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.� Since Einstein�s death a half-century ago, most scientists would agree that what we call �laws of nature� are best regarded as a series of probabilities in a universe that remains mysterious and open.
The idea that there are fixed laws of nature is in fact useful only as a way of assessing the current state of what is known about the material world: in other words, these so-called laws enable us to understand certain phenomena as they appear to us now, at our current stage of interpreting the world.
On the other hand, the realms of creative thought and art, the worlds of aesthetic and interior spiritual life, gain little from being subjected to a priori principles. In this regard, we can consider that when Aristotle contemplated the universe, when Mozart composed, when Monet painted and when Mendel experimented with plants and seeds, they were engaged in interior activities that were not ultimately comprehensible through merely rational methods.
Still, for some people prayer is fundamentally incompatible with a modern scientific worldview. What good is it, they ask, to pray for rain in the midst of a drought? After all, tomorrow�s weather is determined by today�s conditions�more accurately, it was determined by yesterday�s. A similar argument might be made about the course of an illness. What use is it to pray once all the medical remedies have been applied? Nature, they conclude, has taken and will take its course, either in response to scientific protocols or despite them.
Two replies come to mind. First, we constantly alter the course of �nature� by expressions of our will and in light of evolving knowledge. We seed the clouds; we build breakwaters and construct complex irrigation equipment; we discover that a rare herb just might treat a grave illness. It is ridiculous to suggest that we can always know the circumstances under which a desired end might be accomplished. The second response is more abstract and yet more to the point. Scientists receptive to a mysterious and often unpredictable universe can, as we have seen, admit that the laws of nature have more to do with a current sense of probability than with anything like certainty.
As regards the criticism that prayer is an isolating and self-absorbed exercise, are we in fact merely deluding ourselves and avoiding life�s demands when we pray? Ought we not to arise from our knees and take our place within social, political and economic institutions, the better to effect the improvement of life for ourselves and others, instead of indulging inner fancies? Escapism is, of course, always a danger in prayer, and no less an authority than the 16th-century Spanish religious reformer, Teresa of �vila, warns against seeking prayerful solitude merely to avoid the tensions, disturbances and obligations of life. She was a sharp-eyed woman and a gifted psychologist, centuries before psychology became a unique discipline�and she never relied on theories to substantiate her observations on human nature or the interior life.
Today, the objection of escapism often rests on a false assumption�namely, that prayer necessarily avoids or is opposed to the requirements of serious life in the world. On the contrary, as we shall see, genuine prayer has everything to do with real life. Politics, economics, science and technology and even the laudable achievements of humanitarians are never permanent solutions for the problems of the world, if for no other reason than the fact that it is the accomplishments themselves that always reveal what more remains to be done on humankind�s behalf. There is an arrogance in those who protest otherwise, for humility demands that we recognize that our efforts and attainments must always remain incomplete.
It is precisely the necessity of a serious and caring life in the world that exercised the Spanish philosopher and literary critic Miguel de Unamuno in the first third of the 20th century. Speaking for many in his time, he finally found himself forced to acknowledge that the very nature of involvement in the commonweal led to a consideration that we may not be alone in the universe; from there, it was a short route to reflect on the notion of God. Unamuno was not especially at home with the classical idea of existential causality, but he was struck by the truth of a universe that nurtured human personality, which must logically possess the hidden resources to account for that personality�in other words, the ground and basis of the universe itself cannot be impersonal. Unamuno leaned heavily toward the affirmation of an ultimately personal Reality, and he was, at the last, deeply uncomfortable with a rank denial of meaning and, finally, of God.
The German philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich did more than lean in the direction of affirmation. Denied the right to teach in Germany under Nazism, Tillich found a welcome in American universities, where, until his death in 1965, he wrote and taught with a sharp focus on the renewal of religion and modern culture. The depth and ground of all being is God, Tillich asserted. If the word �God� was off-putting for some, he recommended that one reflect on the depths of life, on one�s ultimate concerns, on what one takes seriously without any reservation. �He who knows about depth,� said Tillich, �knows about God.�
But as Tillich and others have warned, there is a danger of infusing prayer with a self-centered, magical spirit that has nothing to do with the search for God; no one who believes in prayer is immune to the subtle contagion of this spirit of magic. Many well-meaning people pray in an effort to learn something about themselves or even to raise their self-esteem. Unfortunately, contemporary culture, perhaps taking its cue from some ideal of physical perfection, tends to see everything, prayer included, in terms of its value for self-improvement. As soon as prayer becomes a means to that end, the sense of transcendence vanishes, and with it the longing for God and the openness to His presence. Authentic prayer does not aim to become a comforting form of self-expression; it is about reaching within and beyond the imagined self to a greater purpose and power.
What of the objection that prayer is mere wish fulfillment or indulgence in narcissistic fantasies and daydreams? Anyone who seriously attempted to pray or who has known even a fleeting or rudimentary experience of a Beyond-in-the-midst can testify that this experience is inevitably characterized by a conviction of otherness�it is about response and contingency. However unclear or problematic the awareness may at times be, prayer is a consciousness that one has first of all been addressed. And for the most part, such encounters offer few immediate or facile emotional satisfactions.
The English scholar and mystic Evelyn Underhill, who contributed richly to the literature of spirituality in the 20th century, wrote that prayer �proceeds by way of much discipline, renunciation and suffering as it moves toward a total abandonment to God�s purpose. . . . Experience of God is the greatest of the rights of man, and it should not be left to become the casual discovery of the few.�
Even people who reject religion and would classify themselves as atheists often engage in concrete and very real forms of prayer as they seek to give of themselves, to transcend their own limitations, to work on behalf of human rights and to respond to the needs of others. Their dedication, their labors and their aspirations comprise their beliefs�and they can indeed be called beliefs. Thus, in a broad but true sense, they are involved in the enterprise of prayer.
