We touch the last reality directly in prayer.
And we do this not by thought's natural research, yet by a quest not less
laborious. Prayer is the atmosphere of revelation, in the strict and central
sense of that word. It is the climate in which God's manifestation bursts open
into inspiration. All the mediation of Nature and of things sinks here to the
rear, and we are left with God in Christ as His own Mediator and His own
Revealer. He is directly with us and in us. We transcend there two thousand
years as if they were but one day. By His Spirit and His Spirit's creative
miracle God becomes Himself our new nature, which is yet our own, our destined
Nature; for we were made with His image for our "doom of greatness." It is no
mere case of education or evolution drawing our our best. Prayer has a creative
action in its answer. It does more than present us with our true, deep, latent
selves. It lays hold on God, and God is not simply our magnified self. Our
other self is, in prayer, our Creator still creating. Our Maker it is that is
our Husband. He is Another. We feel, the more we are united with Him in true
prayer, the deep, close difference, the intimate otherness in true love.
Otherwise prayer becomes mere dreaming; it is spiritual extemporizing and not
converse. The division runs not simply between us and Nature, but it parts us
within our spiritual self, where union is most close. It is a spiritual
distinction, like the distinction of Father and Son in heaven. But Nature
itself, our natural selves, are involved in it; because Nature for the
Christian is implicated in Redemption. It "arrives." It is read in a new
script. The soul's conflict is found in a prelude in it. This may disturb our
pagan joy. It may quench the consolations of Nature. The ancient world could
take refuge in Nature as we cannot. It could escape there from conscience in a
way impossible to us, because for us body runs up into soul, and Nature has
become organic with spirit, an arena and even (in human nature) an experience
of God's will. It groans to come to itself in the sons of God. Redemption is
cosmic. We do not evade God's judgment there; and we put questions about His
equity there which did not trouble the Greek. It we take the wings of the
morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, God still besets us
behind and before. We still feel the collision of past and future, of conduct
and conscience. If we try to escape from His presence there, we fail; the winds
are His messengers, the fires His ministers, wars and convulsions instruments
of His purpose. He is always confronting us, judging us, saving us in a
spiritual world, which Nature does not stifle, but only makes it more universal
and impressive than our personal strife. In Nature our vis-a-vis is
still the same power we meet as God in our soul.
The
voice that rolls the stars along
Speaks
all His promises.
Our own natural instincts turn our scourges,
but also our blessings, according as they mock God or serve Him. So Nature
becomes our chaperone for Christ, our tutor whose duty is daily to deliver us
at Christ's door. It opens out into a Christ whose place and action are not
historic only, but also cosmic. The cosmic place of Christ in the later
epistles is not apostolic fantasy, extravagant speculation, nor groundless
theosophy. It is the ripeness of practical faith, faith which by action comes
to itself and to its own.
Especially is this pointed where faith has its
most pointed action as prayer. If cosmic Nature runs up into man, man rises up
into prayer; which thus fulfils Nature, brings its inner truth to pass, and
crowns its bias to spirit. Prayer is seen to be the opening secret of creation,
its destiny, that to which it all travails. It is the burthen of evolution. The
earnest expectation of the creation waits, and all its onward thrust works, for
the manifestation of the sons of God. Nature comes to itself in prayer. Prayer
realizes and brings to a head the truth of Nature, which groans being burdened
with the passion of its deliverance, its relief in prayer. "Magna ars est
conversari cum Deo." "The art of prayer is Nature gone to heaven." We
become in prayer Nature's true artists (if we may so say), the vehicles of its
finest and inmost passion. And we are also its true priests, the organs of its
inner commerce with God, where the Spirit immanent in the world meets the
Spirit transcendent in obedient worship. The sum of things for ever speaking is
heard in heaven to pray without ceasing. It is speaking not only to us but in
us to God. Soliloquy here is dialogue. In our prayer God returns from His
projection in Nature to speak with Himself. When we speak to God it is really
the God who lives in us speaking through us to Himself. His Spirit returns to
Him who gave it; and returns not void, but bearing our souls with Him. The
dialogue of grace is really the monologue of the divine nature in
self-communing love. In prayer, therefore, we do true and final justice to the
world. We give Nature to itself. We make it say what it was charged to say. We
make it find in thought and word its own soul. It comes to itself not in man
but in the praying man, the man of Christian prayer. The Christian man at
prayer is the secretary of Creation's praise. So prayer is the answer to
Nature's quest, as God is the answer to prayer. It is the very nature of
nature; which is thus miraculous or nothing at its core.
