On Verbal Prayer
By: Various
"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