The English verb �to pray� comes to us from the Old French preier, modernized as prier; this in turn can be traced back to the Latin precari. In its original sense, it means to beseech or to beg, either of a person or God. The phrase �I pray you,� dating from the Renaissance, is a good example of how the word developed in English, when it denoted a simple appeal to someone. But to speak of prayer today�to say �I pray��implies a transcendent address.
We begin to engage in this address and to know something of God through our experience, but language is ultimately inadequate to the task of articulating that experience. It is for precisely that reason that all discourse about the divine is necessarily metaphorical and symbolic. We must take great care not to consider our poor written and spoken attempts with anything but an approximation of the Reality toward which they point. And as for concepts or hypotheses about the nature of God, that devout novelist C.S. Lewis was on the mark: �Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter.�
This statement is very much in the classic Judeo-Christian tradition, which has long claimed that we know more accurately what God is not than what He is. In the 4th century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote compellingly of Moses� �meeting� with God in the cloud atop Mount Sinai. From this image, Gregory developed a notion that came to be called apophatic theology, which holds that whatever we say about God, we must immediately qualify by adding, �But He is not at all like that.� Moses, we can state with utmost reverence, knew very well that he did not know much at all. In 14th-century England and 16th-century Spain, respectively, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and the mystic John of the Cross brought the richness and advantages of this idea of �denial� to fruition.
Despite the impossibility of �knowing� God, and despite our own intellectual limitations and spiritual poverty, we humans have consistently felt compelled to write and speak of prayer throughout history. Our experience of finding our way to God has been so powerful or transforming that it has to be articulated, however inadequately. As Saint Augustine said in a sermon, �We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.� Among the great religions and philosophies in world history, prayer has been the particular genius of the Judeo-Christian continuum for more than four thousand years. It is not exclusive to these traditions, to be sure, but the phenomenon of personal prayer as a living dialogue and continuing relationship with a personal God is found in no other tradition with the force and contemporaneity that it is in the lives and testimonies of Jews and Christians from classical times to today.
The Far East has given us the ethical genius of Confucius, the transforming meditations of Lao-tzu, the wisdom of the compassionate Buddha, the mystical techniques of the many branches of Zen and of Hinduism�all of which enrich and contribute to acts of prayer and continue to provide significant contributions to our collective spiritual life. But these do not have traditions of prayer to one personal and loving God.
That said, it should be stressed that the profound teachings of the East must not be considered abstractly. When considered in terms of direct experiences of the ineffable, it becomes clear that for all their clear differences, Eastern religions are engaged in the same human quest and struggle as those in the West. Buddhism, for example, focuses on liberation from suffering, which, in Christian faith, is the reality forever achieved in the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Both traditions stress the importance of silence; both stress the inadequacy of human comprehension and expression for matters of the spirit. The goal of Buddhism is to reach, through meditation, that genuine state that lies beyond the conscious ego; the goal of Christianity is union with God. Both traditions propose as an ideal the conversion, or ultimate transformation, of what we variously call mind, soul or heart. And in all traditions, formal or obligatory exercises, cultic laws, ritual incantations and similar customs have nourished countless millions of lives round the world, but they are ordinarily not the expression of free and spontaneous love�and that, finally, is at the heart of prayer.
AlthoughI write from the perspective of a Catholic, as one who affirms the faith of the apostles and tries each day to discern anew its meaning, I have written this book with all people of goodwill in mind, with whatever backgrounds, affirmations, doubts or denials. I ask only of readers that they bring to this book the openness with which I myself have tried to approach this subject. In Silence seeks to prove nothing, nor is it a defense for a particular religious tradition. The paths to God are as many as there are people.
Because my concern here is with private prayer, there are only a few passing references to group prayer, or to corporate or liturgical worship, which by their nature are less than personal in expression. The forms of prayer composed for worship are notable for telling us what the particular tradition of a given faith proclaims�lex orandi legem statuat credendi, runs the ancient maxim: how we pray reveals what we believe. But those collective forms are ultimately meaningless unless we bring them to life within ourselves.
In Silence has been written in the same atmosphere it hopes to encourage: one of a dark and quiet interiority. If anything has become clarified for me in my seventh decade of life, it is that there is nothing simple or blind about faith, and there is nothing easy about prayer. And whatever I have to say must be inadequate.
Meister Eckhart, a sinewy medieval philosopher and mystic, proposed that there is nothing so like God as silence. I find much of his writing nearly incomprehensible, but in this case, I think he was bracingly clear. After a half-century of studying a dizzying array of books about prayer in various religious traditions, reading about the philosophy of prayer and investigating some rarefied mental states better left to the psychologist, I am at last left with the haunting simplicity of Eckhart: there is nothing so like God as silence, and there is no greater ambiance in which to encounter Him. Silence, after all, is not nothing.
But if Eckhart was on the mark, why not keep silence? Why another book on prayer? In my defense, I would say that the most valuable subjects to think and write about are those issues we can never fully comprehend or articulate, those things with which we have never finished. Prayer, after all, is linked to faith�as we have seen, an attitude about reality that (among other things) refuses to accept the final opacity of the universe, refuses to accept that life is meaningless, that the world makes no sense. This habit of being is also the foundation of an intuition that insists that love is better than hatred, that chaos is inferior to order, that compassion and respect are superior to vengeance and malice.
The French theologian Jean Dani�lou once wrote, �To be occupied with God is the highest occupation. But this requires an apprenticeship.� That training, I believe, begins again each day for us�however we describe our search, and however we express (or do not) the primary fact that God is first and always occupied with us, long before it occurs to us to give Him a thought.
