"In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful" ("Bism Allah el rachman el raheem") is the invocation in Islam known as the "Bismallah." It is the first phrase in the Koran. It occurs 114 times in its 114 chapters, or suras. It is missing in Sura 9, but occurs twice in Sura 27. It is roughly equivalent to the Christian Sign of the Cross. When reciting the Koran, it becomes a chant. One is reminded of Catholics reciting the rosary.

The word "islam" means "submission" (voluntary submission, not "slavery"). With a capital letter, Islam is a way of life the central focus of which is submission to the will of God. The Bismallah reminds us that this is a good thing to do, for God is "Most Gracious, Most Merciful." It is foolishness of the worst sort to attempt not to submit to the will of God, because God is, after all, God; in control of everything. Go ahead, just try to violate the law of gravity or angular momentum. It can't be done! God rules utterly and absolutely. The best way to get along (logically, the only way) is to do things His way, to submit to the Will of God, "Most Gracious, Most Merciful." Religions other than Islam have basically the same premise, but they go about it in different ways.

Perhaps the most popular way is to view God as a tyrant. There is a strong flavor of this in Judaism, which began as a religion of a Semitic people only recently released from slavery. The idea of a slavemaster who lays down laws that must be obeyed to avoid punishment was easy for people with a slave mentality to understand, and many of the disasters suffered by the Jewish people described in the Bible are reported in that light. (Homer viewed the events of the Trojan war in a similar way.) The idea is very popular in modern Christianity as well. God will "git ya" if you don't obey the rules. The way to salvation in this interpretation is to follow the rules, obey the law, keep the Commandments. The Jews of Jesus' time had 613 laws that they had to obey, and the clergy insisted on the strict observance of each and every one. Jesus found this whole idea repugnant. (See Matthew 23:23 and following,)

This view of God inspires fear. Fear, of course, is a natural, hard-wired reaction to a perceived danger, and thus is a good and holy thing. It gets the adrenaline pumping, preparing the fearful to fight what they fear, or run away from it. It is therefore a motivation for action. Since we can neither successfully fight God or run away from Him, the action motivated is to obey the rules. The word "fear" occurs 400 times in the Bible. We are told to "fear God" ten times, and "fear thy God" five times.

On the other hand, fear of God seems to be His weapon of last resort. 1 John 4:18 says: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love." The Christian view of God is that He wants us to love Him rather than fear Him, and this is borne out in the Bible. The word "afraid" appears 193 times, and "be afraid" occurs 38 times. But of those, the phrase "not be afraid" occurs 13 times, and "be not afraid" occurs 28 times. The phrase "fear not" occurs 62 times, spoken both by God Himself and His representatives to His people.

The reason for this is not hard to fathom. Fear is a natural, God-given faculty, like sexual attraction. But just as sexual attraction can be perverted into lust, fear can be perverted into terror. Like lust, terror provokes action that God would never approve. Christians find their way out of this problem in a variety of ways.

Some of us just don't worry about it. Don't be afraid! Do whatever you want; God's going to send you to heaven or hell regardless. What you do doesn't matter at all. Que sera, sera! Others have a magic ceremony; do this or that, say these or those magic words, and you're guaranteed to be saved. Be not afraid! Nothing you do thereafter will have anything to do with it. You might "backslide" a little, but the redeemed are incapable of sin. Others are saved by faith. If there is a world wide pandemic that has killed millions of people, and I believe that God will protect me from it even if I don't take precautions, I can make Him do that if I believe it hard enough. Fear not! If I'm a child molester and I believe hard enough that it's OK, I'll get into heaven because believing makes it so.

Those of us who believe that Almighty God is not quite so easy to fool see things a little differently. We support a huge, multi trillion dollar international bureaucracy known as the Catholic Church to tell us what the rules are and how we should obey them. We try to do good, positive things to make up for our shortcomings. When we fail, we ask God's pardon, sometimes through an intermediary, and perform ceremonies and rituals in concert with the same Catholic Church that we believe (or possibly hope) will put us on God's good side. Some of us see this as "fire insurance," but others view is as basically the way God wants us to live, and figure if we do right by Him, He'll do right by us. In any case, we try to live our lives in submission to His will, "In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful."

