“Prayer is but reproducing and recollecting a divine memory and divine memory cannot help but produce a divine outcome. Said in another way, prayer reproduces the truth and allows the truth to exist as it is. Prayer does this because it is the act of consciously choosing union. (Treatises of A Course of Love: Treatise on the Art of Thought, 6.2)”
Affirmation: “I will pray often and sincerely today.”
Reflections:
1 – Personal Experience
One of the most important points of the spiritual life, to me, is the matter of prayer. A favorite professor of mine once, in effect, witnessed to me about prayer. In answering a question as to how he had come to a given answer, he replied, quietly, “Prayer.” In truth he was a changed man from what he had been like just a couple of years previously. The witness of his truth about prayer was a defining moment in my own life. The exchange constituted a peak experience.
2 – Practice Prayer
So, in my own way, in many years since, I have practiced prayer–deep prayers when I was upset about something, deep prayers in which I felt God’s touch of healing. A Course in Miracles refers to this action as “communing” with God, and that is, in effect, what I have tried to do in times of crisis. Prayer rights things. There is absolutely no emotional charge that can remain, of an upsetting nature, that in my experience is not made better by deep prayer. And by “deep” prayer, I mean the heartfelt reaching toward God that I imagine the author of The Cloud of Unknowing (an anonymous medieval treatise) had in mind.
3 – Tenderness
Now we find in A Course of Love that prayer is counseled. Of course, this simply reinforces in my own mind something that I have believed since I was 24, when the encounter with my professor occurred. The joy of communing with God is exceedingly tender, for He is a gentle God. His way is not perceived, in prayer, to be a hard or difficult pathway to follow. His is the way of supreme good sense. His is the way that I know, in such moments, that I want to walk.
4 – Healing
We cannot all be healed of physical ailments, and there are emotional ones as well that are not healed. But certainly the physical and emotional ones stand a much better chance of healing if prayer has taken place. And, in my experience, the emotional difficulties are especially prone to healing by prayer. There is a calm that settles over one who is in deep prayer. Sleep comes gently in such a case, if one is saying nightly prayers. We end the day aright, and we are preparing, in our own way, for a subsequent day that will be started aright. There is no substitute for the comfort that prayer can and does give. This I know from personal experience.
Prayer:
Dear Father/Mother,
Thank You for the myriad answers to pray that You have given me over the years. Prayer works in a very practical sense, and I am not upset by “using” prayer in this way. Of course, I do not want to use You, but to love You. And to know that You love me. Communing with You in deep prayer shows me that love flows in both directions.
Thank You for the experience that I lived through when I was 24, the experience of first learning how valuable prayer could really be. Thank You that this occurrence happened so early in my life. I am very grateful for the role that You have played in my life through the deep prayers that I have been led to have over the years.
Be with all of us today. If hard times come, let us know that we always have You to whom to turn. And the hard times melt away in the blessing of communing with You. Thank You especially that healing of emotional issues comes with prayer. I do not rule out healing of physical issues as well, but it is with the emotional that I am especially grateful today. When our mind and heart are calm, we can live through any struggle, and we, with Your help, can turn that struggle into ease.
Amen.
MIRACLES EACH DAY 