This connection, this communion that tugs at us�this hunch that in the final analysis we may not be alone�is at the heart of prayer, and prayer is the most human response to our experience of that sensibility. In this regard, another recurring theme of this book is that prayer is not so much something we do as something God does, something we experience, something unbidden and uninvited, something heard but imperfectly sensed�it is, in other words, a voice and a calling that want to be heeded, despite our lassitude and tardiness in the face of it.
Prayer is an immense, enduring connective thread in human history, as it is in each human life and destiny. It is our surest link to a Beyond in the midst, a connection to what does not vanish, to what is not subject to our mood or whim; indeed, the Reality beyond prayer never fades as, so often, religious enthusiasm and high emotion fade like watercolors exposed to the sun. The astonishing fact of history is that everyone can pray�and perhaps, somehow, everyone at least makes an effort to do so. �The beginning is the more important part,� according to Teresa of �vila. �If a person takes only one step, the step will itself contain so much power that we will not have to fear losing it, nor will we fail to be very well paid.� Many women and men who have prayed over the centuries have written compellingly of their experiences of prayer, and I occasionally refer to them in this book. Sometimes they can be more or less amiable, wise guides as we try to understand our own understanding of Reality. But their language necessarily reflects their experience, and it is always conditioned and limited by their times, cultures and personalities (as is ours). These people can inspire us, they can hint and suggest directions we might take�but the journey must ultimately be our own. We need to discover our own language and our own silence. �A lively person prays one way,� as a 4th-century desert monk said with remarkable psychological insight.
A person brought down by the weight of gloom or despair prays another way. One prays another way still when the life of the spirit is flourishing, and another way when pushed down. One prays differently, depending on whether one is seeking the gift of some grace or the removal of sin. The prayer is different again when one is sorrowing . . . or when one is fired by hope . . . when one is in need or peril, in peace or tranquility; when one is flooded by the light of heavenly mysteries, or when one is hemmed in by aridity and staleness in one�s thinking.
To speak of a �history of prayer� would be to imply that there is some sort of logical development or discernible chronology in humanity�s relationship with prayer�that we can trace it in an orderly fashion down through the ages, something like the stages of scientific thinking about the cosmos, for example. But the sort of �history� I draw upon here is more concerned with certain experiences and themes in life that are identified in the chapter titles.
Can a thematic survey of personal prayer, then�with special reference to the data of ordinary human experiences, like dialogue, suffering and love�take us beyond those ordinary experiences? I hope I have offered that possibility. Prayer derives from a conviction that God is indeed the Ultimacy toward which everything that is yearns, however imperfectly or unknowingly. This cannot be proven: it can only be experienced. And if we have not yet known it, we may still come to that unique awareness, to our everlasting surprise.
In a way, this book in fact explores our aptitude for deeper experience�a subjective inner experience, to be sure, but one that is discovered, not invented. And so In Silence also reflects on our ability to be astonished, which I take as a direct consequence of what Bernard of Clairvaux, in 12th-century France, called the universal capacity for God. That capacity is directly linked to the fact of prayer.
Persons who pray in light of that capacity, even vaguely perceived, experience what can only be called a sense of God, and they require no defense from an intellectual fortress. Indeed, the spontaneous and direct expression of an experience of the Beyond can take us�perhaps must take us�to a still, silent point where we begin to live as never before.
The �sense of God� is not a metaphor: it is a consciousness as sharp as love or pain, heat or light; it is like the homing instinct of birds, which can be neither explained nor denied. And to those who experience it, there is no doubt about its reality.
When I was a first-year college student, I spoke one evening with a professor I much respected, who was also a kind of spiritual counselor to me. I do not recall the subject of our conversation, but at one point I put some question or other to him about the meaning of prayer. What seemed a long moment of silence intervened before he answered very quietly: �What can we do�what can any of us do�but throw ourselves into the arms of God?�
This book is offered in the spirit of that quietly overwhelming question.
In Silence
chapter one
Of Time and Memory�
Some Historic Aspects of the Interior Life
Prayer as the Expression of Personal Religion
Considered independently of specific cultural forms, traditions, doctrines and rituals, religion in general may be described as the inner awareness of an ultimate Reality beyond the self and beyond the human. Once acknowledged, this perception, however dim and provisional, invites a personal response to and association with that Reality�a living and active relationship we may identify as prayer. As distinct from aesthetic or poetic feelings, which establish a link to the divine through art, prayer is essentially a relationship we have with God in this world.
When it is expressed communally or liturgically, prayer is authentic for the one who prays only when there is or has been a prior awareness of the divine presence in secret and in silence�in other words, a sense of the numinous evoked by an apprehension of what is subjectively holy or sacred.
Ideally, of course, such feelings should also be evoked by public acts of worship; that they so seldom do is one of the failures of contemporary religion, which often seems content with conveying a comfortable feeling of good fellowship or a pleasantly undemanding folksiness. A profound sense of the holy does not, of course, require grand panoply: the Quaker tradition of congregational silence can bring many participants to the threshold of profound reverence. Such a practice takes seriously the words of the biblical injunction, �Be still, and know that I am God.�
Prayer has a quite personal and empirical character; as a habit of being and of becoming oneself in this life, it goes be- yond intellectual analysis. Hence William James, the American philosopher and pioneer psychologist of religion, claimed that without prayer there can be no religious life. Found everywhere in human history, prayer expresses, with or without images or words, the experience of a mystery and of a presence beyond this world and above the human; as such, it is concerned not with thinking about God but with relating to Him.*
Prayer in Time and Memory
In his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University between 1902 and 1904, William James perhaps startled his academic audience by calmly stating, �Many reasons have been given why we should not pray, whilst others are given why we should. But in all this, very little is said of the reason why we do pray. The reason why we pray is simply that we cannot help praying.�
Prayer also occurred, as James rightly presupposed, in archaic, prehistoric cultures: this is clear from modern studies of primeval clans and tribes that survived with their traditions relatively intact and uninfluenced by the encroachments of developed society.
