An answered prayer?

God does not come to free us from our ever present daily problems, but to free us from the real problem, which is the lack of love. This is the main cause of our personal, social, international and environmental ills  Thinking only of ourselves:  this is the father of all evils.

Pope Francis.

This is from Pope Francis' Twitter feed.

I don't know, really, what I think about Popes having Twitter feeds, but Pope Francis does.  This showed up yesterday when I checked Twitter, which is odd as I don't subscribe to Pope Francis' Twitter feed.

I'm hoping it's not, actually, an answer to a prayer.

A statement like this by a Pope is really too simple to be reduced to dogma and of course everything a Pope says isn't infallible.  Indeed, rarely does any Pope speak in that fashion.  But this item is oddly timed for me, as yesterday morning as I hiked to work I definitely said a prayer to be freed from one of my "ever present daily problems", maybe.

I'm not going to get into that, but there's something I'd very much like to receive a yes answer to in a prayer, and it's very much on my mind right now.  It's perhaps in the nature of irony, given that to some people what I'm praying about is to be relieved of a sort of gift in the first place, and I'm lucky to hold it.  This is one of the ironies of individual human natures, just because other people may be envious of something you have, do, can do, or just because you may be known for it, doesn't mean it's how that plays out inside your head.

I'm reminded here of actor William Holden, actually, who is an actor I really like. He was great in an entire host of films, and yet he didn't really like acting.  He must have at one time, but in later years he was incredibly blunt when asked about it and told interviewers he didn't like it and only did it as he had to pay the bills.

Or consider Blind Owl Wilson, the famous guitar player from Canned Heat.  Wilson was a musical genius, but he absolutely hated performing on stage.  His superb talent was contradictory to his nature, and ultimately he descended into drugs, which killed him.

Another example would be a college professor I had at UW who was a fantastic and interesting professor.  I enjoyed two of his classes greatly, upper class courses in a discipline I wasn't actually in.  He was frank, however, that he didn't enjoy what he was doing and actually cited a work we read about that a person could in fact be good at something they didn't like.  But for his mentioning it, you'd never have suspected anything, as he was so good at it.  I don't know if he ever prayed about it, as he was a praying man and was a co-religious, but irrespective of that he left UW to went on to an Ivy League school, so you can make of that what you will.

Or consider a lawyer I remotely knew here at one time who wanted to be a filmmaker.  He moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dream and, a few years later, was back, dream unfulfilled.

There are other examples I can think of, the problem being with all of them is that they're all things like this, which shouldn't be taken as direct analogies on anything.  People who dream of excelling in athletics but who don't have the talent, people who write works of music or literature but can't get them performed.  People who live in one place, seemingly in daily contentment, but who desperately wish to live in another.

There must be an endless list of things like this.  Maybe every person has them.

God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is 'no'! And you may become upset because he said no. But open up your eyes and look around at the things he said yes to.

Jerome D. Williams.

I'm not completely certain that Pope Francis is correct in his statement about ever  present daily problems, even though I agree with him on the larger statement.  The problem I have with the Pope's statement is that for lots of people, their ever present daily problems are pretty big problems, from their prospective.  People destroy their lives, literally and figuratively, over problems that seem small to us.  Being a lawyer, not a year goes by that I don't read about a successful lawyer somewhere that hasn't descended into drink, drugs, or even death, due to his occupation.  "We didn't see it coming" will be the quotes from his friends and family even as they recount that the victim was working seven days a week, night and day.  They saw it coming, and they just chose to ignore it, probably figuring it was that person's obsessive personality or that it was "temporary".  Indeed, a lot of the very worst problems an individual may have been indeed highly temporary, and yet in their minds they're overarching.  "Just get this done, and we'll go on vacation".  "Just get through the annual accounting, and we can buy that boat".  Whatever.  To a person carrying by a burden of some sort, which maybe is uniquely a burden just to them, it's still a burden.

That's what leads me to question Pope Francis on this one.  I believe in prayer, and I've seen at least one example of what I'd regard as a miraculous comeback from illness by a very sick person, due to prayer, and I agree with Dr. Williams.  Sometimes the answer is no, for reasons that we can't understand and won't in this life.

All of which gets to a minor part of the "problem of evil".  Why would God invest a person with a strong desire to do something (we'll assume something moral, or at least morally neutral) and yet not allow them to actually do it?  Why would God allow a person to be afflicted with a strong desire to do something immoral?  We don't really know why, and perhaps in our own lives we can't really see it.  Maybe it's a sort of Mr. Holland's Opus sort of situation, where a persona's affliction turns into a great benefit for others.

Maybe that's the reason the answer is sometimes no.

All I know is that I can't watch Mr. Holland's Opus.  And I've started to have the same reaction to It's A Wonderful Life.  They're getting to personal, really, and I just might not like the message, valid message though it is.

Anyhow, synchronicity is one of those things that's difficult to explain.  Yesterday, as I hiked downtown (my car was in the shop) I prayed on a topic I've prayed on before, and I asked for it to be solved that day.  During the day sometime I checked my Twitter feed and there was the Tweet from Pope Francis whom, as noted, I don't subscribe to on Twitter.  So maybe my prayer was answered, but not in the way I wanted it to be.

Well, I'm only human and very flawed.  I'm praying for the same thing again today.