Reverse the curse. When someone is winging fiery darts at you, quench the flame. Do it through discipline. Do that by praying for the person.

In many ways, prayer and discipline are the key to happiness. They are certainly a key to holiness. We can't find success (or deliverance) without them.

How frustrated are those who try! When we have self-discipline, it translates to all aspects of our lives.

Discipline leads to prayer and prayer leads to discipline and such forms a joyful cycle instead of a vicious one.

Fasting is a great way to start and begins by teaching us to control our eating (one of the  ore difficult things we can do), which then translates to many other forms of orderliness. When we have discipline, we learn even to control our words and thoughts. We develop a way of rejecting bad thoughts and keeping only those that are good.

With this, God's grace flows; we have only to note how disciplined Jesus was.

He prayed for His tormentors and rose above them.

Look at your emotions as wild animals that need to be tamed and note that only discipline will tame them.

That kind of order puts a bubble around us and does so by allowing us to detach from emotions.

It channels our energy into good instead of evil.

And those who seek to attack us no longer have a "legal" right to such attack.

To pray for someone who is doing us harm takes discipline because we don't want to! It doesn't seem "normal." Perhaps such is the definition of discipline: doing something that the "flesh" doesn't want us to do!

But the results are miraculous. When we pray for our antagonists we "reverse the curse" and are shielded from their arrows. The bubble of prayer takes us beyond their reach.

Most difficult is jealousy. We have all had envy thrown at us, and it's very painful. It robs us of peace. It is a true "curse" and a form of hate. When someone is jealous of you, they are wishing you a kind of harm, and this is a negative "prayer" that can have effects. As Proverbs says, wrath may be cruel -- but who can stand before jealousy?

And yet, we are not defenseless. Our defense is love. Our defense is prayer. Our secret is discipline. When we repay animosity with prayer, the curse loses its hold on us.

Have you ever tried that? Disciplining yourself not to think negatively about someone you dislike and praying for those who despise you?

It's hard. It takes practice. But it works wonders. It grants us order in our lives, which brings us peace. A priest we know recently noted that "it is difficult to feel the peace of God unless one has first resolved seriously to be faithful to one's spouse, to pardon those who have offended one, to live by one's own work, to discipline one's instincts and desires."

If there is someone who is really bothering you -- whose very name causes emotions to well in you, who even tempts you toward hatred -- pray for that person (from the heart) and those emotions will dissipate.

05/12/03

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