Even a brief consideration of ancient history reveals that wherever there was a sense of wonder or awe in the face of the unknown, there was prayer; where there was gratitude for a suc- cessful hunt or a good harvest, there was prayer; where there
*Given the status of current English (and at the risk of disappointing some readers), I refer to God pronominally in this book by the traditional masculine form�but for the sake of simplicity only, since it is axiomatic that God has no gender. And for reverence, these pronouns are rendered uppercase.
was fear for life or safety, there was prayer. One might even say that prayer was natural for those living closer to nature. In the case of Native American tribes and of the peoples of the Far East, for example, this did not mean that prayer was always directed to a specific being or invisible spirit: often the address was made vaguely, to the spirit of a tree or a river, conceived as a foreign but vital �being� who shared the universe with the perceiver.
Centuries and perhaps millennia before there was anything like the separate department of life known as religion, there was what might be called a religious sensibility�a sense of the Beyond, that seems to have been as instinctive as breathing, sleeping and eating. Conscious of their connection to that Beyond and evidently aware that a relationship could be established with it, people expressed their needs, wishes and reverence. They did not require knowledge in order to understand.
The word �religion,� as a matter of fact, never occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures, nor is it to be found in the gospels; there are a mere five references to it elsewhere in the New Testament. The idea that matters of faith have come to comprise but one discrete aspect of life among others�competing, as it were, for our time and attention�is unfortunate, for such a notion implies that faith centers only around ritual observances or subjects that are obviously �religious� (all of which are of human development and expression in any case). To think this way, as C. S. Lewis trenchantly observed, is to substitute navigation for arrival or courtship for marriage. What is infinite, after all, can have no standing as a department: either everything in life exists in its light, or faith itself is an illusion.
The precise origins of prayer itself we may never know. But the consensus of anthropological and ethnological studies should be noted: we can find at every point of human experience some idea of transcendence and an attempt to relate to it. An intuition about life beyond the grave is a significant corollary of this: �It is certain,� wrote W. F. Albright, one of the great scholars of the ancient world, �that the belief in an after-life has a very long prehistory, going back in some form as far as the Neanderthal men of the Mousterian age. Just what physiological and psychological sources it had, we can hardly demonstrate.�
Albright�s studies in the origin of language support his insistence that what we now call primitive man (flourishing at about 5000 b.c.) was capable of abstraction: �The earliest known stages of the Egyptian, Sumerian and Semitic languages show that general qualities such as �goodness, truth, purity� could be abstracted from the related adjectives and identified as abstractions by some linguistic device.� By the 4th millennium b.c., humans had certainly developed a sense of a divine being�and they associated this being with creation and with characteristics their cultures held to be good. It is at least tenable, therefore (and probably quite correct), to say that the sense of the divine is an innate human perception�not an invented projection, but rather the acknowledgment of a primal certainty.
From Egypt to Rome
�It is difficult to imagine,� wrote Mircea Eliade, �how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world.� A prolific historian of religious ideas, Eliade demonstrated in more than fifty scholarly books the logic that our collective consciousness of a meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred: �Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich and meaningful and what lacks these qualities�that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things.� In other words, the very idea of the sacred and our connection to it is an element in the structure of consciousness, and not merely a stage in its history. And notions about both the deity and life beyond the grave highlight the development of this �idea of the sacred� in almost every ancient culture about which we have any knowledge.
As it was in every ancient religion (including those of the Greeks, Romans and the Hebrews before the 8th century b.c.), polytheism was taken for granted in ancient Egypt, for which we have very extensive and detailed records. During the period from about 2700 to 2200 b.c., for example, the Egyptian kings themselves were worshipped as sons of the sun god. But from 2000 b.c., there is clear evidence of monotheism: Amon was regarded as the one supreme deity, and when one ruler addressed a spontaneous hymn to Amon, his prayer was set down in hieroglyphs: �Creator, Maker, Giver of breath�how manifold are your works, O sole God, whose powers no other possesses. You created the earth according to your heart.� Egyptians also offered morning and evening prayer to Amon.
Along with the tendency toward monotheism, there was a conviction about the afterlife. The Papyrus of Ani, which can be dated to about 1250 b.c., is a major extant portion of the texts now collectively known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead; it contains hymns and invocations interred with the deceased and intended to guide them safely to the beyond. A typical prayer for mercy was addressed, for example, to �My Shining One, who dwells in the Mansion of Images . . . O Preeminent One . . . may you grant me life. . . . O my father, my brother, my mother�Isis! . . . I shall cross to the Mansion of him who finds faces, the collector of souls. . . . And I will not die again in God�s do-main . . . I give you praise, O Lord of the gods.�
Perhaps nowhere are the traditions of prayerful acts discerned more clearly than in this ancient conviction that life endures beyond the grave, a conviction to which the pyramids remain a grand and silent witness. Within them all manner of provisions were made for the entombed rulers in the hereafter. The custom of sprinkling corpses with red ocher�as a substitute for blood and hence as a symbol of life�is found in Egypt and from northern Europe to as far south as Tasmania. More to the point, ancient peoples often buried their dead in a fetal position, which may indeed signify the hope of rebirth; the appearance of the dead in dreams seems also to have suggested the survival of the spirit. The 20th century discovery and translation of Egyptian invocations is precious witness to prayer in one of the most sophisticated ancient cultures.
