On Verbal Prayer
"By prayer, the prayer of our whole nature, voicing our abasement and our hope, our weaknesses and the strength of our striving, our unfitness and our longing, prayer that rises from the very depths of our being -- such prayer alone can pierce the darkness that walls us round, and yield us the joy of the Divine illumination -- 'the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."
John Wilhelm Rowntree
"....those of us who pray have the best of all evidence that prayer is a vital breath of life, for we come back from it quickened nd vitalized, refreshed and restored...."
Rufus Jones
"....prayer is two-fold, inward and outward. Inward prayer is that secret turning of the mind toward God, whereby, being secretly touched and awakened by the light of Christ in the conscience...it looks up to God and joining with the secret shining of the seed of God, it breathes towards him, and is constantly breathing forth some secret desires and aspirations towards him. It is in this sense that we are so frequently in scripture commanded to pray continually...."
Robert Barclay
Petitionary prayer is usually selfish and naive. Bertrand Russell, at the age of 92, survived a shipwreck in which many others drowned. When asked how he did it, he said, "The others prayed to their gods to save them, but I swam like hell."
In a similar vein, my great-great-grandmother Wheeler, living in Wisconsin, supposedly woke up one night to find the barn on fire and her husband in the corner praying. According to tradition, she's supposed to have picked up a mop and slapped him in the head with it and said, "The Lord he'ps them that he'ps themselves!"
Prayer may not change things, but it can change people. Prayer, said Thomas Merton, is the "way we hold ourselves together" and the way we root ourselves "to our own inner truth." The impulse to pray is the impulse to be whole, consistent, merciful, just, at peace with our consciences. Susan B. Anthony, the Unitarian of Quaker origins, said, "I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees, but with my work. My prayer is to lift woman to equality with man. Work and worship are one with me. I cannot imagine a God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him great.' "
Dan Hotchkiss
Prayer is contemplation of life from the highest point of view. The various techniques of contemplation and inner prayer are featured in this issue of The ChristianMystics, but when most people think of prayer they think of "petitionary prayer" or asking God, speaking to God.
The process serves to organize our thoughts, to allow our conscience to become active and filter some of the more selfish and personal wants and desires. In many ways, we must pray not from our own point of view, but as most akin to God as is humanly possible. As Hotchkiss suggests above, while prayers may not change things, it changes us.
One of the most frustrating approaches to prayer is evident in certain fundamentalist approaches which seeks to blame the person praying should the prayer not "come true." There are books and webpages galore which suggest that one has to be sinless to have a prayer answered, that one didn't quite pray hard enough and so forth.
When we break down most verbal prayer we find it follows certain patterns: first, one praises God for goodness and greatness which, since one is addressing God, we assume God is aware of. Rather than take an Eddie Haskell approach (for those who remember Leave It To Beaver where Eddie launches every conversation with June Cleaver by complimenting how lovely she looks) we should realize that we are reminding ourselves, verbally, that God is goodness and love, ever present.
Then, the prayer usually moves to our own worthlessness. God is certainly aware of our character flaws but, the good news proclaims, we are loved so deeply that God sees us not as we are but as we can be. The invitation is for us to do the same, to realize that with grace and divine Love, all things are possible.
Finally, the prayer edges toward our demands or requests. I remember Pat Robertson's declaration that he prayed that a hurricane might miss his broadcast facilities and felt jubilant when, indeed, it turned into a more northerly direction and struck somewhere else. What was the meaning in that, especially from the point of view of those who lived a few miles up the coast?
When we pray for this or that, we are assuming that we know what is best for us. A 12 year old child might ask his parents for a fast sports car, but the chances of that being in his or her best interest are slim. How many times in your life have unanswered prayers been blessings in themselves? Part of this, of course, is that we confuse what we want with what we need, and herein lies the secret of petitionary or verbal prayer.
What we want may be a certain job or a particular amount of money. What we need, on the other hand, is always greater insight, peace and acceptance. When one looks at the prayers of Jesus -- both the Lord's Prayer as well as the prayer before he was taken by authorities -- we find the clue. The key operating principle in these prayers is simple -- "Thy will be done...."
This is to ask to live within the flow of God's Love and presence, to accept that what we may know or think or want from our limited viewpoint is immediate gratification or relief and fails to take into account that, in the long run, goodness and God prevail for our best and highest use.
What, then, is the perfect prayer? It is the one that brings you into the presence of God, the one that allows you to feel that Love and support, the prayer that allows you to "Let Go and Let God."
In verbal prayer, speak from the heart and allow yourself to express your fears and anger and hopes. Listen to your own prayers -- it's the least you can do if you expect God to listen. See what your words say about such things as spiritual pride, about not letting go, about making demands, about flattery and self-debasement. Admit to yourself your shortcomings and recall that you are loved, for it is the highest blessing to remind yourself that God is Love and is present in all things, people and situations. Then, allow yourself to quiet yourself and feel that Presence. Let it support you and warm you until you know that you can let go, that you can take the long view of things and realize that any difficulty now moves you closer to the peace and security that exists not in the temporal world of ours, but in the Eternal Kingdom to which we are co-heirs in Christ.