True prayer is something more than desire. It is no mere subjective instinct—no blind outreach. If it met no response, no answer, it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray in faith if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares, and who actually corresponds with us. Prayer has stood the test of experience. In fact the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of a Heavenly Friend. A subjective need always carries an implication of an objective stimulus which has provoked the need. There is no hunger, as Fiske has well shown, for anything not tasted; there is no search for anything which is not in the environment, for the environment has always produced the appetite. So this native need of the soul rose out of the Divine origin of the soul, and it has steadily verified itself as a safe guide to reality.
Prayer is thus the psychological act by which the soul seeks and finds contact, conscious contact, or communion, with God. In the first instance it is not asking for anything, it is not petition; all it seeks is God Himself. When it makes a request, there is always a preface: Let me find Thee, let me know Thee, then I will ask of Thee. Francis of Assisi, we are told, would frequently spend an hour or two in prayer on Monte Alverno, and the only word he would say would be “God,” repeated at intervals. That is prayer, bare, elemental, essential prayer.
Look at Jesus, remaining through the long hours, in tranquillity of spirit, with God. Is not the central reality of His prayer, and therefore of prayer in its perfect meaning, in this: this which includes and transcends alike the petition of need, and the stress of battle; this inner communing, thought to thought, with God; this reflection of spirit in Spirit; this perfecting of character in reciprocal intercourse; this shaping, in mutual converse, of mind, meaning, and will; this response of love to love; this unveiledness of face; this reflecting, as a mirror, of the being of God; this transfiguration, wherein man, as man, becomes himself a very image of God, growing progressively from glory to glory, which is indeed the proper fruit of ‘the Spirit—the Spirit which is the Lord?
To pray for everything just means to have fellowship with the Father in everything. [Note: M. Kahler, Berechtigung and Zuversichtlichkeit des Bittgebets.]
I understand that when our spirits are attuned to the Spirit of Righteousness, our hopes and aspirations exert an influence far beyond their conscious range, and in a true sense bring us into communion with our Heavenly Father. This power of filial communion is called prayer; it is an attitude of mingled worship and supplication; we offer petitions in a spirit of trust and submission, and endeavour to realize the Divine attributes, with the help and example of Christ. [Note: O. Lodge, The Substance of Faith, 116.]
When I stir thee to prayer, I stir thee not to the prayer which standeth in many words, but to that prayer which in the secret chamber of the mind, in the privy closet of the soul with very affect speaketh to God, and in the most lightsome darkness of contemplation not only presenteth the mind to the Father: but also uniteth it with Him by unspeakable ways which only they know that have assayed. Nor I care not how long or how short thy prayer be, but how effectual, how ardent, and rather interrupted and broken between with sighs than drawn on length with a continual row and number of words. [Note: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.]
1. There is perhaps in this communion at first only a vague feeling after companionship, which remains in many persons vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite consciousness of a personal Presence, and there comes back into the soul a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all the soul’s need. For such persons prayer is the way to fulness of life. It is as natural as breathing. It is as normal an operation as appreciation of beauty or the pursuit of truth. The soul is made that way, and as long as men are made with mystical deeps within, unsatisfied with the finite and incomplete, they will pray and be refreshed.
Vague and formless, in some degree, communion would always be apart from the personal manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. As soon as God is known as Father, as soon as we turn to Him as identical in being with our own humanity, as suffering with us and loving us even in our imperfection, this communion grows defined and becomes actual social fellowship, which is prayer at its best. St. Paul’s great prayers of fellowship rise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom we know, because He has been humanly revealed in a way that fits our life. We turn to Him as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought. The vague impulse to reach beyond our isolated and solitary self gives place to an actual experience of relationship with a personal Friend and Companion, and this experience may become, and often does become, the loftiest and most joyous activity of life.
Prayer is the ethical and religious act in which the fellowship of the believing man and Christian with his God finds its strongest and most specific expression, and by which this fellowship is most profoundly realized and furthered. [Note: J. Kostlin, Christliche Ethik, 247.]
This fact of communion with the Father breaks clean through that mechanical view of the world which turns it into a dead world; for it means that God is doing the wonderful new free thing of conversing with His human child, and is being answered by His child’s faith. Such prayer, such genuine fellowship with God, is something which laughs at fate and its rigidities, and to see it so is to breathe a higher, freer air, in which the universe takes on the better aspect of a real training-ground for Divine sonship. It is a universe in which God is free to speak with man. [Note: H. R. Mackintosh, Studies in Christian Truth, 28.]