Here the friction vanishes, therefore, between
prayer and natural law. Nature and all its plexus of law is not static, but
dynamic. It is not interplay, but evolution. It has not only to move, but to
arrive. Its great motive power is not a mere instinct, but a destiny. Its
system is not a machine, but a procession. It is dramatic. It has a close. Its
ruling power is not what it rises from, but what it moves to. Its impulse is
its goal immanent. All its laws are overruled by the comprehensive law of its
destination. It tends to prayer. The laws of Nature are not like iron. If they
are fixed they are only fixed as the composition is fixed at H20 of the river
which is so fluid and moving that I can use it at any time to bear me to its
sea. They are fixed only in so far as makes reliable, and not fatal, to man's
spirit. Their nature is constant, but their function is not stiff. What is
fixed in the river is the constancy of its fluidity. "Still glides the stream,
and shall for ever glide." The greatest law of Nature is thus its bias to God,
its nisus to return to His rest. This comes to light chiefly in man's
gravitation to Him, when His prodigal comes home to Him. The forwardest
creation comes to itself in our passion for God and in our finding of Him in
prayer. In prayer, therefore, we do not ask God to do things contrary to
Nature, though our request may seem contrary to sections of it which we take
for the whole. We ask Him to fulfil Nature's own prayer.
The atmosphere of prayer seems at first to be the
direct contrary of all that goes with such words as practical or scientific.
But what do we mean by practical at last but that which contributes to the end
for which the world and mankind were made? The whole of history, as the
practical life of the race, is working out the growth, the emancipation of the
soul, the enrichment and fortifying of the human spirit. It is doing on the
large scale what every active life is doing on the small--it is growing soul.
There is no reality at last except soul, except personality. This alone has
eternal meaning, power, and value, since this alone develops or hampers the
eternal reality, the will of God. The universe has its being and its truth for
a personality, but for one at last which transcends individual limits. To begin
with the natural plane, our egoism constructs there a little world with a
definite teleology converging on self, one which would subdue everybody and
everything to the tributary to our common sensible self. On a more spiritual
(yet not on the divine) plane the race does the like with its colossal ego. It
views and treats the universe as contributory to itself, to the corporate
personality of the race. Nature is here for man, man perhaps for the superman.
We are not here for the glory of God, but God is here for the aid and glory of
man. But either way all things are there to work together for personality, and
to run up into a free soul. Man's practical success is then what makes for the
enhancement of this ego, small or great. But, on the Christian plane, man
himself, as part of a creation, has a meaning and an end; but it is in God; he
does not return on himself. God is his nisus and drift. God works in him; he is
not just trying to get his own head out. But God is Love. All the higher
science of Nature which is the milieu and the machinery that give the soul its
bent to love, and turn it out its true self in love. All the practice and
science of the world is there, therefore, to reveal and realize love and love's
communion. It is all a stage, a scenery, a plot, for a denounement where beings
mingle, and each is enriched by all and all by each. It all goes to the music
of that love which binds all things together in the cosmic dance, and which
makes each stage of each thing prophetic of its destined fullness only in a
world so bound. So science itself is practical if prayer end and round all. It
is the theory of a cosmic movement with prayer for its active end. And it is an
ethical science at last, it is a theology, if the Christian end is the real end
of the whole world. All knowledge serves love and love's communion. For
Christian faith a universe is a universe of souls, an organism of persons,
which is the expression of an Eternal Will of love. This love is the real
presence which gives meaning, and movement, and permanence to a fleeting world
of sense. And it is by prayer that we come into close and conscious union with
this universe and power of love, this living reality of things. Prayer (however
miraculous) is, therefore, the most natural things in the world. It is the
effectuation of all Nature, which comes home to roost there, and settles to its
rest. It is the last word of all science, giving it contact with a reality
which, as science alone, it cannot reach. And it is also the most practical
things in all man's action and history, as doing most to bring to pass the
spiritual object for which all men and all things exist and strive.
