Petition

Module 1 of 2022
Petition, by Rev. Michaël Merle

Report by John-Peter Gernaat
​
This talk, and therefore the report, presume a knowledge of Theosophy. The report on Theosophy, which formed the first talk of this module of the Africa Seminary may be read at this link.

Theosophy, the Wisdom of God, has long excited people’s imagination, well before the coming of Christ. When Hebrew rabbis composed the Talmud, which is an accompaniment to the Torah, they philosophised on the Wisdom of God, that all of creation must have been brought about out of the Wisdom of God: “In His wisdom, God creates…”

We have referred to Theosophy as the human being, because what we can behold in the human being is the Wisdom of God as a result of having been created in the image and likeness of God. The Human being reflects the wisdom of God. Rudolf Steiner then goes on to explain that the path that the human being treads is not the wisdom of God, but rather the wisdom of the human being or Anthroposophy. This path is graced by Christ, it is the Christ-path, it is the path of connecting to the Christ Being, and not the Christ Being at the end of the path but the Christ Being in us on the path, meeting the fullness of the Christ Being as a goal.

Understanding what it is to be human will help us understand what petition is all about. It is a human being that is petitioning. If we understand our constitution, we can understand how we pray. Sometimes we continue to pray as if we have not yet grown up. This happens.
Reading Mark chapter 12 where a scribe comes to Jesus. To be a scribe was an important task. They were the record-keepers who wrote down the discussions of the Pharisees and Sadducees. We would not have scripture if the scribes had not inscribed it. Only human beings can write. Animals can communicate, but only humans write. In order to write the human being must create a symbology that has meaning to everyone. As human beings we write ourselves into the world and others can read who we are through all that we do and are in the world. This scribe was someone with capacity and knowledge, seeking more knowledge. He had observed how well Jesus had answered the questions of the crowd. He therefore felt that Jesus could confirm for him what lived in his heart. He asks: “Which is the most important of all the commandments?” This was a question that would have been a topic of regular discussion by those for whom he scribed. Jesus replied out of scripture: “Hear Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord (the Shema for the Hebrews).” This has the effect that everyone will listen. They did what Steiner describes: they lifted their gaze to the Divine. They were being human. He says: “You will love the Lord your God” and then he describes how one should love the Lord their God: “with your whole being.” He describes the human being to the point to which they human being has reached in their development: “with all your heart (the very essence of who one is – we make the heart our central point when we say to the one we love: “I love you with all my heart”. ‘Heart’ is therefore the centrality of the person. Thus we love the Lord our God with a sense of oneself – that self which has incarnated into the earthly body. Therefore the “I” of oneself, the earthly “I”.) and with all your soul (There is a difference between heart and soul. Heart represents the spirit while soul is another quality. It is how the spirit can find expression in the world and how the world can impress itself upon that spirit.) and with all the power of your life (With the life forces, often described as the Etheric Formative Forces of Life.) and you shall love the Lord your God with your strength of might (with the physical body).” It is a description of a four-fold human being: heart, soul, power of life, and strength of might. This description resonates with us.
​
This gives us a new way of understanding prayer. We often think that prayer means asking for the things that we desire or that we perceive we may need. We did that as a child: we expressed our needs to our parents in the expectation that they would respond and give us that which we needed or wanted. Sometimes a parent would say no and not accede to the wish or demand. When we work only with the physical body and the power of our formative life force we rely on the parent being able to accede to our needs. But when we have developed the capacity to work with our full humanity we no longer need to ask, but we do, as adults, need to lay claim to that which belongs to us. When we are adults our parents will acknowledge our claim and may even gift more in addition through their love for us. We can take hold of our selves as adults. We no have to ask the Divine as if we are still children. Petition is not asking. Petition means to lay claim, to actively seek out something that belongs to one. (We go to court and make a petition, asking the court to confirm that something belongs to us. We are not asking anything of the court other than to confirm ownership. The court may offer grace in the form of compensatory damages if one had been deprived of something that was one’s own, thereby offering us more than we come to petition for, but this was not part of our petition originally.)

