1. Why do we pray? Because it is a vital necessity to the life of man. Prayer is desire; desire enters into everything in life, so that life is an unceasing prayer. Desire relates us to-whatever we desire whether it be material things, mental attainments, or spiritual understanding. Desire may be superficial and transitory; and from such desire little return will come. A life that is filled with such desires is never able to express anything that is great or wonderful, but is satisfied with trivial results, showing that one cannot express anything that is greater or higher than the ideals that exist in the mind. When you see great things accomplished by any one, know that it is in answer to prayer; that only the great desire can bring the great result. This applies not only to some things, but to everything in life. Our lives, whatever they may be, are the true expression of our prayers. We should know that our false as well as our true desires are alike expressed, each desire as a seed carrying within itself its own fruition, each bringing its own punishment or reward. If we could all realize the truth of this, what a difference it would make in our prayers. If we knew that a true desire always related us to the good and the true, ever becoming the seed for greater and more perfect expression, or if we realized that our false desires not only brought about the loss of mental and physical energy, but also brought into our lives unpleasant and disagreeable things, we would try to shape our desires in order to have them conform to the true requirements of the law of desire and its fulfilment.
It is said, “They that desire nothing pray for nothing,” and it is certainly a poor sort of prayer which has in it no earnest wish for its own success. A beggar who showed by his manner that he did not care to have his petition granted would be little likely to gain it. This desire for that which we pray for is not to be won in a moment, or excited in the soul at will. It is a part of a much wider thing—a part of the very life of God in the soul. When the heart is given to God, and the affections are set on things above, then this desire will come simply and naturally, and our prayers will be not only carefully uttered requests but holy longings and heartfelt desires.
So homely a thing as the desire of animals for food and the effort to satisfy it is a form of prayer. The cry of the child for attention from its mother is a prayer. Our hunger and thirst, our dependence on food and drink for life itself, keep us, while we are on this lower plane, in a constant state of prayer. In the world of inorganic nature, as well as in the world of animal nature and of human nature on its physical side, God has made ample provision for answers to prayer. With the want come the means of satisfaction. We know that the universe is the result of absolutely orderly law and arrangement. To have provided only for the lower needs of man, disregarding his mental and spiritual needs, would have been, to say the least, illogical. But God is not illogical. The appeals coming from a higher plane are heard and answered. “Prayer, based on want,” Dr. Matheson says, “is the premonitory symptom of a larger life.” The greater the want, the higher the development. In this sense the glorious advance of history is an answer to prayer. The formulating of the laws of evolution, the development of electricity, the discovery of radium and of other modern wonders which mark the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great progress in intellectual and material affairs—all this is an answer to prayer, to the prayer of man marching to a higher development, asking consciously or unconsciously the knowledge to carry him farther. [Note: S. Fallows, Health and Happiness, 4.]
2. Prayer is the expression of a good desire. The human heart is full of restless desires, and the prayers of men consist for the most part of the unsifted petitions which are urged by their varying passions. But nothing can be plainer than this, that prayers can never be answered unless the desires that prompt them are right. And doubtless the main reason why prayers remain unanswered is that the desires have not been corrected by meditation. When Wordsworth says—
Me this unchartered freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance-desires:
and appeals to duty to regulate and restrain desire, he reminds us of what we all know—that vain and contradictory desires constitute the burden of life; and that to desire what is right, and to desire it consistently and passionately, is the first condition of true living. The desires can be corrected only by truth. The mind must apprehend God, and then it will say, “There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee”; it must grasp the thought of the will of God, and then it will passionately desire that its will may be in absolute harmony with His.
Prayer means the discipline of desire. Embalmed in the 106th Psalm is the record of one of those weirdly tragic stories of the wilderness journey of the Israelites—the story of Kibroth Hattaavah or Graves of Desire. The comment is familiar:—
He gave them their request;
But sent leanness into their soul.
How far spiritual loss is meant to be set side by side with material gain does not affect the fact that life through and through is tried by that contrast, and the comment on the old-world story expresses that fact with striking accuracy. The cases of Lot, Esau, Balaam, Ahab, Gehazi, Judas, and Demas illustrate the same strange possibility of inward treachery of desire. It is the fate of all who have been
Cursed with the burden of a granted prayer.
