It is no mere subjective instinct—no blind outreach. If it met no response, no answer, it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray in faith if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares, and who actually corresponds with us. Prayer has stood the test of experience. In fact the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of a heavenly Friend. A subjective need always carries an implication of an objective stimulus which has provoked the need. There is no hunger, as Fiske has well shown, for anything not tasted, there is no search for anything which is not in the environment, for the environment has always produced the appetite. So this native need of the soul rose out of the divine origin of the soul, and it has steadily verified itself as a safe guide to reality.
What is at first a vague life-activity and spontaneous outreach of inward energy—a feeling after companionship—remains in many persons vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite consciousness of a personal Presence and there comes back into the soul a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all the Soul’s need. For such persons prayer is the way to fullness of life. It is as natural as breathing. It is as normal an operation as appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit of truth. The soul is made that way, and as long as men are made with mystical deeps within, unsatisfied with the finite and incomplete, they will pray and be refreshed.
Vague and formless, in some degree, communion would always be, I think, apart from the personal manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. As soon as God is known as Father, as soon as we turn to Him as identical in being with our own humanity, as suffering with us and loving us even in our imperfection, this communion grows defined and becomes actual social fellowship which is prayer at its best. Paul’s great prayers of fellowship rise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom we know, because He has been humanly revealed in a way that fits our life. We turn to Him as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought. The vague impulse to reach beyond our isolated and solitary self gives place to an actual experience of relationship with a personal Friend and Companion and this experience may become, and often does become, the loftiest and most joyous activity of life. The soul is never at its best until it enjoys God, and prays out of sheer love. Nobody who has learned to pray in this deeper way and whose prayer is a prayer of communion and fellowship, wants logical argument for the existence of God. Such a want implies a fall from a higher to a lower level. It is like a demand for a proof of the beauty one feels, or an evidence of love other than the evidence of its experience.
Prayer will always rise or fall with the quality of one’s faith, like the mercury in the tube which feels at once the change of pressure in the atmosphere. It is only out of live faith that a living prayer springs. When a man’s praying sinks into words, words, words, it means that he is trying to get along with a dead conception of God. The circuit no longer closes. He cannot heighten his prayer by raising his voice. What he needs is a new revelation of the reality of God. He needs to have the fresh sap of living faith in God push off the dead leaves of an outgrown belief, so that once more prayer shall break forth as naturally as buds in spring.
The conception of God as a lonely Sovereign, complete in Himself and infinitely separated from us “poor worms of the dust,” grasshoppers chirping our brief hour in the sun, is in the main a dead notion. Prayer to such a God would not be easy with our modern ideas of the universe. It would be as difficult to believe in its efficiency as it would be to believe in the miracle of transubstantiation in bread and wine. But that whole conception is being supplanted by a live faith in an Infinite Person who is corporate with our lives, from whom we have sprung, in whom we live, as far as we spiritually do live, who needs us as we need him, and who is sharing with us the travail and the tragedy as well as the glory and the joy of bringing forth sons of God.
In such a kingdom—an organic fellowship of interrelated persons—prayer is as normal an activity as gravitation is in a world of matter. Personal spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul reaches after soul, hearts draw toward each other. We are no longer in the net of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal force, we are in a love-system where the aspiration of one member heightens the entire group, and the need of one—even the least—draws upon the resources of the whole—even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine-human fellowship.
The only obstacle to effectual praying, in this world of spiritual fellowship, would be individual selfishness. To want to get just for one’s own self, to ask for something which brings loss and injury to others, would be to sever one’s self from the source of blessings, and to lose not only the thing sought but to lose, as well, one’s very self.
This principle is true anywhere, even in ordinary human friendship. It is true too, in art and in music. The artist may not force some personal caprice into his creation. He must make himself the organ of a universal reality which is beautiful not simply for this man or that, but for man as man. If there is, as I believe, an inner kingdom of spirit, a kingdom of love and fellowship, then it is a fact that a tiny being like one of us can impress and influence the Divine Heart, and we can make our personal contribution to the Will of the universe, but we can do it only by wanting what everybody can share and by seeking blessings which have a universal implication.
So far as prayer is real fellowship, it gives as well as receives. The person who wants to receive God must first bring himself. If He misses us, we miss Him. He is Spirit, and consequently He is found only through true and genuine spiritual activity. In this correspondence of fellowship there is no more “violation of natural law” than there is in love wherever it appears. Love is itself the principle of the spiritual universe, as gravitation is of the physical; and as in the gravitate system the earth rises to meet the ball of the child, without breaking any law, so God comes to meet and to heighten the life of anyone who stretches up toward Him in appreciation, and there is joy above as well as below.
All that I have said, and much more, gets vivid illustration in the “Lord’s prayer,” which Christians have taken as a model form, though they have not always penetrated its spirit. It is in every line a prayer of fellowship and co-operation. It is a perfect illustration of the social nature of prayer. The co-operation and fellowship are not here confined, and they never are except in the lower stages, to the inward communion of an individual and his God. There is no I or me or mine in the whole prayer. The person who prays spiritually is enmeshed in a living group and the reality of his vital union with persons like himself clarifies his vision of that deeper Reality to whom he prays. Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood are born together. To say Father to God involves saying “brother” to one’s fellows, and the ground swell of either relationship naturally carries the other with it, for no one can largely realize the significance of brotherly love without going to Him in whom love is completed.