Those who feel prayer stifled by the organization
of law do not consider that law itself, if we take a long enough sweep, keeps
passing us on to prayer. Law rises from Nature, through history, to heaven. It
is integrated historically, i.e. by Christ's cross and the Church's history,
with the organization of love. But that is the organization of Eternity in God,
and it involves the interaction of all souls in a communion of ascending
prayer. Prayer is the native movement of the spiritual life that receives its
meaning and its soul only in Eternity, that works in the style and scale of
Eternity, owns its principles, and speaks its speech. It is the will's
congenial surrender to that Redemption and Reconciliation between loving wills
which is God's Eternity acting in time. We beseech God because He first
besought us.
So not to pray on principle means that thought
has got the better of the will. The question is whether thought includes will
or will thought; and thought wins if prayer is suppressed. Thought and not
personality is then in command of the universe. If will is but a function of
the idea, then prayer is but a symptom, it is not a power. It belongs to the
phenomenology of the Infinite, it is not among its controls.
Prayer is doing God's will. It is letting Him
pray in us. We look for answer because His fullness is completely equal to His
own prayers. Father and Son are perfectly adequate to each other. That is the
Holy Spirit and self-sufficiency of the Godhead.
If God's will is to be done on earth as it is in
heaven, prayer begins with adoration. Of course, it is thanks and petition; but
before we give even our prayer we must first receive. The Answerer provides the
very prayer. What we do here rests on what God has done. What we offer is drawn
from us by what He offers. Our self-oblation stands on His; and the spirit of
prayer flows from the gift of the Holy Ghost, the great Intercessor. Hence
praise and adoration of His work in itself comes before even our thanksgiving
for blessings to us. At the height of prayer, if not at its beginning, we are
preoccupied with the great and glorious thing God has done for His own holy
name in Redemption, apart from its immediate and particular blessing to us. We
are blind for the time to ourselves. We cover our faces with our wings and cry
"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts; the fullness of the earth is His
glory." Our full hearts glorify. We magnify His name. His perfections take
precedence of our occasions. We pray for victory in the present was, for
instance, and for deliverance from all war, for the sake of God's kingdom--in a
spirit of adoration for the deliverance there that is not destroyed, or foiled,
even by a devilry like this. If the kingdom of God not only got over the murder
of Christ, but made it its great lever, there is nothing that it cannot get
over, and nothing it cannot turn to eternal blessing and to the glory of the
holy name. But to the perspective of this faith, and to its vision of values so
alien to human standards, we can rise only in prayer.
But it would be unreal prayer which was adoration
only, with no reference to special boons or human needs. That would be as if
God recognized no life but His own--which is very undivine egoism, and its
collective form is the religion of mere nationalism. In true prayer we do two
things. We go out of ourselves, being lost in wonder, love and praise; but
also, and in the same act, we go in upon ourselves. We stir up all that is
within us to bless and hallow God's name. We examine ourselves keenly in that
patient light, and we find ourselves even when our sin finds us out. Our
nothingness is not burned and branded into us as if we had above only the
starry irony of heaven. Our heart comes again. Our will is braced and purified.
