We were shocked last Tuesday afternoon, January 25, 2011 when we heard the news that a bus was bombed in Makati City, Philippines. Five were killed in that incident and 13 were injured.

Bombs are becoming more frequent these days. In the Philippines alone in the space of 11 years 21 bombs have been recorded, bombreport the worst one being the bombing on February 27, 2004 of the passenger boat Superferry 14 sinking this vessel and killing 116 people and injuring hundreds more. This was described as the deadliest terrorist attack in the Philippines and the world’s deadliest terrorist attack at sea. The 21 bombs in the space of 11 years killed on record 254 persons and injured hundreds more.

In 2009 there was a report from a military official that within a year 56 bombs had exploded or had been discovered in central Mindanao, the biggest island in southern Philippines. This is only in one part of the country.

If you add to these the bombs that have exploded or have been discovered to nearly explode all over the world, whybitcoinprice we realize that bomb explosions to hurt people are indeed becoming more common.

In the face of this tragic and very sad phenomenon, what can we do?

The reasonable thing to do is to prevent the explosion of these bombs. But how? Is there a way to prevent the explosion of such bombs.

There are people who say that we cannot prevent such man-made disasters from occurring. They have been prophesied long ago and will continue to do so until the end of this world.

But such a view is too pessimistic. It is like saying, “We are going to die anyway, so let’s die anyway we want, the earlier, the better.”

The realistic view is that while we cannot prevent all such bombings, there are measures which we can take that will prevent some, if not most, of these bombings. The prevention of some of these bombings is reward enough for the effort to prevent their fatal explosions.

I will give here 3 practical suggestions to prevent these bombs from being made and from exploding. Two of these suggestions can be done by individual persons immediately. The third is done better in institutions of learning and worshiping after the leaders of these ufa168live institutions realize the efficacy of this method. They are all from a spiritual perspective. They are not from a military or police perspective which is to monitor the activities of suspicious individuals and prevent them from carrying their intended terroristic activities.

The first suggestion is very simple and yet it has been known to do many things, some of them impossible by human standards. This is prayer. “More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of,” said Alfred Lord Tennyson. Prayer can effectively prevent these bombings.

But by prayer here I do not mean the mumbling of prayer formulas from a prayer book or a sheet of paper. There is a parish here which ends the Mass everyday with a prayer using Psalm 91. It is a prayer for protection against harm of all kinds. The people recite this prayer. But this kind of prayer is not effective against bombings. For most of the parishioners it is just a ritualistic mumbling of prayers. It has not prevented the kidnappings and murders in the city.

Nor do I mean prayer here as going to a silent place and thinking about one’s self, about the values he needs to cultivate in his life, how he can overcome his faults, and then making a resolution to overcome these faults. Many are doing this in convents and monasteries, but this kind of prayer only cultivates the ego of the ones who pray.

By prayer I do not mean the loud, spontaneous but formalistic prayers of ministers before their congregation during their services or of prayer leaders before sessions or meetings.

By prayer I simply mean “conversation with God”, artistpose not mumbling a set formula of words, not thinking about oneself, not publicly showing religiosity. That is actually how Rosalind Rinker defined prayer, “conversing with God” and that is also the gist of Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada’s definition of mental prayer.

This kind of prayer, a sincere and real conversation with God can prevent the explosion of bombs because God in that conversation can share with the one who prays how to prevent these bombs from exploding or from being made, since many of these bombs have been labeled as improvised explosive device or IED. In other words they were made by improvising some gadgets to make a bomb explode.

The more people do this kind of prayer the more will there be possibility that God will teach us how to prevent these bombs from being made and set to explosion.

The second suggestion I have for the prevention of the making and explosion of these bombs is to avail of the services of the guardian angels. Each one of us has chronicleshub a guardian angel. But let us get a clearer picture of this being because most of us have a rather hazy picture of him.

Most of us think that a guardian angel is a winged human like being who is at our back. This is how artists have depicted the guardian angel. But actually this angel is a spirit. And because he is a spirit he has neither body nor wings. He cannot be seen by our physical eyes but we can feel his presence just as we can feel the blowing of the wind.