And we pray. Man, do we pray, especially when we're afraid! We have prayers and meditations and aspirations and novenas. We have the nine Fridays and forty hours and jubilee years. We have scapulars and rosaries and miraculous medals and holy cards and prayer books and votive candles and holy water and statues of Mary and the saints; all intended (or at least advertised) to help us uplift our minds and hearts to God. And when something threatens us, we use them all with a passion that knows no bounds! Please, God, don't let grandma die! Make that deal go through! Make my mom quit picking on me! Kill that sorry SOB! Don't let my girl friend be pregnant! Don't let my wife find out about her! Don't let the cops find my stash! Don't make me go to jail! Don't let the judge find out I lied! Make the hurricane hit someone else! And so it goes.

During the invocations at mass, our former pastor, who is now a bishop, used to ask, "for what else shall we pray?" One old lady always prayed for the poor souls in purgatory, no doubt a holdover from her Catholic school upbringing. People frequently prayed for their daughters who were having babies or their mothers who were having operations or their friends who were getting married. Because I am an innovative soul and a free thinker (some people say "a crazy old fart!") I used to thank God for stuff. The elections of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, end of the first Gulf War, putting the fires out in Kuwait, not getting hit by the hurricane. I was the only one who did that, and the only man who spoke up. Maybe the other men had more sense. I don't know.

What I do know is that Jesus himself gave us a formula for prayer. (Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4) I see the Lord's prayer not such much a magic incantation as a formula for praying: (1) acknowledge our relationship to God, (2) honor his name (the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful), (3) ask for Him to impose His will upon us (as a kind of submission to it), (4) request the necessities of our lives, (5) request forgiveness of our transgressions to the same extent and the same degree that we forgive others (kinda sets the standard, doesn't it?), (6) ask to be led away from temptation, and (7) protected from evil. Al-Fatiha, the opening prayer of the Koran, contains similar sentiments.

Jesus himself practiced islam. When he was frightened, in the garden of Gethsemene, he prayed really, really hard! (Matthew 26:39-42, Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42) But the three Evangelists who reported the event were careful to point out the proviso under which he prayed, submission to the will of God. (Dear God, if you want the hurricane to hit us, then let it come! Yeah, right!)

Unlike fear, which is a natural reaction to a perceived threat, terror can get us when there's no threat at all. At Lowe's Building Materials store the Thursday before the Sunday when Hurricane Dennis hit, when the skies were sunny and bright and people were frolicking on our beautiful beaches, one lady was freaking out about the hurricane! There wasn't even a sign of a hurricane, yet this poor soul was working herself into a heart attack. Surfing the television channels alternated between discussion of Hurricane Dennis and the bombing of London, one at least two days away from anywhere we needed to be concerned about and the other one safely over and done.

I tried to track Dennis by watching the Weather Channel. On Friday, I watched for about a half an hour. They had interviews with weather forecasters, meteorologists, the National Weather Service, and various survivors of former hurricanes. Everybody agreed that Dennis would be really bad if it hit in any particular spot and if it was as bad as they were afraid it would be and if people weren't prepared, et cetera, et cetera. There wasn't a word about where the sucker actually was so I could track it with push pins on my cork board map of the Gulf Coast. (I like to watch God at work!)

A Muslim friend of mine asked me if I was afraid of the approaching hurricane. I replied that I figured that hurricanes were among the few things totally under the control of Almighty God, untainted by the hand of man, and whatever God wanted to do with His hurricane was fine with me. He seemed to understand. We are both, in our own ways, submitters to the will of God.