We not only recall our needs, but we discover new ones, of a more and more
intimate and spiritual kind. The more spiritual we grow, the more we rise out
of the subconscious or the unconscious. We never realize ourselves as we do
when we forget ourselves after this godly sort in prayer. Prayer is not falling
back upon the abyss below the soul; even as the secret of the Incarnation is
sought in vain in that non-moral zone. Prayer is not what might be called the
increased drone or boom of an unspeakable Om. But we rise in it to more
conscious and positive relation with God the Holy--the God not abysmal but
revealed, in whose revelation the thoughts of many hearts are revealed also,
and whose fullness makes need almost as fast as it satisfies it.
After adoration, therefore, prayer is
thanksgiving and petition. When we thank God our experience "arrives". It finds
what it came for. It fulfills the greatest end of experience. It comes to its
true self, comes to its own, and has its perfect work. It breathes large, long,
and free, sublimi anbelitu. The soul runs its true normal course back to
God its Creator, who has stamped the destiny of this return upon it, and leaves
it no peace till it finds its goal in Him. The gift we thank for becomes
sacramental because it conveys chiefly the Giver, and is lost in Him and in His
praise. It is He that chiefly comes in His saints and His boons. In real
revelation we rise for above a mere interpretation of life, a mere explanation
of events; we touch their Doer, the Life indeed, and we can dispense with
interpretations, having Him. An occurrence thus becomes a revelation. It gives
us God, in a sacrament. And where there is real revelation there is
thanksgiving, there is eucharist; for God Himself is in the gift, and strikes
His own music from the soul. If we think most of the gift, prayer may subtly
increase our egoism. We praise for a gift to us. We are tempted to treat God as
an asset, and to exploit him. But true prayer, thinking most of the Giver,
quells the egoism and dissolves it in praise. What we received came for another
end than just to gratify us. It came to carry God to us, and to lift us to Him
and to the consent of His glory. The blessing in it transcends the enjoyment of
it, and the Spirit of the outgoing God returns to Him not void, but bringing
our souls as sheaves with Him.
So also with the petition in our prayer. It also
is purified by adoration, praise, and thanksgiving. We know better what to pray
for as we ought. We do not only bring to God desires that rise apart from Him,
and that we present by an act of our own; but our desires, our will, as they
are inspired are also formed in God's presence, as requests. They get shape. In
thanks we spread out before Him and offer Him our past and present, but in
petition it is our future.
But has petition a true place in the highest and
purest prayer? Is it not lost in adoration and gratitude? Does adoration move
as inevitably to petition as petition rises to adoration? In reply we might ask
whether the best gratitude and purest thanks are not for answered petitions. Is
there not this double movement in all spiritual action which centres in the
Incarnation, where man ascends as God comes down? Does not man enlarge in God
as God particularizes upon men? But, putting that aside, is the subsidence of
petition not due to a wrong idea of God; as if our only relation were
dependence, as if, therefore, will-lessness before Him were the devout
ideal--as if we but acknowledge Him and could not act on Him? Ritschl, for
example, following Schleiermacher, says, "Love to God has no sphere of action
outside love to our brother." If that were so, there would be no room for
petition, but only for worship of God and service of man without intercession.
The position is not unconnected with Ritschl's neglect of the Spirit and His
intercession, or with his aversion to the Catholic type of piety. If suffering
were the only occasion and promptuary of prayer, then resignation, and not
petition, might be the true spirit of prayer. But our desires and wills do not
rise out of our suffering only, nor out of our passivity and dependence, but
also out of our duty and our place in life; and therefore our petition is as
due to God and as proper as our life's calling. If we may not will nor love, no
doubt petition, especially for others, is a mistake. Of course, also, our
egoism, engrossed with our happiness influences our prayer too often and too
much. But we can never overcome our self-will by will-lessness, nor our greed
of happiness by apathy. Petitions that are less than pure can only be purified
by petition. Prayer is the salvation of prayer. We pray for better prayer. We
can rise above our egoism only as we have real dealing with the will of God in
petitionary prayer which does change His detailed intentions toward us though
not His great will of grace and Salvation.
