First, we form a concept of that which we shall do the idea of it looms up in our minds. Now, when we do anything consciously, the transition from inaction to action unfolds itself in a certain order. All these things - the giving and the receiving, the work and the rest - should fall within the circle of prayer. It will include many kinds of intercourse with Reality - adoration, petition, meditation, contemplation - and all the shades and varieties of these which religious writers have named and classified.Īs in the natural order the living creature must feed and grow, must suffer and enjoy, must get energy from the world and give it back again if it is to live a whole and healthy life. Prayer will include many different kinds of spiritual work and also - what is too often forgotten - the priceless gift of spiritual rest. For here we breathe the air of the supernatural order, and attain according to our measure that communion with Reality for which we were made. It should, as it were, lift us to the top of our condition, and represent the fullest flowering of our consciousness. Prayers should be the highest exercise of these powers for here they are directed to the only adequate object of thought, of love, and of desire. Prayer should take up and turn towards the spiritual order all the powers of our mental, emotional, and volitional life. It is the whole person of intellect, of feeling, and of will which finds its only true objective in the Christian God. Do we need them in our spiritual life, too? Christians are bound to answer this question in the affirmative. In our natural life we need to use all of them. From the combination of these three come all the possibilities of self-expression which are open to us. These practically cover all the ways in which the self can react to other selves and other things. Now, it is the outward swing which I want to consider: the powers that may be used in it, and the best way in which these powers may be employed.įirst, there are three capacities or faculties which we have under consideration - the thinking faculty, the feeling faculty, and the willing or acting faculty. The wholeness, sanity, and balance of our existence depend entirely upon the perfection of our adjustment to this double situation on the steady alternating beat of our outward adoration, and our homeward-turning swing of charity. Like a pendulum, our consciousness moves perpetually - or should move if it is healthy - between God and our neighbor, between this world and that. Because we live under two orders, we are at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. The whole of a person’s life consists in a series of balanced responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things but rather to that “Eternal truth, true Love, and loved Eternity” wherein the world is felt to be enshrined. It entails, then, a going up or out from our ordinary circle of earthly interests. In the same spirit William Law defines prayer as “the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity.” “Prayer,” says Walter Hilton, “is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God by withdrawing it from earthly thoughts.” It is “ascent,” says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. God is that spiritual reality, and we believe God to be immanent in all things: “He is not far from each one of us: for in him we live and move and have our being.” In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that part of our conscious life which is deliberately oriented towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality.
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