PRAYER may be understood widely, so as to include every form of address from man to God, whatever its character. Hannah’s song is a thanksgiving, yet it is introduced by the words “Hannah prayed and said”. The prayer of Habakkuk is a psalm.
In the larger sense of the word, as the spiritual language of the soul, prayer is intercourse with God, often seeking no end beyond the pleasure of such intercourse. It is praise; it is congratulation; it is adoration of the Infinite Majesty; it is a colloquy in which the soul engages with the All-wise and the All-holy; it is a basking in the sunshine, varied by ejaculations of thankfulness to the Sun of Righteousness for His light and His warmth. In this larger sense, the earlier part of the Te Deum is prayer as much as the latter part; the earliest and latest clauses of the Gloria in Excelsis as truly as the central ones; the Sanctus or the Jubilate no less than the Litany; the Magnificat as certainly as the Fifty-first Psalm.
1. The lowest and crudest notion concerning prayer is that it consists in asking God for things, and its value consists in getting the things for which we ask. This is the notion with which childhood always begins, and the only one which childhood can entertain. This notion is also prominent in popular religious thought, and underlies much of what is said concerning answers to prayer. This view is very superficial, and is the parent of much scepticism respecting prayer. It is no uncommon thing to find young persons sceptical with respect to prayer because they have failed to get the things for which they have prayed; and often the faith of older persons breaks down from the same cause. In the stress of some trial they have faithfully prayed, and no answer has come. Friends or relatives have died, or their own health has failed, or their way has been hedged up; and all the while Heaven has seemed as deaf to their cries and entreaties as the ear of the dead; and they have been left to sorrow and uncertainty and bereavement and manifold distress. Such cases abound; and, if we would escape the painful doubts arising thence, we must revise and deepen our conception of prayer and its relation to the religious life. Plainly, the view of prayer simply as a talisman or as a means of getting things is inadequate to experience.
Prayer is not, as it has been scornfully described, “only a machine warranted by theologians to make God do what His clients want”: it is a great deal more than petition, which is only one department of it; it is nothing less than the whole spiritual action of the soul turned towards God as its true and adequate object. And if used in this comprehensive sense, it is clear that, as to much prayer, in the sense of spiritual intercourse with God, the question whether it is answered can never arise, for the simple reason that no answer is asked for. [Note: H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, 183.]
Prayer may take on any form of personal intercourse. Unquestionably this has been the teaching of the Church. “To speak boldly,” says Clement of Alexandria, “prayer is conversation and intercourse with God.” “Prayer,” says St. Thomas, “is the ascent of the soul to God.” Sabatier repeats almost the words of Clement when he describes prayer as “intercourse with God, . . . intimate commerce, . . . interior dialogue”. And the outcome of that most penetrating study of personal religion, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, is a similar definition of prayer as “every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine”. [Note: Mary Whiton Calkins, in The Harvard Theological Review, iv. 491.]
Our Christian faith is that God’s deepest purpose in the creation of men is that He may have spiritual children made in His image and likeness, who shall know Him and love Him, and to whom He may communicate Himself in blessing for ever and ever. And our earthly life is arranged by Divine wisdom for our discipline and development as the children of God. We must be practised in industry, in self-control, in integrity and faithfulness, in helpfulness and mutual trust, in the love and practice of righteousness, and in faith in God. In such a life we need pre-eminently to recognize our dependence on God, to relate our life to His will, to seek to enter into fellowship with Him.
This religious desire and effort of the soul to relate itself and all its interests to God and His will is prayer in the deepest sense. This is essential prayer. Uttered or unexpressed, it is equally prayer. It is the soul’s desire after God going forth in manifestation. It may find expression in petition, or in worship, or in obedience, or in multitudinous forms of activity; but the thing itself is always the same—the soul’s striving after God. This is the prayer which may exist without ceasing, consisting, as it does, not in doing or saying this or that, but in the temper or attitude of the spirit. [Note: B. P. Bowne, The Essence of Religion, 131.]
2. But what of the prayer of petition? The answer to this question must be that there is a psychological necessity for prayer in this form. The circumstances of human life are such that we are perpetually reminded of our needs and dependence at every turn. Goods are lacking; dangers threaten; perplexities surround us. The future is hidden, and omens of ill are rarely absent. This is true for the purely earthly life, and truer still for the hidden life of the spirit. Hence, wherever there is an active belief in God at all, there will always be petition. It is the great form in which the sense of dependence finds expression in both private and public devotion. We recall our needs, or they force themselves upon us, and we ask God for help and guidance and deliverance. Some religious thinkers of a quietistic type have condemned specific petition altogether, beyond the prayer that the will of God may be done; but this has been ecclesiastically condemned as an unreal exaltation, and is psychologically fictitious and practically impossible in most lives.