The element of adoration has been missed from
worship by many observers of our public prayer. And the defect goes with the
individualism of the age just past. Adoration is a power the egoist and
individualist loses. He loses also the power both of thanksgiving and of
petition, and sinks, through silence before God, to His neglect. For our
blessings are not egoistically meant, nor do they remain blessings if so taken.
They contemplate more than ourselves, as indeed does our whole place and work
in the gift of life. We must learn to thank God not only for the blessings of
others, but for the power to convey to others gifts which make them happier
than they make us--as the gifts of genius so often do. One Church should praise
Him for the prosperity of other Churches, for that is to the good of the
gospel. And, as for petition, how can a man or a Church pray for their own
needs to the omission of others? God's fundamental relation to us is one that
embraces and blesses all. We are saved in a common salvation. The atmosphere of
prayer is communion. Common prayer is the inevitable fruit of a gospel like
Christ's.
Public prayer, therefore, should be in the main
liturgical, with room for free prayer. The more it really is common prayer, and
the more our relation with men extend and deepen (as prayer with and for men
does extend them), the more we need forms which proceed from the common and
corporate conscience of the Church. Even Christ did. As He rose to the height
of His great world-work on the cross His prayer fell back on the liturgy of His
people--on the Psalms. It is very hard for the ordinary minister to come home
to the spiritual variety of a large congregation without those great forms
which arose out of the deep soul of the Church before it spread into sectional
boughs or individual twigs.
Common prayer is not necessarily public. To
recite the Litany on a sick-bed is common prayer. Christ felt the danger of
common prayer as public prayer (Matt. vi. 5,6). And this is specially so when
the public prayer is "extempore." To keep that real calls for an amount of
private prayer which perhaps is not for every one. "Extempore" prayers are apt
to be private prayers in public, like the Pharisee's in the temple, with too
much idiosynerasy for public use; or else they lose the spontaneity of private
prayer, and turn as formal as a liturgy can be, though in another (and perhaps
deadlier) way. The prayers of the same man inevitably fall more or less into
the same forms and phrases. But private prayer may be more common in its note
than public prayer should be private in its tone. Our private prayer should be
common in spirit. We are doing in the act what many are doing. In the retired
place we include in sympathy and intercession a world of other men which we
exclude in fact. The world of men disappears from around us but not from
within. We are not indifferent to its weal or woe in our seclusion. In the act
of praying for ourselves we pray for others, for no temptation befalls us but
what is common to man; and in praying for others we pray with them. We pray for
their prays and the success of their prayers. It is an act of union. We can
thus be united even with churches that refuse to pray or unite with us.
Moreover, it is common prayer, however solitary,
that prevails most, as being most in tune with the great first goal of God's
grace--the community. So this union in prayer gives to prayer an ethical note
of great power and value. If we really pray with others, it must clear, and
consolidate, and exalt our moral relations with them everywhere. Could we best
the man with whom and for whom we really pray? There is a great democratic note
in common prayer which is also true prayer. "Eloquence and ardour have not done
so much for Christ's cause as the humble virtues, the united activity, and the
patient prayers of thousands of faithful people whose names are quite unknown."
And we are united thus not only to the living but to the long dead. "He who
prays is nearer Christ than even the apostles were," certainly than the
apostles before the Cross and Resurrection.
