Source: Huff Post Religion
I am an anthropologist. More than 10 years ago now I was in pursuit of a project on religion and community when a young, blond, giggly California beach girl told me that I should have a cup of coffee with God. She loved hanging out with the Lord, she said. They chatted in the morning, she said. He was kind and loving and he helped her to sort out her life — a perfect boyfriend, she chuckled. When she had first come to the church, she said, she hadn’t been able to pray. To get down on her knees. Now, she found it easy to pray, though she still didn’t kneel. Now, she could talk to God about anything. She did not, she went on, ask God whether she should paint her toenails. Then she hesitated, as if wondering whether she wouldn’t. “It’s a very humbling experience,” she explained, “because you’re talking to the Creator, and you’re an ant. You know, he created the human race so that he could have a relationship with us. It’s almost like — I wonder whether he’s lonely, or was lonely. It just kind of blows my mind.”
What I found so striking as an anthropologist is that prayer changed people, not so much morally or emotionally, although prayer might change people in these ways, but in their capacity to imagine. Prayer changed the way people used their imagination and it changed the quality of their imagination, so that what they imagined felt more real to them. They became able to feel God beside then as they walked. They experienced God as talking back.
Categories: CHRISTIANITY, Faith, Religion, Spirituality