2. Communion implies sympathy, and if sympathy is present it makes little difference what is actually said or thought. You may meet a man and say to him merely that the day is fine, but if you have said it with sympathy you have had communion with him. On the other hand, you may have talked long with him and on high topics, but if it has been without sympathy there has been no communion. The sympathy need not find utterance at all. Animals do not talk, and yet they like to be together; and it is pleasant to sit by one’s friend, though he and you may speak no word to each other for many minutes. Now-if we raise all this to the highest point, it may help to show what communion is like between man and God, and it will be seen that, given the communion, the sympathy, the form or subject of one’s prayer will matter little; the soul may be trusted to pour itself out in its sense of sympathy and submission. The poor serving-woman who can understand hardly a word of the Latin service has the sense of the Divine Presence and lays open before it her life with all its needs.
We may find a very homely but pertinent parallel illustration in men’s treatment of animals, and though the illustration may seem belittling yet we must remember that the difference in rank between animals and men is infinitely less than between men and God. About the only way men know to tame and domesticate animals, that is to say, to bring them into a measure of fellowship with themselves, is precisely this same method of making some good gift to the animal contingent on its asking for it, or coming into some contact with the man. When the farmer takes a vessel of corn or salt or other delicacy to the pasture with him to induce his farm animals to come fearlessly to him, it may be true that the shy ones that don’t come fail to get something that would have been good for them, and it is certainly true that those that come get something by their coming which they would not have got if they had not come; but still there was no violation there of the orderly laws of that farm’s management. There is no putting of the will of a silly animal above the will and wisdom of the wise owner. It is not a makeshift to patch up a defect in the efficiency of the system of farm feeding. Nor is it necessarily a plan to enable certain favoured animals to live better than others and better than they could by the unaided working of the ordinary farm management. The one object is fellowship, or in common language to make those animals tame, friendly, and not afraid of him. Precisely such is the nature of the institution which we call prayer. Its object is to domesticate men to God’s household, to induce them to voluntarily come to God without fear and engage in fellowship with Him. [Note: D. A. Murray, Christian Faith and the New Psychology, 292.]
3. Communion with God also implies submission to His will. It is in communion that man most truly realizes himself by making himself most truly an organ in the self-fulfilment of God. So to ask whether prayer is effective is like asking whether it is effective to be alive unto God, effective to realize one’s true being and to fulfil one’s Divine vocation. In fact it is only when we fall unconsciously into the mistake of regarding prayer as something external to the communion of the Christian man with God—or into the still more radical mistake of regarding that communion itself as something external to the essential life of humanity and of nature—that we raise this question of the effectiveness of prayer at all. It is like asking whether it is effective for reality to be real, or for life to live. The essential will of the Christian man is that in all the ways of the world God may fulfil Himself; in pursuance of that will, the Christian man gives his loyalty to those causes of human welfare in which the heart of man gradually has been learning to articulate and make definite its longing for God and for good. When such a man brings before God all things of his life—all the things his heart fears, all the things his heart desires—the doubt is not whether such prayer is effective; the doubt is whether there is in the world any other permanently effective force than such prayer and the life that is lived in the spirit of such prayer.
