Setting A Trap For God

In Aramaic, the original language of many of our sacred teachings, to “pray” literally means to “set a trap”, according to Ancient Language and Spirituality scholar Dr. Rocco Errico. In other words, prayer is “Setting a Trap for God”. A trap was a lyrical energetic device to capture and mold the energy of GOD. So if you are setting a trap for God, then what is the bait? YOU ARE THE BAIT. Your energy attracts God’s energy so that it might work through you to create that for which you pray.

In order to be the bait, you must make yourself available to God by setting aside time for prayer and meditation. By setting aside this time, you train yourself to receive the loving support and guidance of God so that you are adept at accessing God’s grace any time you need it. The more you trust that God’s grace is available (because you’ve experienced it so often), the more strength your prayers will have to manifest because you will have a strongly developed “faith” muscle. You must also release the subconscious belief that you must be “perfect” in order to experience God’s grace. Don’t let the conscious or unconscious judgments that you hold about yourself keep you from feeling worthy of God’s grace. Instead, go to God “with curlers in your hair”, which means, go to God just as you are, so that you experience God loving you and embracing you regardless of how “good” or “bad” you judge your circumstances to be.

To set a trap for God, you must also know who (or what) God is. My experience of God has been the experience of being embraced by a positive, loving, beneficent force. This is contrary to the common caricature of God as an vengeful, sadistic “being” that would punish us and withhold from us. When you experience God as a loving energetic force, and you feel this loving energy embracing you “just as you are”, you begin to connect with “unconditional” love, instead of the love that requires our perfection in order for us to be worthy to receive it.

You must also know who YOU are if you want to set a trap for God. You are as God created you. Innocent, perfect, whole and complete just as you are. Your uniqueness is a blessing, for it blesses God in the same way that the different flowers bless the earth with their beauty. You are not your “story”. This story, along with the judgments that you hold of yourself due to the “story” was just a catalyst to move you down the path of self-discovery. In other words, your prior victimization, failure, hardships, challenges or experiences were chosen by your soul so that you would choose a new way of seeing the world, and thus move forward down your spiritual path. If your life had been a “cakewalk” you probably would not have pursued your spiritual enlightenment. Therefore, you do not have to judge yourself or withhold from yourself because of your past or your “path”.

When you make yourself available for God, know that God is the loving force that would embrace you when you are available, and know that you are God’s child who deserves God’s blessings, you are then ready to “set a trap for God”.