From the 3rd millennium b.c. to the time of Jesus, forms of prayer changed little in Assyrian and Babylonian cultures. The Babylonian god Marduk was addressed by an unknown speaker in an intimate tone: �O Lord, great are my sins�do not cast your servant down, but remove my transgressions.� Another supplicant expressed confidence in his prayer for protection from enemies: �I have prayed humbly, and I have been heard by my Father, my God.� Equivalent sentiments are found in Cretan civilization of the same era.
From the Sumerians and Egyptians to the Central American natives, the terms �father� and �mother� are everywhere to be found as expressive of the affinity between the human and divine. About 2000 b.c., the Sumerians asked a Father-Mother God to �strip us of our many sins, which we wear like a garment.� In ancient Egypt, Isis was �my father, my mother, my brother,� and the Babylonians addressed Marduk, �as a father and mother, you dwell with your people.� And at the end of the 2nd century a.d., the Acts of St. Peter (a nonbiblical account of early Christian traditions concerning that apostle) placed on the lips of the dying apostle a boldly confident address to God in Jesus: �You are a father and a mother to me�a brother, a friend, a servant. You are all that is, and all that is, is in You.�
The true primitive spirit of prayer is not the expression of a savage or uncivilized nature, nor of atavistic fear or selfish desire. Nor does �primitive� connote a na�ve stage of human development; rather, it describes a basic experience of human contingency. Those we call primitives often disclose not what we have outgrown or put aside but what is fundamental to our humanity.
Attributed to Homer in the 8th century b.c., the Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, contain both poetic prayer and ceremonial prayer. The former invokes a god, tries to justify a reason for a petition to be favorably heard, and then formulates the petition. The latter type follows a pattern of ritual washing, prayer, sacrifice and libations. Greek prayer reflected the tone of its mythology and hence presumed the reality of a feisty give-and-take between gods and mortals; the heroes are always aware of their dependence on the capricious power of preternatural (but not omnipotent) beings, of whom they beg favor and protection in time of need, and to whom they offer sacrifice and honor. Do ut des, as the Romans said later in Latin, was the working principle of reciprocity: �I give to you so that you might grant to me . . .�
The Greeks also knew their gods in an almost personal way�that is, the gods were comprehensible, even sometimes predictable in their emotional responses and their particular loyalties. Existing somehow in space but not omnipresent, the gods had to be summoned in prayer, but there was never a sense of intimacy or loving union between the supplicant and the deity. (The Judeo-Christian God, contrariwise, is both beyond space and time and intimately present within it: He does not have to be summoned, it is humans who are summoned by Him and to Him.)
The Iliad and Odyssey recount many petitions and prayers for safety, as well as curses hurled like Zeus�s thunderbolts. The earliest extant prayer in Greek literature is probably that of the priest Chryses, in the Iliad, when he asks Apollo to avenge him: �I built your temple and burned sacrifice to you�so let your arrows make [my enemies] pay for my shed tears.� One of the most touching examples of a personal prayer is found in the Odyssey. Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus, has waited patiently twenty years for his return. Weary of temporizing with increasingly insistent suitors, she begs heaven to end her life: �Great goddess Artemis, let some whirlwind snatch me up and drop me into the ocean: I wish that the gods who live in heaven would hide me from mortal sight, or that you, fair Diana, might strike me. I would rather go beneath the sad earth awaiting Odysseus, without having to yield myself to a man so much less than he was.�
By the 5th century b.c. and later, Greek prayer became more refined, as can be seen in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the poems of Pindar, the histories of Xenophon and the philosophical dialogues of Plato. There was now a greater concern for the spiritual efficacy of honor and reverence for the gods, and prayers for revenge are softened to entreaties for justice.
�Without thee, no mortal shall have strength to achieve or prevail,� the Chorus prays to Zeus in Aeschylus�s Suppliants; that sense of dependence has moral consequences. Timaeus, in the eponymous dialogue by Plato, observes that �all who possess even a modicum of wisdom, everywhere and always, at the beginning of every work, important or unimportant, call upon God.� Elsewhere, Plato includes entreaties to the gods for the forgiveness of moral guilt. Xenophon and Sophocles also bear witness to the customs of daily prayer at sunrise, sunset and before meals.
It must be stressed, however, that Hellenic prayer was entirely focused on the needs of contingent mortals in this world: ecstatic or contemplative prayer�that is, the sort of prayer aimed at achieving an intimate life with a god�was unknown. Timaeus may have come closest to an intuition about mystical prayer, with its germ of a notion about humanity�s almost existential relation to the Creator-Demiurge.
While Hebrews and, later, Christians employed a variety of postures for public and private prayer (kneeling, standing, sitting, bowing, crouching), the Greeks and Romans almost invariably seem to have stood while praying, extending both arms upward and bringing their hands together with the palms open; medals struck during the Roman Empire indicate that the arms were thrown wide apart.
To this day, Jews, Christians and Muslims extend arms or lift up hands in the act of prayer, much as a needy child does toward a parent. Prostration, bending, striking one�s breast, bowing and kneeling, touching the forehead to the ground, bringing together upraised palms, folding the hands and interlacing the fingers�these are remnants of ancient gestures of greeting and petition and require no academic interpretation.
The most common form of Roman prayer, it must be noted, was to flatter or even to bribe a god�and it was critical to invoke the correct god for one�s cause: �Help me, Jupiter, because it is in your power. . . . Cure me and I�ll give you an offering. . . . Make me richer than my neighbor.� In exchange for divine favor, a person might make a votum or vow to offer a sacrifice, to build a temple or even to bind oneself to the god forever. Two millennia later, this kind of bargaining quid pro quo still characterizes some na�ve notions in just about every tradition of prayer.
