Teach Us to Pray
‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’
PRAYER for others is at once an art and an intuition, and dependent, as both these are, upon imagination for its power and its fulfillment. For without vicarious imagination there can be no reality to prayer, and prayer, lacking reality, becomes a dead weight indeed. And as any true art involves a long and steadfast apprenticeship, followed by a life of dedication, so must prayer be pursued and never relinquished. It demands a long training, a long experience of private and individual prayer, before the soul has any power to pray for other selves. Yet a paradox is here, for without long-continued, sincere prayer for others the soul lacks power to pray for its own needs. And indeed its own wants may be said to vanish as it continues in prayer for the needs of others.
This matter of praying together for others and for one another, what is it ? A mystery profound, yet a rite instinctive to all peoples. A custom so universal in practice that it goes back beyond the beginnings of drama and other primitive modes of self-expression. Its beginning must lie hid in that vast mystery — the dawn of human consciousness. For when man first realized himself he did it through contact with other selves, and to touch other selves is to draw on them for power, for instinctive protection against the unknown. When he first became aware of God, then did man first strive to apprehend Him, and his way was the child’s instinct of propitiation. Many of us are still in this primitive stage of prayer and we implore our God, ‘Do this for us and we will do thus and thus for thee!’ Yet our intelligence does revolt against this bargaining. Rather would we pray, ‘Do this, because it is of thine own nature, O thou Eternal Love, even as we, thy children, pray it because thou hast thyself caused us to pray!’
This immediately brings us to the conditions for effective corporate prayer: —
1. Such prayer demands leadership — we must have one to direct our prayer, one who leads us in rhythm and unity, and thence to the real power that is generated by such harmony.
2. There must be a form of words. Here impromptu effort rarely suffices, no matter how poetic or beautiful it may be. Words must be accepted, known, and loved before we can go with them straight into the presence of God. There must be indeed a waiting upon God, but it must be with unity of purpose, uniformity of expression. To be inarticulate now, or to be eccentric, is to dissipate spiritual force and to be lost in the unreal. In this sense corporate prayer is like great music — it must follow order and be sustained within bounds to make a great appeal.
3. There must be the spirit of love in our corporate prayers, for now we need the gifts of intuition and of imagination, and these come of love. Our prayers, lacking love, lack that vicarious sympathy which gives strength to desire. Without love, prayer has no wings either to approach the Eternal Love or to bear our brothers’ burdens.
4.There must be freedom from prejudice. For it is possible for a group of us to pray with intense feeling for some cause, or for some movement for social justice, and at the same moment to have within us a deep undercurrent of bitterness toward those who are not in agreement with our own beloved ‘objects.’ But how can we enter the Presence of Infinite Pity and Infinite Love with the spirit of intolerance making us little and dumb and povertystricken ?
Haste, and dogmatism, and dependence upon certain environments, are not all these hindrances to effectual corporate prayer? And awareness of God, expectation, freedom from prejudice, are not these really necessary conditions to such prayer?
We have said that, while love is the very essence of corporate prayer, it is also dependent upon intuition and imagination. What are these? The truest answer would now be to appeal to the inward experience of the soul. What is intuition? That sense of the soul, that mysterious cpiality, which derives its strength from the growing life of God within its consciousness. A sense beyond other senses; that in us which is of the Divine, the Knower.
And what, then, of imagination? It is this picture-making faculty, this ability to see with the inward eye, that gives us power to visualize the needs of those for whom we pray. We must suffer with, we must identify ourselves with those we are praying for. Do we pray together, then, in order that the Divine Power may bless human beings, because we fear that they will not be blessed without our prayers? Does God need our prayers for them? Here is a mystery! One answer, and only one of many, is that God uses His people as His channels of blessedness, and the full tide of His divine love comes pouring through their human loves as they make themselves ready for His purposes.
Yes, truly, this need of human intercession is bound up in the mystery of the incarnation. We are all the servants of our brothers, and the Divine Love uses us even as it used, chiefest and best, Him who was and is above all His brethren.
And if love be the sum of it all, the motive for, the reason for prayer, how shall we approximate to any degree of love that shall so partake of the Divine Nature as to make prayer imperative? There is the way of living. Your friend becomes more to be loved and followed as you dwell where he is. Daily, hourly contact, knowing Christ, is the answer. What is not of His nature you grow away from; what He cares for you learn to prize. His desires become your aim; His purposes you strive to fulfill. And all this with an ever-growing consciousness of His supreme beauty of character. Does this rob you of individual effort, does it bring with it an abject humility? Rather, it increases your courage; and that you may help Him work out His purposes for your brothers is to you a source of complete and everlasting joy. In His will is our peace, indeed!
There comes a place in our journeying when both individual and corporate prayer to us cease to seem different, when the needs of the one are merged in the needs of the many. And there is an experience when from an agony of supplication for others the soul no longer asks for anything at all, when it knows that the Eternal Love has accomplished that for which it had impelled the soul to pray.
How, then, shall we attain to this high ideal of corporate intercession, which is, indeed, Love-in-Action?
Only by living continually in the presence of love and of pity. All the saints have pointed out to us that their strength, whether of prayer or of vision, lay in their practice of the presence of God, their perpetual awareness of Him. By never-broken habit of will, by steadfast imagination, they dwelt upon the reality of the Eternal Love until for them this reality became as breathing — the very process of life. And if there is one thing their testimony has bequeathed it is that this practice is not for the saint only, but is open to the least of the brethren of Christ. It is the Royal Way, and it is also the way of the humble.