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From: sampath kumar <sampathkumar_2000@xxxx>
To: Ramanbil@xxxx
Subject: Re: Message not approved: "Is There Anything in Prayer?" - An article
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:32:00 -0700 (PDT)


--- Ramanbil@xxxx wrote:
>
> Dear friend:
> Can you post it directly in a readable form? I am not able to open
> the document. Thanks.
> Dasoham
> Anbil Ramaswamy
>
******** ********* ********

Dear SrimAn Anbil swamy,

Of course! Here it is: (This article appears to me basically an
expansion of the theme of our own "tiruppAvai"!).
______________________________________


The Atlantic Monthly | October 1921

"Is There Anything in Prayer"?

"Prayer is the organization of one's unsatisfied desires so that God
may work through them for the end desired"
by J. Edgar Park

.....

One of the earliest discoveries made by the adventurer who dares
to penetrate into the land of Common Sense is that in that land
mere wishing does not accomplish very much. Sundered lovers wished
their hearts away for centuries, longing for the sound of the other's
voice through the intervening miles of space. But all was of no avail
until to that wishing was added the minute knowledge of
electro-magnetism, which resulted in the invention of the telephone.

The longest road in the world is the road that lies between feeling
and fact. The road can be made passable only by knowledge. Wishing is
just the initial motive force designed to drive one to seek the
knowledge of the way. Processions of longing, beseeching human beings
through plague-stricken cities, imploring the removal of the curse,
effected nothing, until their desires were converted into patient
investigation of the causes and cure of plague. The processions were
valuable in so far as they incited and stung the lethargic scientific
mind into investigation and discovery. Wishing, looked upon as an end
in itself, is barren, but it is the initial stage of all progress.

Desire, when it can be transmuted into action, is the joy of life.
Desire, when it cannot immediately be transmuted into action, is the
basic problem of literature, art, philosophy, and religion. What is
to be done with it? Prayer is the organization of unsatisfied desire.
Unless it is organized in some way it leads to ruinous consequences.
Worry, nervous disorders depression, temptation, morbid mental
conditions ? these are the names of some of the results of
unorganized, unsatisfied desires. A mother returns home on a sudden
call, to find her child sick unto death. She immediately gets the
best doctors and the best nurses and does all she can for his cure.
At last she has done all she is able to do. Can she then put the
matter from her mind and go to the movies? No, there remains, after
she has done everything possible for her child, a mass of desire for
that child's recovery which she has not been able to work off into
action. What is she to do with? She may either go into another room
and worry herself to death over the child, and thus make herself a
prophet of death to the child and the whole household, or she may
pray. Prayer is the control of the overflow of desire above that
which can be immediately transmuted into action.

What then is her mental attitude in prayer? It has been largely
represented as that of a slave asking for a favor before the throne
of an oriental potentate. 'I have done many favors for Thee in the
past. I have contributed to the church, and attended thy services and
kept thy laws. Now I humbly ask, in return for these offerings, the
life of this child!'

Or it has been supposed that here is the one exception to the
otherwise inexorable principle that mere wishing does not accomplish
anything. She is simply to wish and ask, as a child would wish and
ask a parent for, something desirable.

Prayer in both these cases is looked upon as a triangle. The mother
and the child are at the base angles; God is at the apex. The mother
sends up a prayer to God, which God considers, and, if it seems good
to Him, sends down the answer to the child. The conditions of
effective prayer under these conditions are, as set forth in a recent
hand-book on prayer, faith, humility, and submission.