We have been warned by a man of genius that the
bane of so much religion is that it clings to God with its weakness and not
with its strength. This is very true of that supreme act of religion of which
our critics know least--of the act of prayer. So many of us pray because we are
driven by need rather than kindled by grace. Our prayer is a cry rather than a
hymn. It is a quest rather than a tryst. it trembles more than it triumphs. It
asks for strength rather than exerts it. How different was the prayer of
Christ! All the divine power of the Eternal Son went to it. It was the supreme
form taken by His Sonship in its experience and action. Nothing is more
striking in Christ's life than His combination of selflessness and power. His
consciousness of power was equal to anything, and egoism never entered Him. His
prayer was accordingly. It was the exercise of His unique power rather than of
His extreme need. It came from His uplifting and not His despair. It was less
His duty than His joy. It was more full of God's gift of grace than of man's
poverty of faith, of a holy love than of a seeking heart. In His prayer He
poured out neither His wish nor His longing merely, but His will. And He knew
He was heard always. He knew it with such power and certainty that He could
distribute His value, bless with His overflow, and promise His disciples they
would be heard in His name. It was by His prayer that He countered and foiled
the godless power in the world, the kingdom of the devil. "Satan hath desired
to have thee--but I have prayer for thee." His prayer means so much for the
weak because it arose out of this strength and its exercise. It was chiefly in
His prayer that He was the Messiah, and the Revealer and Wielder of the power
and kingship of God. His power with God was so great that it made His disciples
feel it could only be the power of God; He prayer in the Eternal Spirit whereby
He offered Himself to God. And it was so great because it was spent on God
alone. So true is it that the kingdom of God comes not with observation, that
the greatest things Christ did for it were done in the night and not in the
day; His prayers meant more than His miracles. And His great triumph was when
there were none to see, as they all forsook Him and fled. He was mightest in
His action for men not when He was acting on men but on God. He felt the
dangers of the publicity where His work lay, and He knew that they were only to
be met in secrecy. He did most for His public in entire solitude; there He put
forth all His power. His nights were not always the rest of weakness from the
day before, but often the storing of strength for the day to come. Prayer (if
we let Christ teach us of it) is mightiest in the mightiest. It is the ether
round the throne of the Most High. Its power answers to the omnipotence of
grace. And those who feel they owe everything to God's grace need have no
difficulty about the range of prayer. They may pray for everything.
A word, as I close this chapter, to the
sufferers. We pray for the removal of pain, pray passionately, and then with
exhaustion, sick from hope deferred and prayer's failure. But there is a higher
prayer than that. It is a greater thing to pray for pain's conversion than for
its removal. It is more of grace to pray that God would make a sacrament of it.
The sacrament of pain! That we partake not simply, nor perhaps chiefly, when we
say, or try to say, with resignation, "Thy will be done." It is not always easy
for the sufferer, if he remain clear-eyed to see that it is God's will. It may
have been caused by an evil mind, or a light fool, or some stupid greed. But,
now it is there, a certain treatment of it is God's will; and that is to
capture and exploit it for Him. It is to make it serve the soul and glorify
God. It is to consecrate its elements and make it sacramental. It is to convert
it into prayer.
God has blessed pain even in causing us to pray
for relief from it, or profit. Whatever drives us to Him, and even nearer Him,
has a blessing in it. And, if we are to go higher still, it is to turn pain to
praise, to thank Him in the fires, to review life and use some of the energy we
spend in worrying upon recalling and tracing His goodness, patience, and mercy.
If much open up to us in such a review we may be sure there is much more we do
not know, and perhaps never may. God is the greatest of all who do good by
stealth and do not crave for every benefit to be acknowledged. Or we may see
how our pain becomes a blessing to others. And we turn the spirit of heaviness
to the garment of praise. We may stop grousing and get our soul into its Sunday
clothes. The sacrament of pain becomes then a true Eucharist and giving of
thanks.
And if there were a higher stage than all it
would be Adoration--when we do not think of favours or mercies to us or ours at
all, but of the perfection and glory of the Lord. We feel to His Holy Name what
the true artist feels towards an unspeakable beauty. As Wordsworth says:
I
gazed and gazed,
And
did not wish her mine.
There was a girl of 15, tall, sweet,
distinguished beyond her years. And this is how Heine ran into English at the
sight of her:
No
flower is half so lovely,
So
dear, and fair, and kind.
A
boundless tide of tenderness
Flows
over my heart and mind.
And
I pray. (There is no answer
To
beauty unearthly but prayer.)
God
answered my prayer, and keep you
So
dear, and fine, and fair.