Even when Hurricane Dennis finally hit land, 143 miles or so away, some of my Christian friends were still terrified. I don't know, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of those people were fervently praying, "Oh, God, don't let the hurricane hit me, let it hit somebody else, anybody else. Not me, God! Please, not me"

On Sunday, with Dennis safely off the coast of Florida, I went to church, as I usually do on Sunday, to thank God for sparing my humble abode once again (among other things). It was like the Rapture! The church was locked up tighter than a drum, and there were exactly four families (counting me) who had showed up. I drove around for about 60 miles and the only place I found open was Love's Truck Stop, which sold me a bag of Doritos so I wouldn't starve. There was a light sprinkle, but it wasn't bad enough to stop people from walking along the beach, enjoying the fresh air. (The police were stopping people from walking along the beach, enjoying the fresh air, but that's because a curfew had been established and the police were worried about looters.) I couldn't find a single Catholic Church open. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians and the First Baptists were all hunkered down, too. Were not all families saved? Where were the others? Maybe we ought to consider giving a little more thanks for things God has already given us (like living in the most beautiful spot in the United States) instead of constantly asking for stuff that we don't deserve, like not getting hit by hurricanes. They have to hit somewhere.

I was told later that our bishop had announced that the people of our diocese were released from their usual obligation to go to church this Sunday. That is probably a good thing for the bishop to do, to relieve the anxiety (terror?) the stayathomes might otherwise feel about not doing their duty. But just because we don't have to go to church doesn't mean we shouldn't go or can't go. I understand that there was a curfew imposed for the area, but no civil authority in the United States can legally prohibit anyone from going to church or peaceably assembling. That is a direct violation of the First Amendment, and legally and morally can be ignored. My feeling is that the bishop probably should have included this in his announcement, for the guidance of his "flock." Southern Christians seem to be confused about this. They keep blaming the Supreme Court.

Terror, like lust, is the devil's weapon. It is one of the purest examples of the Fruit Inspector Test. Terror never, never produces good fruit. Fear galvanizes; terror paralyzes. Fear is dynamic; terror is static. Fear gives us strength; terror gives us weakness. Fear is oriented toward good; terror is oriented toward evil. That's why it is the terrorists' main weapon, because they are purveyors of evil: anarchy, tyranny, slavery. They claim to be Muslims, but they are no more Muslims than the Ku Klux Klan are Christians. The terrible things they do "In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful" is the absolute antithesis of Islam.

The phrase "my name" when referring to God ("the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful") appears in the Bible 117 times, 86 times in the Old Testament and 31 times in the New. Jesus said, "And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it." My magic incantation friends, God bless 'em, see this as the key to controlling God. Just ask "in Jesus' name," and you'll get it. After all, he promised! They have found, however, that it is prudent to ask for things like "blessings" and "your spirit," and other unverifiable stuff, because asking for a million dollars or having your ornery boss drop dead this afternoon doesn't work. I don't know how they explain that.

The way I explain it is that "my name" means "representing me," which the Biblical context makes clear. It is hardly representative of Jesus to ask for unnecessary wealth or someone else's untimely death. I have a problem with asking God to have the hurricane hit somewhere else, too. It's got to make landfall somewhere, why not where I am? What's so special about me? Doesn't it make more sense just not to worry about the hurricane and trust that God will do the right thing, even if it's blowing my house in bite-sized pieces into the next county? I think it does. Take reasonable precautions. Evacuate if you have to, but don't get terrorized. (I have to admit, however, that I do remind God that I, personally, would prefer that it not hit my house. I have found that my preferences and His don't always coincide. I can live with that. Allahu akbar!)

Maybe it makes more sense, when we feel the pangs of terror coming on, to be reminded of Matthew 6:25-34 and Luke 12:24-32:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat (or drink), or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span? Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith? So do not worry and say, 'What are we to eat?' or 'What are we to drink?' or 'What are we to wear?' All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides. Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.

Notice the ravens: they do not sow or reap; they have neither storehouse nor barn, yet God feeds them. How much more important are you than birds! Can any of you by worrying add a moment to your lifespan? If even the smallest things are beyond your control, why are you anxious about the rest? Notice how the flowers grow. They do not toil or spin. But I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass in the field that grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith? As for you, do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not worry anymore. All the nations of the world seek for these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these other things will be given you besides. Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom.

John Lindorfer