The custom of offering spontaneous prayers to nature gods in the temples of Mayan, Aztec and Incan civilizations is well attested; here as in Egypt, religious iconography included colorful representations of the sun, and the practice of mummifying dead kings was well established. Although there is no certain record of the content of spoken prayer, the existence of Central and South American temples and of a priestly class certainly implies a tradition of public worship, which in turn presupposes formulas of prayer.
The early 6th-century-b.c. Persian prophet Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, named the Supreme Being �Ahura Mazda.� Surviving prayers attributed to Zoroaster seem remarkably modern in their warmth and in their ethical principles; more to the point, his prayers presume a benevolent divine will that evokes a serene dependence.
With outstretched arms, open mind and my whole heart, I greet you, Ahura Mazda, in spirit. Turn your countenance toward me, dear Lord, and make my face happy and radiant. My heart yearns for you with a yearning which is never stilled. You are my most precious possession. My joy is in you, my refuge is in you. Let me live before you and with you and in your sight, I humbly pray. . . . Everything that my eyes rest upon reveals your glory. . . . Help me to cultivate the habit of prayer, to know your will, and to conform my impulses to its demands . . . I will pray to you in silence, for you hear my prayers even in my thought.
At about the same time, the Pygmy of Gabon, in Central Africa, were developing a similar prayer of simple thanksgiving, addressed to the god Waka: �You gave me this buffalo, this honey, this wine.� Their orations were as intimate as Zoroaster�s. To this day, the Ovambo tribe of Africa greets the dawn with a cry of desire, and the Bantu express their social sympathies in a language of humble gratitude and religious intercession at dawn and nightfall. In these cases, there is no evidence of syncretism�no influence, for example, from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which also has an ancient practice of prayer at sunrise and sunset.
To put the matter briefly: primitive peoples had an ineradicable sense of awe, of transcendent power. Later, these feel- ings were ritualized and formalized, but originally, they seem to have been spontaneous and improvised in simple sounds like tongue-clicking, loud breathing, deep lamentation or even whistling.
North American natives still routinely withdraw into solitude to pray. The Osage, for example, seem always to have withdrawn from the community, from family and companions, for acts of morning reverence. Similar cases abound, reflecting a wide variety of impulses and motives, including expressions of awe, complaint and petition; all of these seem to have paralleled or even preceded the more developed forms of ritual and sacrifice.
�O God, you are my Lord, my father and mother, Lord of the mountains and the valleys,� prayed the Kekchi Indian. �What have I done?� asked the Khoi-Khoi, �that I am so severely punished?� The Melanesians to this day have an ancient form of supplication when they are in a storm at sea: �Save us in the deep, O dear divinity�save us from the storm and bring us to land!� The Amazalu still ask of their tribal deity, �Give us what is good and watch over us,� and the Khonds of Orissa go one step farther: �We know not what is good or for what we ought to pray. You do. Give that to us.�
The Watje of the Caribbean prayed daily, �O God, I know You not, but You know me. I need You!� And with remarkable tenderness (and theological sophistication), the North African Galla stood alone in the desert, facing the sky for an evening prayer: �In Your hand I pass the day, in Your hand I pass the night�You Who are my mother and my father.�
Similarly, the evolution of Hindu prayer, which is not doctrinally rigid, allows multiple gods to be invoked while many people have one favorite. But recently, deeper study of Hindu texts and more respectful dialogue with Hindu sages have made it clear that Hinduism ought not to be regarded as na�vely polytheistic.
Although it is true to say there are as many approaches to Hinduism as there are Hindus, Hinduism may be regarded as essentially monotheistic: in this light, all its gods are aspects of a single universal Reality which is the only Reality; the world itself, for the Hindu, is the Unreal. In this regard, Ramakrishna, Gandhi, Tagore and Aurobindo�all of them profoundly mystical Hindus�prayed to God in terms no Jew or Christian would have to reject. At the heart of their prayer is a conviction that informs all Asian prayer and the best of Western prayer: we are one with God and we are not one with God. Real prayer does not reject the language of paradox but embraces it.
In Hindu private prayer, great stress is placed on proper sounds and chants, and the repeated mantras are credited with almost magical power. Purification of the mind and inner transformation not only realize the deepest inclinations of the self but also bring one closer to one�s God.
In China, remarkable contributions were made not to the concept or practice of prayer or matters of religion as commonly understood, but to the notion and nature of ethics. Confucius, who was probably born in 551 b.c. and died about 479 b.c., had no interest in what we call God or the gods, nor was he concerned about an afterlife. �Why do you ask me about death when you do not know how to live?� he was reputed to have asked. Orphaned and poverty-stricken, he became a self-educated public servant, urging the reform of oppressive taxes that were ruining the lives of countless Chinese.
A living embodiment of the most worthy social ideals and an advocate for just government, he was unsuccessful as a politician but brilliant as a teacher. Confucius insisted that the truly superior man is benevolent and that a moral existence lived in harmony with the universe is the highest achievement. The realization of that goal was to be found in a government that existed only for the benefit of all the people.
Eventually, the ideals of Confucius (preserved only in fragmentary documents) were absorbed into a variety of popular religions, some of which, as they evolved, made room for various kinds of deities. One especially noteworthy outgrowth of these became known as Taoism, which can be traced to the writings of the mysterious Lao-tzu, who lived sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries b.c.
In the Tao-te Ching (The Book of the Way and Its Virtue), attributed to Lao-tzu, there is mention of an infinite mystery that can be neither named nor described in human language. Lao-tzu claimed that �the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.� He spoke of moving beyond thinking and encouraged entrance into a dark emptiness that was not nothingness but a state beyond multiplicity, and he understood that what we call the truth is nothing like an absolute.