There has been, however, a growing school of religious thinkers who
have felt that the use of terms and figures like these must not blind
us to the fact that the realm of Prayer is no exception to the
general rule; that it is necessary, not only to wish, but to know how
to wish; that there are laws governing the organization of
unsatisfied desires which must be observed. Prayer for them is not so
much a triangle as a
straight line. Prayer is the organization of one's unsatisfied
desires so that God may work through them for the end desired. The
mother's
unsatisfied desire for the life of the child may be so organized as
to be the channel through which the healing power of God may reach
the
child. Prayer is not, then, that passive acquiescence of the
Irishman,
who hung the Lord's Prayer over his bed and, every night, before he
jumped in, jerked his thumb in the direction of the petitions and
ejaculated, 'Them's my sentiments.' Prayer is an activity of will and
mind and feeling, which makes us the natural channel through which
good effects flow to those for whom we pray. Psychology studies the
conditions of that activity.

Religion asserts that these good effects are the result, not merely
of a personal, but also of a cosmic wish.

What is the condition of mind of such a mother, which most conduces
to the cure of the child? If it is true, as we have surmised, that
prayer is not simply wishing but organized and directed wishing, then
it is evident that, as in any other art, power in prayer will come
with practice. It is necessary, as in any other art, to begin with
little things and gain skill and power from the small to the great.
Prayer is the personal influence, which we recognize so well in
social intercourse, at its highest point of efficiency. We all
recognize that personal influence is a hard attainment; power in
prayer is equally open to all, but requires great effort to attain.
Much as we may dislike the word, there is a technique of prayer which
can be mastered. The mother must have learned to pray, in order to be
of much help to her child at such a crisis. To be a healing
personality is a high achievement. But let us suppose that she has
been practising prayer for years. She has gained her power in the
attainment of lesser ends than this very life of her child. It is, in
general, almost impossible to generate in the face of a sudden
emergency a hitherto unused power. Prayer ought to start with
trifles?the sublimation of petty personal desires, the gaining of a
rational spiritual attitude toward minor social problems in the home
and school. Prayer does not generally emerge into the consciousness
as a desire for the evangelization of the world in this
generation; it rather begins with a desire for a new doll or the
winning of a game.

Some years previously, this mother has found that her child was not
getting on well at school. He began to bring home bad report-cards,
he
did not like the teachers, he hated the studies. The mother finds
herself beginning to anticipate more trouble. She expects another bad
report, more tales of being disliked by the teachers, more inability
to do the work prescribed. Her very face as she meets the child at
the door tells what she anticipates. Suddenly she realizes that the
whole atmosphere of the home is melancholy with the sense of
impending failure. Her personal influence, through the black
background of her consciousness, is, in spite of anything she may
say, foreboding. Then she endeavors to 'get hold of herself '; to
prevent this thwarted desire for her child's happiness and success
from turning sour and becoming a fixed, if almost unconscious,
conviction that the child will not get on well at school.

She begins to pray. She invokes another conviction, that the good
Spirit of the universe has no such intention for her child. She
recalls some of the great passages of religious inspiration, the
words of the saints who have been sure of a power outside ourselves,
as well as in ourselves,making for righteousness. Thus gaining the
prayer mood, she then reminds herself that she must be the channel
for bringing this good-will into the life of her child. She replaces
the picture of failure, which threatens to become fixed in her mind,
with a more vivid and living picture of success. With all the love
and sympathy and imaginative fire she possesses, she pictures to
herself her petition being granted ? the new attitude on the part of
her child, his awakened interest in his studies, his liking for his
teachers, his expectation of success. She prays intensely, with all
her desire, through and in this mental picture.

This act is exceedingly difficult; but, if done, it changes the whole
atmosphere of the home. The very face of the mother as she meets the
child is magnetic of success for the child instead of being prophetic
of failure. In the thousand ways, known and unknown, in which the
mother's mind touches the mind of the child, encouragement,
expectation of achievement, faith in his powers now flow in upon the
will of the child. In petitions of this nature, the whole personality
is stirred; desire, intellect, and imagination are at their highest
point of efficiency, that she may become a conductor of God's
good-will. She concludes her prayer with thanks-giving to God that
the prayer has been granted, a supreme act of faith.

