Prayer letters

I got the damnedest (pun intended) thing in the mail today: A prayer "rug" of paper, a letter telling me to use it immediately and return it, and a form to check off my needs so this church can pray for me; when it's not busy innundating me with pleas for cash, check, money order or, let a thousand angels sing, a credit card number.
Apparently I got the version with pictures of black women in the testimonial letter, but the image of Jesus on the "rug" looks pretty caucasian, as usual. If you take it as a given that Jesus was in Palestine during the time in question, don't you think somebody would have commented on there being this strange, pasty white dude running around with Jews and Greeks and Samarians? None of whom needed a tanning booth for beautiful golden skin, a la George Hamilton. The letter advises the recipient to look into Jesus' closed eyes, which will open when you've prayed enough for them to do so.
It's not that I'm against prayer. Prayer, good thoughts, psychic karma love power or whatever is generally one of the most benign (and even alimentary) things in religion or spiritualism. (A big exception is when one prays only to hear what they want to hear: that they're a good person or doing God's will; see Bush, George W.) One of the amazing things about humans is our ability to do things that aren't easily explained, and the last thing I want to do, secular though I may mostly be, is to kill the sense of wonder one rightly feels when observing human beings or our mother, Nature.
Then again, I'm not so sure that religions, especially those on the fundamental side of things, want us to feel wonder. Shock and awe, fear of an angry God, terror that one might be having too much fun in this world and won't get to rise up out of one's clothes when the Raputre comes; these are okay by them. Was it Mencken that said something about Puritanism (and God knows we've got a heaping helping of that crap running around) being the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time? Or Ben Jonson? Mark Twain?
Thing is, it's one of those phrases that people repeat, misquote, paraphrase and twist so often that it's hard to know whether you've got the right citation or not. (Another is the germ of the phrase, "Today's trade, tomorrow's competition". I know I've read several versions of it, and that may just be the version that stuck in my head, but finding the source is beyond me.)
One thing I will give St. Matthew's Churches of Tulsa, Okla.: There was nary a mention of the hellfire and damnation that I might suffer if I didn't pray on the thing. To support the positivity, I would send it back, for the next recipient to use and find benefit from, but they've put identifying marks on the return envelope. I suppose Matt. 6:3 doesn't apply to prayer rugs by mail.