My writing

THE MECHANICS OF PRAYER: The Fundamentals

December 7, 2011

The Fundamentals Julia Marks
To begin any and every writing about God, it is necessary to acknowledge the three fundamental laws of God: respect, courtesy, and gratitude.  No matter if you are dealing with having visions, praying for a friend, or grocery shopping, these three laws always apply.  If it’s not respectful, courteous, or grateful, it’s not God. I have found over the years that God can be understood to some infinitesimal degree.  And in that understanding one can find simplicity.  The above laws about God are simple.  If you want to follow God, even in a small way, and find yourself yelling at your neighbor about raking their leaves into your yard, find a way to back out of the argument and look for something respectful to say.  Or [...]

ANGLICANISM: The View From The Nearly Abandoned Treehouse

December 7, 2011

The View From The Nearly Abandoned Treehouse
It takes a lot to be a mystic.  In addition to having the ability burned into you at birth, it takes patience and endurance, courage and endurance, flexibility and endurance, and just plain endurance.  At times it means suspending all that you’ve grown to accept as reality and expanding the boundaries just a bit further out into the unknown, over the chasm, and plunging into unspeakable discomfort, only to find yourself sitting still and knowing that He is God. But it doesn’t take that much from the world to keep a mystic going.  From almost the beginning of the church, mystics have had a penchant to take themselves away from the world — into monasteries and convents, hermitages and anchorite cells.  For me, though, to [...]

TALES FROM BEYOND THE HORIZON: Call And Response

December 4, 2011

Call And Response | Julia Marks
When I was seventeen I had a series of visions.  For the first time in my life, however, the visions were really visual.  I could see them. They lasted for four nights.  For the first three nights, I was awakened in the night, in my large, dark, four-poster bed, to see a nun standing serenely and silently at the end of my bed.  She made no demand on me.  She looked at me.  I wondered if I were imagining that she looked at me with expectancy.  Nothing about the experience disturbed me.  I easily sunk back into my pillow and went back to sleep. On the fourth night, the vision changed.  Instead of the nun, a man appeared at the end of my bed.  I didn’t know much, if anything, about appearances like this, so I just assumed, [...]

LETTERS TO JESUS: First

December 1, 2011

LETTERS TO JESUS: First
Did your breath catch in your throat just before you touched the barrel of water?  Did your hand tingle or tremble before it laid God’s love onto it?  Did you turn your head to see if someone was gaping at your foolishness, or did you shrug into yourself, shutting out what might be coming your way? Did they stare directly at you when they learned what you had done, or did they slide glances at you from the edge of their eyes, hoping that, in seeing you standing there, the story would prove false?  But they had been drinking all night.  Was what happened to them just a foolish blur, a twirl of life that, realized the next morning, was easily shrugged off in the brilliant light of the day’s work in front of them?  The fields needed [...]

THE MECHANICS OF PRAYER: An Introduction

November 30, 2011

THE MECHANICS OF PRAYER: An Introduction
There are many definitions of prayer.  Evelyn Underhill calls it a loving intercourse with God.  Myriad descriptions refer to it as being a quenching of a thirst.  We, people, somehow and for some reason yearn to connect with God and prayer is one way that satisfies this yearning. All this is well and good.  And very poetic.  But I take a much more practical and concrete approach to prayer.  Here is my definition: Prayer is the act of taking of an idea and bringing it into reality through God. All of us who pray have a general, if fuzzy, understanding of how  prayer works.  We may even have strong feelings about the form it should take — it should involve knees and/or a bowed head.  We should stand.  A cross should be [...]

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