Thoughts on how we should pray.
The reflection below is based on a talk and discussion held at Winforton Church on the fourth Sunday of July and ranges from thoughts on images of God to the mechanism of prayer.
I should like to begin at a stage before thinking about how we should pray and consider the meaning of prayer – what exactly is it? The essence of prayer is that it is a communication with a higher power – a power that we usually refer to as God.
In the Bible God is anthropomorphised and referred to as Father – a tradition that is essential for children and useful for adults but we always need to be aware that God is not an entity that exists physically somewhere in the universe – a universe which as we understand from the latest investigations using the James Webb telescope is even larger the we originally thought.
I prefer to think of God as a spiritual power not specifically located anywhere but everywhere. For short-hand I use the expression the fifth dimension, also used, after me, by the priest Professor John Hick (and quite probably others) – but we were obviously thinking long similar lines. Earlier still the theologian Paul Tillich used the expression ‘Ground of all Being’ for his understanding of God. What these definitions are trying to encompass is the thought that God is both immanent and transcendent – God both within and without.
So before we come onto communication with that higher being I would invite you to define the God you communicate with. How do you, reader, define your God?
Thinking about prayer, it can be of many forms. It can be personal where we are contemplating our present needs and maybe thoughts for the future -this is tapping into the God within and can be a form of self re-inforcement and boosting one’s self confidence. Next in the hierarchy might be prayer for others, be they relatives or not who may be in especial need. Then there is the much wider sort of prayer which maybe for huge issues such as World peace which perhaps needs a vast range of people saying the same prayers to have an effect.
Incidentally there have been formal experiments to try to determine the efficacy of prayer from the later Victorian period to some much more recent experiments funded by the Templeton Foundation.
In Victorian times the it was known that the Royal Family were prayed for more often than anyone else – and perhaps as a result they lived (or should have lived) longer than they rest of us. It was found that they didn’t. The Templeton Foundation in 2006 funded (at a cost of 2.4 million dollars) a much more rigorous scientific experiment involving 1800 people with heart problems divided into two groups, one group prayed for, the other group not. The outcome was not positive, with 18% of patients who were prayed for suffering complications, whereas only 13% of those who were not prayed for suffering similar complications.
We are then left with just anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of prayer where perhaps as I mentioned above we are tapping into that God that is within each of us. We believe from this anecdotal evidence that prayers can work – is it perhaps a form of telepathy? Or perhaps it is just a mystery – science cannot help us to understand everything in this world there is some knowledge, transcendental knowledge, that can only be sensed by those open to receive. Received perhaps through meditation or contemplation, itself a form of prayer.
Finally I would mention some of the much broader approaches to prayer such as through religious experience which one could almost say began with Schleiermacher (1830ish) who attributed much more importance to experience over dogma – contemplations such as practiced by the mystics, for example Hildegard of Bingham or Julian of Norwich. There are also the more way out thoughts such as morphic resonance introduced by the maverick Cambridge academic Dr. Rupert Sheldrake who might argue that praying in a place such as an ancient cathedral will be tapping into the thoughts and prayers of those who have been praying there for hundreds of years.
For further reading on this huge subject, I could recommend the following:-
Hardy, Alister The Spiritual Nature of Man Religious Experience Research Centre, Lampeter. (Available from me for £5.00)
There are so many but I can recommend books by Williams James, Paul Iles, Elizabeth Underhill and George Austin.
Dr David Greenwood. D.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk August 2022
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