The Pearl: 31 March 2015

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance. – Khalil Gibran You're familiar with the expression, "Great minds think alike?" Proving the truth of that old proverb, the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw have both said basically the same thing about prayer: that we pray for the wrong reasons. We don't give thanks to God for what we have. Instead, we mostly beg our Creator to give us what we don't have, as if God exists to serve us. … [Read more...]

The Pearl: 28 March 2015

Most people do not pray. They only beg. – George Bernard Shaw The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was a prolific writer, literary critic, author of the famous plays Pygmalion -- which later was turned into the famous musical My Fair Lady. Shaw has been the only winner of both an Academy Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was also a member of the socialist Fabian society, a staunch advocate of eugenics, a serial adulterer, and a man who once wrote a Dublin newspaper to declare "with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror of my respectable connections, that I was an atheist." Hey, nobody's perfect. His personal faults aside, Shaw was absolutely correct in his astute analysis of prayer and the human condition. By and large, we humans do not pray to God and give thanks for the wonderful gifts we have received. Instead, we tend to beg our Creator for materialistic possessions that we still covet in spite of our blessings. Or for personal miracles. But rarely does it seem that we ever just say "thanks." … [Read more...]