Prayer for Protection One of the reasons Unity’s co-founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore did not like ritual was because they found too often it became rote and routine. When you repeat something over and over, you can begin to do it unconsciously, without engaging the meaning it might have originally had. Weddings are a nice ritual and the significance sometimes is in inverse proportion to the number of repetitions. If you get married once or twice, the ritual is sacred and memorable. Around the fifth or sixth time, I suspect it loses some of the dazzle. I don’t know, since I’ve never, ever been married. Yet. Perhaps the longer you wait, the more significance the ritual has too. Anyway….the Fillmores don’t have much ritual in the practices and teachings we have come to know as Unity. Most Unity churches, however, have created their own. We have not been inhibited by founders who created no sacred cows, we created them ourselves. I don’t know that there are numbers on how many Unity churches end the service with the Peace Song and have the Prayer for Protection in the service somewhere. The one thing people like about ritual though is its familiarity. The Prayer for Protection is like a kind of Unity branding. When you hear it in a church service, you know you are in a Unity church. Because no matter how widely known it is, other denominations have not adopted the prayer the way Unity has. To keep a routine sacred requires it to be examined once in awhile. Most of us attached to our routines would rather examine it than change it and ministers are warned to be careful about tipping a congregation’s sacred cows. So today I’d like to look more deeply at our familiar Prayer for Protection and there is no threat of removal! To begin, I think it is important to understand when and why the Prayer was written. It was written by James Dillet Freeman, who has become known as Unity’s Poet Laureate. He held actual paying jobs over the years at Unity, including serving as the Director of Silent Unity. Let me allow Rev. Freeman to explain how the Prayer came to be by quoting from an article he wrote for Unity Magazine several years ago: Let me tell you how I wrote Unity's "Prayer for Protection." When World War II was raging in Europe, we received many letters and phone calls from people caught in the conflict, but for a long time we did not have a prayer for protection that we were all satisfied with. This is how one came. Silent Unity has always written a special Christmas Prayer Service just for Silent Unity workers. And in 1940 I was asked to prepare this service. We had never before needed a prayer for protection, but in 1940 we needed one, so 1 I wrote one to go with the Christmas service. What I wrote was a little four-line verse: "The light of Christ directs me; The love of Christ enfolds me; The power of Christ protects me; The presence of Christ upholds me." I had hardly finished this Christmas service before Silent Unity came to me again and asked me to write a protection pamphlet that we could send to people, so I did. It was called His Protecting Spirit. They told me they wanted affirmative prayers for protection on the back page. Among these was the verse from the 23rd Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Ps. 23:4 KJV). One of the young women who worked in Silent Unity was reading my manuscript as I wrote it, and as she finished it, she came up to me and said: "Jim, if I were a woman in England and they were dropping bombs on my roof, or if I were a soldier and someone was pointing a loaded gun at me, I wouldn't want to feel like I was walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Can't you do better than that?" I thought, You want me to do better than the 23rd Psalm? You have to be out of your mind. But rolling around in the back of my mind was the little verse I had written as a prayer for protection at Christmas. I had written it just for Silent Unity, but now it came rolling up to the front of my mind and demanded that I pay attention to it. It enticed me to see what I could make of it. First I took the rhymes from it. I felt it would be more universally received if it was not a rhyme. Then I changed Christ to God. It had been Christ because it was a Christmas prayer, but I felt if we were going to send it around the world, God might be more acceptable to more people. So the little prayer became: "The light of God surrounds me, The love of God enfolds me, The power of God protects me, The presence of God watches over me." That is the way we first printed it. Then a line came to me that I felt would make the prayer even more powerful. The line was: "Wherever I am, God is." I added it as the fifth line. The "Prayer for Protection" first appeared as a four-lined prayer in 1941, but when we reprinted it in 1943, it appeared in the form it has had ever since. "The light of God surrounds me; The love of God enfolds me; The power of God protects me; The presence of God watches over me. Wherever I am, God is!" He ends the article this way: I think Unity's "Prayer for Protection" is as much God's word as "I Am There" is. Sometimes God speaks to us when we don't even know it is God. I think God has many ways of speaking to us and not only in words that we hear with our ears. I think God speaks to our hearts and minds, and sometimes God's message has nothing to do with words. God is love and 2 intelligence and life. More than anything we say God is, or even imagine God is, God is the one universal Presence and Power and is seeking to express Truth and beauty and good through all of us and for all of us. The most widely known Unity prayer was not written for a Unity audience. Perhaps it is its universality that has given it the enduring power it has enjoyed. The prayer has journeyed to the moon with Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, to college, to new jobs and new cities, to hospitals, recently on television with Robin Roberts and around the globe. It was intended to go across the seas to Europe. For all its power, does it speak accurately to our Unity beliefs? Yes and No. The prayer speaks to a human need level yet, it retains language that viewed metaphysically may not be complete but it is not inconsistent with Unity thought. Reverend Freeman, or Jim as he was known around the Village, was inspired. I am not implying he went through any of these thoughts as he wrote but I am encouraging us to take a deeper look as we continue to send our energy and thoughts out into the ethers each time we speak the words. The Light of God surrounds us. For 267 days, between September 7, 1940 and May 21, 1941, the United Kingdom endured multiple bombings. London was hit 71 times, including 57 consecutive nights. No lights were allowed after dusk to avoid illuminating targets. In the times of greatest darkness we long for light. We are experiencing the winter solstice and we find ways to celebrate the light and create light in the darkness. There was a very real, human need for the comfort of light in the requests for prayer that Silent Unity received. Light surrounding us can sound separate but at a human level, any light at all was a comfort. Metaphysically, we speak of God as light—energy, illumination. We often speak of the light within us. We also speak of God everywhere present so that would include surrounding us. It would not be inaccurate to say that the light that is God--that is of God-- surrounds us. Charles Fillmore’s invocation says, “We are immersed in the presence of pure being”. Immersed, surrounded—you say tomato, I say tomato, it still sounds like Unity to me. The Love of God enfolds us. This definitely has an “anthropomorphic God” ring to it; and it speaks to a human desire for comfort. An anthropomorphic God is an image of a Divinity that looks and acts like a human. It is a creation of our human mind, creating God in our image and likeness. We humans come into this world requiring tactile stimulation for proper development so it is not that surprising we would want a God to lovingly embrace us. 3 On a metaphysical level, we say the transcendent God, the everywhere present energy we name as God, is not only Light but also Love. Humans struggle to understand the transcendent God and often long for an immanent God. The immanent God is the embracing, loving presence we can feel. This longing has led many Christians, including many in Unity, to use the figure of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of an imminent God.