(1) That God sometimes suffers men to destroy themselves, giving them their own way, although He knows it is ruinous, and even putting into their hands the scorpion they have mistaken for a fish, is an indubitable and alarming fact. Perhaps no form of ruin covers a man with such shame or sinks him to such hopelessness as when he finds that what he has persistently clamoured for and refused to be content without has proved the bitterest and most disastrous element in his life.
It is a thing partly worth our wonder, partly our compassion, that what the greatest part of men most passionately desire, that they are generally most unfit for; so that at a distance they court that as an enjoyment, which upon experience they find a plague and a great calamity. [Note: Robert South.]
(2) How does God deal with it? For a long time He may in compassion withhold the fatal gift. He may in pity disregard our petulant clamour. And He may in many ways bring home to our minds that the thing we crave is in several respects unsuitable. We may become conscious under His discipline that without it we are less entangled with the world and with temptation; that we can live more holily and more freely as we are, and that to quench the desire we have would be to choose the better part. God may make it plain to us that it is childish to look upon this one thing as the supreme and only good. Providential obstacles are thrown in our way, difficulties amounting almost to impossibilities absolutely prevent us for a while from attaining our object, and give us time to collect ourselves and take thought. And not only are we prevented from attaining this one object, but in other respects our life is enriched and gladdened, so that we might be expected to be content.
(3) But man’s will is never forced; and therefore if we continue to pin our happiness to this one object, and refuse to find satisfaction and fruit in life without it, God “gives in anger” what we have resolved to obtain. He gives it in its bare earthly form, so that as soon as we receive it our soul sinks in our shame. Instead of expanding our nature and bringing us into a finished and satisfactory condition, and setting our life in right relations with other men, we find the new gift to be a curse to us, hampering us, cutting us off in unexpected ways from our usefulness, thwarting and blighting our life round its whole circumference.
When Samuel remonstrated with Israel and warned them that their king would tyrannize over them, all the answer he got was: “Nay; but we will have a king to rule over us”. But, not many days after, they came to Samuel with a very different petition: “Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die not: for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king”. So it is always; we speedily recognize the difference between God’s wisdom and our own. What seemed neglect on His part is now seen to be care, and what we murmured at as niggardliness and needless harshness we now admire as tenderness. Those at least are our second and wiser thoughts, even although at first we may be tempted with Manoah, when he saw his son blind and fettered in the Philistine dungeon, to exclaim:—
What thing good
Pray’d for, but often proves our woe, our bane?
I pray’d for children, and thought barrenness
In wedlock a reproach; I gain’d a son
And such a son as all men hail’d me happy;
Who would be now a father in my stead?
Oh, wherefore did God grant me my request,
And as a blessing with such pomp adorn’d?
Why are His gifts desirable, to tempt
Our earnest prayers, then giv’n with solemn hand
As graces, draw a scorpion’s tail behind?
Such, I say, may be our first thoughts; but when the first bitterness and bewilderment of disappointment are over, when reason and right feeling begin to dominate, we own that the whole history of our prayer and its answer has been most humiliating to us, indeed, but most honouring to God. We see as never before how accurately our character has been understood, how patiently our evil propensities have been resisted, how truly our life has been guided towards the highest ends. [Note: Marcus Dods, How to Become Like Christ, 76.]
It You remember the story of the Argive mother, who, carried to Juno’s feet by her two sons when the horses failed, prayed to the Queen of Heaven that for their filial piety her darlings might receive the richest guerdon that Heaven could bestow; and how, in answer to her prayer, when the night fell on her sleeping sons, death fell on them too, lifting them far from evil fate and making them glad with great gladness, and the hapless mother saw that the goddess had been too bountiful. It is a fable, pregnant with a lesson for us; we cannot tell how often our petitions, if granted, might, like swords of wrath, sweep away sweeter mercies from our path, leaving us shorn, defenceless, and alone. [Note: Herbert Branston Gray, Modern Laodiceans, 83.]