Regarding prayer not so much as consisting of particular acts of devotion, but as the spirit of life, it seems to be the spirit of harmony with the will of God. It is the aspiration after all good, the wish, stronger than any earthly passion or desire, to live in His service only. It is the temper of mind which says in the evening, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit”; which rises up in the morning “To do thy will, O God”; and which all the day regards the actions of business and of daily life unto the Lord and not to men—“Whether ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God”. The trivial employments, the meanest or lowest occupations, may receive a kind of dignity when thus converted into the service of God. Other men live for the most part in dependence on the opinion of their fellow-men; they are the creatures of their own interests, they hardly see anything clearly in the mists of their own self-deceptions. But he whose mind is resting in God rises above the petty aims and interests of men; he desires only to fulfil the Divine will, he wishes only to know the truth. His “eye is single,” in the language of Scripture, and his whole body is full of light. The light of truth and disinterestedness flows into his soul; the presence of God, like the sun in the heavens, warms his heart. Such a one, whom I have imperfectly described, may be no mystic; he may be one among us whom we know not, undistinguished by any outward mark from his fellow-men, yet carrying within him a hidden source of truth and strength and peace. [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]
4. We enter into communion with God at His own invitation. Prayer is our conscious response, as free beings, to God’s invitation, the effort on our part to enter into that intercourse with God which He on His part desires us to have. It is therefore miserably misconceived by its critical opponents, when represented as a mere petition for favours. For it is something infinitely wider and more important than this. It is the affirmation of our social nature, seeking its only adequate end in union with the absolute and permanent source of all society. Hence prayer is as many-sided as life, and as all-embracing as faith, for it is faith in action. And its human analogue is not petition, but intercourse with a friend. Primarily, we desire such intercourse as an end in itself, simply because our friend is our friend, and the fact of converse with him manifests and satisfies our friendship. And then we tell him our thoughts and seek his criticism and approval of them; we discuss our plans with him and ask his advice; we express our affection, our admiration, our gratitude towards him for his friendship; we invite him to share our joys, and seek his sympathy with our sorrows.
And God responds. For prayer is nothing at all except as on the one side there is a human “I,” on the other a Divine “Thou,” and living fellowship between the two. This is a matter on which there can be no dispute. What could speech mean if there were no one to listen and to reply? But more, the man who prays is conscious, be it dimly or clearly, that his prayer has been drawn from him by Another’s influence. Some creative hand touched him, stirring the sense of need, claiming his trust; then he began to pray, sure amid all other uncertainties that it is best for children to speak out their requirements to the father, notwithstanding that the father may know already what their requirements are. Real fellowship with the living God—not make-believe about it, or keeping up a familiar but useless habit—this is prayer.
What is prayer? It is, when we comprehend it in its deepest and most peculiar significance, a dialogue between our innermost self and Almighty God, a real and true experience. It is an uplifting of the human soul to the highest reality, God condescending and bending towards the individual human soul. It is a mystery of whose deepest and innermost truth and splendour we are, perhaps, fully conscious only at rare moments in our lives. [Note: W. Bousset, The Faith of a Modern Protestant, 60.]
There is a direct and mutual communion of spirit with spirit between ourselves and God, in which He receives our affection and gives a responsive breathing of His inspiration. Such communion appears to me as certain a reality as the daily intercourse between man and man; resting upon evidence as positive, and declaring itself by results as marked. The disposition to throw doubt on the testimony of those who affirm that they know this is a groundless prejudice, an illusion on the negative side as complete as the most positive dreams of enthusiasm. At least, unless something better can be urged against the doctrine of prayer than the commonplaces about the fixity of natural laws, I must profess I know of nothing in the constitution of this universe at all at variance with our natural faith in a personal intercourse with God, in His openness to our appeal and our susceptibility to His spirit. [Note: J. Martineau, Hours of Thought, ii. 224.]
5. Taking prayer as inter-communion between God and ourselves, we can understand how by it our knowledge of God can be enormously deepened and extended. We get to know our friends better by conversation and familiar intercourse. And so we shall get to know God better by conversing with Him. But we are very apt to forget that if conversation is to do this work it must not be one-sided, and our ordinary conversation with God is terribly one-sided. We insist on doing all the talking ourselves; we go straight through our prayers, almost without drawing breath, and then get up and go away, without leaving a moment to God in which He may talk to us. It is no wonder that such prayers do not much advance our knowledge of Him to whom we speak, and to whom we refuse to listen. We must make pauses in our prayers, during which we wait for God’s answer to come, whether it be in the form of reproof or comfort or instruction; whether it come as illumination to the mind or strength and courage to the heart. If we would only converse humbly and modestly with God, instead of merely giving Him detailed information of things which He knows already, prayer would be a far more effective agent in Divine knowledge than we find it to be at present. In particular, our knowledge of God would become more personal. We should go away with a knowledge of Him in His personal nature, as revealed in what He speaks to our soul, and with an experience of His power and readiness to satisfy our personal needs and aspirations.
The last and highest result of prayer is not the securing of this or that gift, the avoiding of this or that danger. The last and highest result of prayer is the knowledge of God—the knowledge which is eternal life; and by that knowledge the transformation of human character and of the world. [Note: G. J. Blewett, The Christian View of the World, 249.]