There may be no analogue in Chinese thought for the idea of a Creator as we often use that word in the West, but a potential symbiosis should be appreciated. The Eastern intuition about the power of natural forces in the universe and the Eastern insistence on ethical responsibility are two notions consistent with the invitation extended to Adam by God, Who invites us to collaborate with Him in the management of this mysterious, created world, and to live and act in solidarity with others.
This is one of the astonishing, unique characteristics of Hebrew faith: that the world is the setting for God�s continuing and effective dialogue with humanity. But how is it possible to speak of a dialogue with God?
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Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich (Head of Audi Motorsport): "Qualifying was extremely close. After the good free practice sessions, I must admit that I'm disappointed that as a team we didn't make a similarly good showing in qualifying. Mattias (Ekström) was the only driver to make it into Q4 and had the disadvantage of having driven the largest number of laps on his tires compared with the other drivers. That made it difficult for him in Q4. But we're continuing to work on achieving our aim of winning the manufacturers' championship."
Mattias Ekström (Red Bull Audi A5 DTM), grid position 4
"It was a perfect weekend. We achieved everything we'd been planning for. Our set-up was perfect; it's never been as optimal as this. I'm happy about that and want to thank my engineer, Alex (Stehlig). Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for pole. But the others drove faster in Q4; you can only congratulate them on that."
Timo Scheider (AUTO TEST Audi A5 DTM), grid position 8
"The first qualifying section today was already very close, so then we decided to make a one-hundred-percent change to the set-up even before the session was over. With that, unfortunately, we were off the mark and now we're on the fourth row. After Audi's strong showing in the free practice sessions, we'd been hoping for more. But with Mattias (Ekström), Edo (Mortara) and me in the top ten, it should be possible to grab the points for Audi that are crucial in the battle for the manufacturers' title. That's got to be the aim."
Edoardo Mortara (Playboy Audi A5 DTM), grid position 9
"For us, it was very difficult. Qualifying was poor. Ninth place – we were simply too slow. It's possible that we made a mistake with the set-up because this morning we were still looking competitive. We didn't make use of the car's full potential."
Filipe Albuquerque (TV Movie Audi A5 DTM), grid position 11
"My qualifying was frustrating. Ending up on position eleven at the last qualifying session of the season and to be eliminated in Q2 is definitely bad. I missed Q3 by 15 thousandths of a second. That was really unfortunate."
Mike Rockenfeller (Schaeffler Audi A5 DTM), grid position 12
"The last qualifying session of the season was a disappointment for me. We were good in free practice and then changed something on the car which unfortunately didn't work out the way we'd been hoping it would. We also changed something from Q1 to Q2 which had a negative effect. We made the wrong decisions and weren't quick enough compared with the competition. My performance was also under par in the Audi camp – that's a double dose of disappointment."
Adrien Tambay (Audi ultra A5 DTM), grid position 15
"In Q2, I was pretty optimistic. Unfortunately, I made a mistake on the last lap and we missed making it into Q3 by two tenths of a second. That's a shame because a place in the top ten would probably have been possible."
Rahel Frey (E-POSTBRIEF Audi A5 DTM), grid position 16
"I'm happy after I'd still been struggling in free practice. Q2 was my aim and by taking 16th place I achieved it. The track has lower grip than Valencia. That quickly causes the car to understeer and and you start slipping. I'm still struggling a bit with that."
Miguel Molina (Red Bull Audi A5 DTM), grid position 20
"It's frustrating to be eliminated in Q1 for the first time ever in qualifying this year – especially since I was on pole here last year. We need to analyze why that happened. But we've still got the race tomorrow and one thing's clear: we never give up."
Hans-Jürgen Abt (Team Director Audi Sport Team Abt Sportsline): "After the good free practice, we'd been expecting more. Mattias Ekström's situation was unfortunate: we had to push in Q3 and drive one more lap in order to make it into the final qualifying section. With an additional lap on the tires, though, you no longer have a chance for the pole position. It's possible that in the race on Sunday the battle between the two title candidates may play into our hands."
Ernst Moser (Team Director Audi Sport Team Phoenix): "We had high aims for qualifying. The free practice sessions were looking good; we were always among the front runners. We'd clearly been focusing on Q4. That's why we're disappointed about only having taken twelfth place with Mike Rockenfeller. Before the qualifying session, we had made some changes – now we need to analyze if that was the reason. Miguel Molina's car had more potential too. Now we've got to try and make the best of these grid positions."
Arno Zensen (Team Director Audi Sport Team Rosberg): "With positions nine and eleven we're not happy. Edo (Mortara) was pretty high up in the air in Q2 when he hit a curb. We've got to check if his car was damaged. The race is long. Let's see what we can still achieve."
– End –
Quotes after qualifying at Hockenheim
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Audi A4 Emotion Trailer - ExtendedDie neuen Audi A4 und der A4 Avant legen mit zahlreichen Highend-Technologien die Messlatte in der Klasse höher. Elegantes Design trifft auf ein innovatives Bedienkonzept, konsequenter Leichtbau auf effiziente Lösungen beim Antrieb. Auch beim Infotainment und bei den Assistenzsystemen führen A4 und A4 Avant den Wettbewerb an. Weitere Informationen zum neuen Audi A4 finden Sie im Audi MediaCenter: https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/de
Audi A4 Emotion TrailerDie neue Generation der Bestseller-Familie A4 wurde auf sämtlichen Technikfeldern neu entwickelt. Das Ergebnis: Niedrige Emissionen, beste cw -Werte, wegweisende Technologien in Sachen Infotainment sowie die größte Auswahl im Wettbewerb bei Fahrerassistenz- und Sicherheitssystemen. Weitere Informationen zum neuen Audi A4 finden Sie im Audi MediaCenter: https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/de
Die Weltpremiere des neuen Audi A4Mit der exklusiven Premiere zeigen die Vier Ringe der Weltöffentlichkeit die nächste Generation der Audi-Bestseller Audi A4 Avant und Audi A4 Limousine. Weiteres Bewegtbildmaterial stellen wir Ihnen im Audi MediaCenter zur Verfügung: http://bit.ly/1Jj2MGD.