3. We must go further. Prayer is the expression of a good desire; it is also the expression of a Godward desire. As Isaac Pennington says: “By Prayer, I do not mean any bodily exercise of the outward man; but the going forth of the Spirit of life towards the Fountain of life, for fulness and satisfaction: the natural tendency of the poor, rent, derived spirit, towards the Fountain of spirits”.
The natural and common heritage of love and faith is a theme that is dear to Julian; in her view, longing toward God is grounded in the love to Him that is native to the human heart, and this longing (painful through sin) as it is stirred by the Holy Spirit who comes with Christ, is, in each naturally developed Christian, spontaneous and increasing; “for the nearer we be to our bliss, the more we long after it”. [Note: Grace Warrack, in Introduction to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of the Divine Love, 34:]
You don’t suppose that the insight with which a poet’s mind is endowed is just his ordinary reasoning powers? It is something different—it is contact with a spirit greater than his own. If the aspiration is theirs, amounting to nothing more than a sensation, it is sufficient to produce that aim at assimilation that is called prayer. It is the same sort of thing that makes a plant force its way through a crevice to get the sun’s rays. [Note: George Frederick Watts, ii. 174.]
My inmost soul, O Lord, to Thee
Leans like a growing flower
Unto the light. I do not know
The day nor blessed hour
When that deep-rooted, daring growth
We call the heart’s desire
Shall burst and blossom to a prayer
Within the sacred fire
Of Thy great patience; grow so pure,
So still, so sweet a thing
As perfect prayer must surely be.
And yet my heart will sing
Because Thou seem’st sometimes so near,
Close-present God! to me.
It seems I could not have a wish
That was not shared by Thee;
It seems I cannot be afraid
To speak my longings out,
So tenderly Thy gathering love
Enfolds me round about;
It seems as if my heart would break,
If, living on the light,
I should not lift to Thee at last
A bud of flawless white.
And yet, 0 helpless heart! how sweet
To grow, and bud, and say:
The flower, however marred or wan,
Shall not be cast away. [Note: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.]
4. This Godward desire is a reflex of the Divine desire itself. The faith which steals in at prayer-time is the tacit assurance—though we may not put it in so many words—that our prayer is the real expression of Divine desire working within us. And what greater encouragement than this can visit the soul of man? That prayer is the reflex in man of the Divine desire itself is expressly assumed in the words of Jesus: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them” (Mar_11:24, A.V.). For here, surely, is meant not merely human desire—whether of the heathen burglar who prays for riches obtained illicitly, or of the law-abiding poor man who prays for riches in the course of honourable trading, or of suppliants all and sundry who pray for any boon which may make their lives dignified, comfortable and shadow-free; else were human desire, when directed towards the highest deity known, the ultimate ruling-force in the universe—an anomaly which the Lord Jesus never meant to suggest. Rather must we believe that He had in mind desires that are begotten of God, and that kind of “believing” also which is given of God—a sign-manual that the desire within corresponds to the Desire enthroned above.
Given this state, then faith is the hand stretched out to grasp the proffered gift. And it has been verily so, with large result, as generations of godly souls have abundantly testified.
Oh plain, and easy, and simple way of salvation! wanting no subtleties of art or science, no borrowed learning, no refinements of reason, but all done by the simple natural motion of every heart that truly longs after God. For no sooner is the finite desire of the creature in motion towards God, but the infinite desire of God is united with it, co-operates with it. And in this united desire of God, and the creature, is the salvation and life of the soul brought forth. [Note: W. Law, The Spirit of Prayer, 87.]
Enthusiasm born of numbers may simulate the true faith that is normally born in the secret chamber, in one soul or more secluded with God. But even then it becomes a great impulse towards daring venture for what is esteemed the cause of God. The Council of Clermont met in the year 1095 to consider the project of a great crusade against the Turks, and broke up amid unanimous shouts of Deus id vult, which became the battle-cry of that First Crusade. In surer manner, if in humbler fashion, a godly labouring man of a certain English town was wont to relate his answers to prayer, adding the words: “I said to myself, this ‘ere is God’s will, and my will, so I just claim it”. He had learned the logic of faith, based on the essentials of all true prayer—the coincidence of Divine and human desire. [Note: W. A. Cornaby, Prayer and the Human Problem, 178.]