Because we have a human constitution as an adult that has an essential “I”-being our prayer, our petition is different to asking the Divine. When we pray we address the Divine and express what we are able to manage ourselves and that we will give to this with our devoted energy. We may then trust that we might be met with grace permitting us to do more that we could do alone, because of this grace. We might address the sorrow and heaviness of our heart, but in the understanding that we are bearing our burden and working with it. We do not turn to the Divine wishing the Divine to wave a wand that will alleviate our burden. We ask the Divine to see us and recognise what it is that we are doing and how we are doing it. We lay claim to that which we can do and recognise that which we cannot do, and we wait in our doing for the Divine to meet us and bring us that which we need. We do not ask for that which we need because the Divine knows better than we do what, in the circumstances of our life and our developmental unfolding, we need.

If we keep asking the Divine as if He could provide it magically then we are still a child in our relationship with the Divine. But if we lay claim to what we can do while holding in faith that element which lies beyond what we can do, then we are opening up ourselves to a real relationship with the Divine. This does not mean that miracles do not happen, but rather that we recognise when they do occur, because we realise that it is more than we could have managed ourselves on that day. Our true, final intention of petition is every day to speak to God in the relationship that we can, one of reliance, one of faith, one of assurance, but, very importantly, one of human activity and the engagement of our will.
We have a beautiful description of the letter of Paul to the Ephesians 3: 14-21:

So now I bow my knees before the Father in whom all beings in the heavens and on the earth have their birthplace and their home. May HE grant you, out of the wealth of HIS light-glory, that the higher power may take hold of you which through HIS Spirit brings to birth the Inner Human Being in you. This happens when the Christ dwells in your hearts through your faith, and when you are firmly rooted and grounded in love. Then you will also have the power, together with all who have a share in the salvation, to grasp what the secret is of length and of breadth, of height and of depth; you will comprehend the love of Christ which is greater than all comprehension, and you will be filled with all the fullness of the highest God.

To HIM who can fulfil beyond all measure what we ask for or what we simply carry in our minds, in that HE lets higher forces become active in us: to HIM belongs all the glory of revelation which enlightens the community through Christ Jesus in all generations and in the ages of time to come. Amen.
​
(This is an extract form the Jon Madsen rendition which is a translation by Emil Bock.)

God fulfils in us more than anything we could ask for or imagine.

There is going to be a higher power at work in us when we are active. This higher power will not spring into action until we get ourselves going. When we cooperate with this higher power, more will happen than we could ever have even asked for or imagined. Something extraordinary happens that is not because of ourselves, but it would not have taken place without us. We must be present. The higher power in us is the “I”-organisation, the Christ-in-us. We hear it eight times in the Act of Consecration of Man: “Christ in you.” Christ is in us. We walk the path because Christ is in us. Christ is not accompanying us. Christ makes it possible that we can do ever more than we could have ever asked for or imagined. That is what it is to be a petitioning human being: I lay claim to my capacity to be human and I know that that is made possible, graced, and expanded by Christ-in-me. This changes the way that we pray and the way in which we see that our prayers are answered.

In the seasonal Gospel Reading the theme was: “ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you”. We should stop focussing on the ‘ask’, seek’ ‘and ‘knock’ and rather turn our attention to ‘you will receive’, ‘you will find’, and ‘it will be opened’, start working with a that as a reality, because it is real.

If we keep knocking and don’t notice that the door has been opened, we remain outside knocking. If we keep asking and do not recognise that we are receiving, we keep asking like a child. If we keep seeking and don’t realise we have it already, we never stop journeying without ever enjoying the fruits of the journey.
​
When we understand how we are constituted as a human being, how we are theosophy, it may change the way in which we petition. It does not mean that we don’t pray for others, but the only thing we can pray for is that they will come into the realisation that they need to come to and that they will find the grace in their lives that God will afford. There is no more we can ask for. Think of the Trinity epistle: “Our substance is his substance”. We are made of the very substance of God. It is the only thing that God can give us, the essence of His substance. With that we can experience more than we could ever do or imagine.