Daily prayer—keeping your hand in God's

On a family vacation some years ago, my brother Ed and I took his then-two-year-old son out on a lake in a rowboat. Peter stood between Ed’s legs with his hands on the oars as Ed rowed. After a while, Peter bellowed one of those two-year-old commands: “I do it myself, Daddy.”

Ed let go, and Peter slapped the oars up and down on the water. As we proceeded to go nowhere, he gleefully exclaimed, “I do it all by myself!”

I smile at that scene when I think about why people pray. At times we may imagine we can command life’s boat by ourselves. But as the awareness grows that we’re going nowhere fast, prayer becomes a welcome friend. And daily prayer is a way of keeping your hand in God’s.

I believe the best care we can take for our health and peace of mind is prayer that acknowledges our oneness with God. My daily prayer is to know God as the great and only Life and Mind, my Life and Mind.

I pray to understand that I am not a personal ego separate from God, but an individual identity flowing from the divine Life like a stream from an inexhaustible fountain. I pray to know God as the pure, good, and eternal nature of myself and everyone.

Repeating specific prayers from spiritual texts, as well as praying spontaneously, have been spiritual food, rest, exercise, and refreshment for me over the years. Still, I’m looking for ways to improve my prayer practice, and one issue I’m paying more attention to is confronting thoughts that cause me to resist praying for my own well-being.

Here are three specific forms of resistance I’ve often had to face, and some ideas from Christian Science that help me break through them:

1. Believing prayer has to change bad conditions or prevent them from happening. To believe this is stressful and makes me want to avoid or give up on prayer. So I remind myself very often that the reason I pray is to see the good that’s already true and present.

In divine Science, or spiritual reality, God is the infinite Spirit that manifests itself in a universe of spiritual and good identities. Material life isn’t another fallen reality, but only a misconception of the one spiritual reality. Prayer lifts thought above physical perceptions to the truth of perfect being.

A psalm in the Bible describes the goal of prayer simply: “All I want is to see you [God] as you are” (Ps. 17:15, Contemporary English Version). Aiming steadily for this goal, one could pray: “All I want is to see God as infinite Love in control of everything. I want to see myself and the entire creation as Love’s expressed being, whole, and satisfied. I want to know that the all-good Cause is giving life and happiness to everyone continuously, and that there’s no other power to oppose God’s good purpose.”

Prayer of this nature doesn’t aim to control material conditions, but rather to realize spiritual ones. Jesus taught that we can’t make one hair black or white through human forcefulness. But through God’s grace, we can know the truth that frees us from material illusions so that the harmony that is normal and real appears.

Describing the effects of such prayer, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Prayer cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it.”

2. Believing there are merely human solutions to my own or others’ troubles. Thinking about ways to make my life run more smoothly is often useful, but I’ve found it can sometimes sidetrack me from prayer that brings God’s healing power to bear on a situation.

If I have a financial decision to make, for instance, I try to acknowledge early that my intelligence comes from divine Mind, God. That way, I help break the habit of relying on the very limited human mind for solutions. I also gain in trust that even global economic concerns have answers in God.

Ultimately, human troubles will persist as long as we accept mortal, material existence as reality. Only prayer based on the Science of being will waken human consciousness to God as the infinite source of good.

To give another example of moving beyond mere human solution to the realm of transformative prayer, when I give money for disaster relief, I may feel I’ve done what I can. And making such donations is a very worthwhile form of aid. But if I continue to hold a mental image of tragedy and danger, I haven’t given the best I have to offer.

Jesus pointed to a higher offering when he responded to protests that money a woman had spent on oil to anoint him should have been given to the poor. He said, “Ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.”

Jesus certainly didn’t discourage charitable giving (another time he held up the model of the good Samaritan, who cared for a stranger’s human needs). In this reference to his anointing, perhaps he was encouraging the greatest form of charity—love that heals deeply and thoroughly by honoring the Christ, the spiritual idea of God, as the true self of everyone.

Even one individual, understanding that his or her life, and all life, is spiritual and God-sustained, helps end the enslaving worldview that we’re material beings forever vulnerable to shortage and disaster. The best matching fund for charitable donations is scientific prayer.

3. Believing my prayers aren’t good enough to heal myself or others. Acknowledging that God—Truth itself—is always the healer helps me confront and overcome this fear.

Jesus said if we continued in his word, we would know the truth—and the truth would free us. One way I see to continue in his word is to be willing to declare the truth under all circumstances.

Declaring any single spiritual truth is a type of prayer. And I can always declare that God is supreme and that all creation including me is perfect and spiritual now. I can declare that there is no power to prevent the appearing of this perfection.

Even when accusing thoughts, or the evidence presented to the five senses, tell me I’m not convinced of this and that suffering or danger is very real, I can trust that continuing to declare the truth will lift me to knowing it. Truth does the lifting, and it doesn’t get scared or tired.

Another way to continue in Jesus’ word is through daily prayers of action. These include conscious expression of qualities such as gratitude, patience, and persistence. Many times when I’ve felt spiritually feeble, making a simple effort to love and encourage someone, or to express more patience, has brought the needed inspiration.

The Bible gives this beautiful encouragement to everyone who prays: “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities [weaknesses]: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings [yearnings] which cannot be uttered.”

To me this indicates that prayer is a joint venture, something like a Parent-child rowing team. Resistance to prayer dissolves when we see that God prays with us and through us. More than something we do to get closer to Truth, prayer is evidence of our oneness with Truth. Daily prayer keeps our hand in God’s and lets divine Spirit power us forward.

Margaret Rogers lives in Greenbrae, California. She is a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science.

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