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     %PERSONAL COMMUNAL WAY PRAY CHANGE EVOLVE GROW 891011

     Every  growing  community and the  members  of  every
growing community participate in change.  The challenge is
to  find  and follow integrative ways of  growing  through
balanced  change.  The integrative ways are:  the ways  of
finding new ways,  the process of following new ways,  the
content  which  is found in the process of  following  new
ways,  the process of sharing the process and the content,
etc.

     Persons  and  communities  which  seek  to  stabilize
themselves through stopping change, or through achieving a
final  ideal  condition,  lose their  balance  and  change
through disintegration; they fall. The fall has to do with
presuming to have achieved a good condition of being which
calls  for  no further change;  i.e.,  believing that  one
somehow  knows  that  one is good in  an  ultimate  sense,
having transcended evil. The presumption of the attainment
of  such knowledge through any process (such as eating the
fruit  of  the  tree of the knowledge of  good  and  evil,
through  research,   through scholarly  discourse,   etc.)
constitutes the fall.

     Balanced  change is made possible through integrative
prayer   which  illuminates  the  ways  to   change   with
integrity;   involving both personal prayer  and  intimate
communal  prayer  in  which members of the  community  are
free/freed  to  be  open  and  honest  about  their   most
fundamental  desires  and needs.  The work of Love  is  to
create  contexts in which people may be safely  vulnerable
enough to feel free to change creatively. The work of Love
is  to eliminate the felt need to be defensive as a way to
be  secure.  The defensive way to try to achieve  security
destroys the secure possibility of being vulnerable, which
is real security.

     Authentic  prayer   is  not a prescribed  ritual   or
performance  according  to some technical  or  traditional
form.   Prayer is essential to change and the  essence  of
being in the process of change.  In prayer communities and
their  members are reborn as they conceive  themselves  in
new and creative ways. By changing their preconceptions of
themselves they change their perceptions of themselves and
become   free   to  re-conceive  themselves  through   new
conceptions  of themselves.  The process of change is  one
with the process  of perception and conception through re-
conception in the ways of prayer.

                                                                                                                               
                         (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in      
                    (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)  
                                                                                                                               
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