There is all the difference in the world between the man who says, 'I
am going to give up my bad habit,' and the man who says, 'I have
given
up my bad habit.' So there is between feeling that God may answer the
prayer and that God has answered it. The latter is the act of faith
that the answer will be hindered only by the defect of the channel.
The answer is granted; the flood of happiness and success is forcing
its way through the narrow and obstructed channel of the mother's
personal influence upon the child. Prayer has substituted such an
influence for the previous, almost unconscious, suggestions of
failure. There is no dogmatism in such prayer as to the method of the
of the answer ? that is left to the infinite possibilities of actual
experience. The claim is simply made on the universe for the
happiness of the child, and in the making of the claim the
psychological machinery is set in motion for its being honored by the
universe. And this effort to organize unsatisfied desire not only has
its influence upon those for whom we pray, but tends to purify and
enlighten the desire itself, so that, when the petition is granted,
it may be on a much higher plane than when it was first offered. Yet
it is the same prayer. The desire is always satisfied. But it often
is sublimated in the process of satisfaction.

In the face of the impending death of her child, a mother who has so
practised prayer on lesser matters has great powers. Her very face in
the sick-room as the child dimly sees it, is on the side of health
and life. And who can tell in what numberless ways the minds of those
who love touch one another, all unseen even by the argus eyes of
science.
Miracles occur, and the tide of life returns into sluggish veins,
when the desire of life is kindled through the touch of kindred
minds.

Many objections will occur to one who reads for the first time this
theory of prayer. Does not this explanation of prayer, it will be
asked, run counter to the practice of One who said in his prayer,
'Not My will but Thine be done'? This phrase has been greatly
misused. It has been misused so as almost to justify the Irishman's
type of prayer, before mentioned. Rousseau best expressed a
prevailing interpretation of it thus: 'I bless God, but I pray not.
Why should I ask of Him that He would change for me the course of
things, do miracles in my favor? I, who ought to love, above all, the
order established by his wisdom and maintained by his
providence?shall I wish that order to be dissolved on my account? As
little do I ask of Him the power to do well. Why ask what He has
already given?'

But God's highest will is carried out only through human wills
working
at white heat. Prayer is not asking God to change the course of
things, but asking Him to help me to be a part of that course of
things. I become so, not in spite of my will, but through my will.
The Master used this phrase, not before He had exerted his own will,
but after the great drops of the sweat of desire were falling from
his brow to the ground. The phrase is no idle excuse for listless
praying; in it we see the sublimation of desire taking place. Idle
prayers, which place this phrase, misused, in the forefront, will
ever excuse injustice and sickness and unhappiness as the will of
God. Justice, happiness, health, surely these are the will of God for
all; as to the detailed method of their coming, our desires in prayer
are ever being enlarged and enlightened by the inflow upon us of the
cosmic desires of God.

Again, it will be asked if this theory will not lend itself to the
idea that, if you want a purse of money, you must imagine it very
vividly lying on the pavement outside your house, and then go out and
find it. A father heard his little girl praying for the red doll in
the window of the corner store, and told her she ought not to pray
for things like that; she ought to pray to be a good girl, or for the
heathen. The fact was that she did not want specially to be a good
girl in the father's meaning of that phrase, and she did not care
about the heathen, but she did want the red doll. Why make a
hypocrite of her at the start? So it is with money. If that is what
you really want, pray for it. If you pray sincerely, you will receive
an answer which will satisfy you. Possibly not the pocket-book, but
an ability to get up earlier in the morning, or to keep awake between
meals, or to reduce your expenditures. The answer always comes and
abundantly satisfies anyone who dares persistently to carry out the
art of praying. But prayer always initiates effort.

Prayer is a hard task without the mystic sense of the personality of
God. In all the lesser problems of life it is easy enough to look
upon it as the simple demonstration of a natural law. But when the
storms are out and the floods let loose, when one has done all one
can by action and has done all one can by prayer, then life is hard
and cruel, indeed, unless one can feel, behind all the laws and
beneath all the principles, in higher reaches of spiritual communion,
a love that understands and forgives.

__________________________________

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