Mattias Ekström was the quickest Audi driver in qualifying for the DTM finale at Hockenheim. Quotes from the Audi camp.


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New York Mets: The club has received permission to
interview Oakland Athletics pitching coach Rick Peterson for their
vacancy in the same position.
"(Oakland GM) Billy Beane and I spoke this afternoon and Billy
agreed to let us talk to Rick about our opening because of his
unique family position," Mets interim general manager Dan Duquette
said. "Rick's family is from New Jersey and he wants to, if
possible, work on the East Coast."
In the last five of Peterson's six seasons as the A's pitching
coach, the team has finished in the top three for earned-run
average in the American League -- best the last two.
The Mets removed pitching coach Vern Ruhle after the team
finished 10th in the NL with a 4.48 ERA this season.
He will be reassigned to another position within the organization
Anaheim Angels: The Angels agreed to a one-year
contract extension with pitching coach Bud Black on Friday.
Black, 46, has been the club's pitching coach for
four seasons.
The Angels' 4.28 ERA was the sixth-lowest in the American League
this past season. The staff ranked third with a 3.69 ERA during the
team's World Series championship season in 2002.
Anaheim's bullpen has been the league's best the past two
seasons, with an ERA of 2.98 in 2002 and 3.03 in 2003.
Black pitched 15 years in the majors, going 121-116 with a 3.84
ERA in 398 games for Seattle, Kansas City, Cleveland, Toronto and
San Francisco.
He was a member of the Royals' 1985 World Series champions.
Chicago White Sox: The top eight rows of seats at US Cellular Field are being taken out as part of offseason renovations.
About 6,600 seats in the upper deck are being permanently
removed in an attempt to make the ballpark smaller, more intimate.
The work is part of a two-year stadium makeover
made possible by the sale of naming rights for $68 million dollars over 23 years to US Cellular.


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Healthy Gift Ideas for Father's Day
Beyond a certain age fathers tend to prepare for retirement, quiet literally. The laid-back attitude towards exercise, which was a regular habit in years gone past, the indulgence in food and drink, T.V and the couch are inseparable and mindless. But after retirement is when good health begins to matter more. Hence this Father's Day let's shop for gifts that will put health and fitness back on our Dad's radar. Check out these healthy gift ideas for Father's Day, and give your Dad a nudge in the right direction. *Images courtesy: © Thinkstock photos/ Getty Images
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Best affordable US destinations
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Budget travelers will get a lot of bang for their buck at these fun yet affordable U.S. vacation destinations.
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Feds Arrest 3 Men From New York On Charges They Wanted To Join ISIS, Carry Out Terror Attack Against Obama
Federal officials say three men have been taken into custody in the United States on charges they plotted to travel overseas to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
FBI Offers $30K Reward for Info. on 2 Violent Serial Bank Robbers
The FBI is offering a reward of up to $30,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of two violent serial bank robbers that have recently robbed seven banks in Northern Virginia and Maryland.
Reputed Al-Qaida Operative To Represent Himself In US Terrorism Trial
New York (AP) — When the trial of reputed al-Qaida operative Abid Naseer begins this week, jurors are expected to hear an opening statement from the defendant himself, the latest terrorism suspect prepared to act […]
Former D.C. Taxi Driver on FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List
A former taxicab driver in the D.C. area is the latest person to go on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, the FBI announced Thursday.
AP Source: FBI Completes Federal Probe of Ferguson Shooting
The FBI has completed its investigation into the police shooting of an unarmed, black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
FBI Agent: No Direct Evidence Ex-CIA Man Leaked to Reporter
The lead FBI agent on the case against an ex-CIA officer accused of leaking details of a classified mission to a journalist has acknowledged a lack of direct evidence proving the allegation.
How Crime in Maryland Has Changed, and Has Not Changed in Virginia, Over the Last Decade
The national average of crimes per 100,000 people has been steadily dropping for the past decade, but that doesn't seem to be the case for Maryland.
Plan to Attack U.S. Capitol Thwarted; Ohio Man Arrested
United States officials have arrested an Ohio man in connection with a plan to attack the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
Off-Duty FBI Agent Kills Dog After Animals Fight
Police say an off-duty FBI agent shot and killed a large dog that attacked his smaller dog in Glen Burnie as a 4-year-old boy looked on.
Islamic State Recruits Broadly, Not Just Fighters
The three teenage girls from Colorado swapped Twitter messages about marriage and religion with recruiters for the Islamic State group, then set out for Syria with passports and thousands of dollars in stolen cash. Authorities intercepted them in Germany, then returned them to their families without criminal charges.


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Feel like getting a burrito hangover? Then Taco Loco #2 is your place. If this doesn't stuff your drawers, nothing will. Generous amounts of ingredients and all taste pretty good. I asked for fresh jalepenos in my burrito to kick it up and they did exactly as requested. The tacos are good and the fish tacos very good. Beans and rice are hot and full of lard the way God intended Mexican food to be made with.
Use the buddy system to rub eachother's bellies afterwards.............you'll be stuffed!
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Upgrading from Office 2007 to Office 2010? Get used to the new interface, and explore the latest features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
"I often watch the lynda.com videos on my laptop while working out on a stationary bicycle. The short length of the video segments helps to keep me motivated: "I'll quit at the end of this chapter." So far I have lost 25 pounds!" —Gail P.
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