Faith Is a Call to Prayer; Prayer Is a Call to Faith (with Nayaswami Maria)
Sunday Service with Nayaswami Maria and Nayaswami Ananta at Ananda Village, recorded November 6th 2022.
Faith, as opposed to mere belief, is based on personal experience and deep conviction. When we meditate on God with deep concentration, we attain that experience that gives us profound faith in Him.
In this Sunday Service, Nayaswami Maria shares how the power of faith takes us victoriously through life's challenges. She emphasizes the power of attunement to the Divine and attuning ourselves to those who already have obtained full faith in God.
This week's reading is:
Faith Is a Call to Prayer; Prayer Is a Call to Faith
(From Rays of the One Light - Weekly Commentaries on the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita by Swami Kriyananda)
Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within.
The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.
In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapters 7 and 21, we read:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. . . .
Verily I say unto you, if you have faith, and doubt not…if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.
And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.
Paramhansa Yogananda showed by his own example that prayer is a power, provided we believe deeply in that power. When our thoughts and feelings are strongly focused and then united in growing awareness to the Divine Presence within, they can bring even seemingly unrealistic wishes to fulfillment.
When Paramhansa Yogananda was in charge of his school in Ranchi, India, he took the boys on occasional outings to the surrounding countryside. “There was a waterfall not far away,” he told Swami Kriyananda, “where I took them sometimes. It was dangerous to cross there. But I would cry out to the boys, ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘Yes!’ they would shout back enthusiastically. And so we always crossed in safety.
“Years later, after I’d gone to America, one of the teachers tried to do the same thing, but he lacked spiritual power. One of the boys slipped on a rock and was drowned.”
Thus, the Master explained, belief alone is not enough. It must be united to one-pointed awareness, which leads to Self-realization. The Bhagavad Gita, in the sixth Chapter, underscores the necessity for such one-pointed concentration:
Whenever the mind, fickle and restless, wanders off from its concentration, let the meditating yogi withdraw it resolutely, spurning every distraction (no matter how alluring!), and bring it back again and again under the control of the Self.
Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.
