One of the most powerful
means of overcoming the externalisation of life is to find
support in prayer and meditation. But as soon as prayer is
suggested, there are those who will immediately retort:
"Praying does no good". This statement has an element of
truth in certain cases: not theological truth, but
psychological. When it is said by those who are unwilling to
curb their promiscuous habits or to tame their carnality,
then the statement, "It does no good to pray", is true - but
only of themselves. Their prayers are ineffective, not
because God refuses to hear them, but because they refuse to fulfil the first condition of prayer, namely a longing to
revise their natures to accordance with God's laws. To have
any effectiveness, a prayer for help must express an honest
desire to be changed, and that desire must be without
reservation or conditions on our part. If we pray to be
delivered from alcoholism, and yet refuse to stop drinking,
that fact is an acknowledgment that we did not really pray.
In like manner, the man who prays to be delivered from
sexual perversions and excesses - and that very day
deliberately exposes himself to such pleasures - has
destroyed the efficacy of the prayer by a reservation. All
prayer implies an act of the will, a desire for growth, a
willingness to sacrifice on our own part; for prayer is not
passive, but is a very active collaboration between the soul
and God. If the will is inoperative, our prayers are merely
a list of the things we would like God to give us, without
ever asking us to pay the price they cost in effort and a
willingness to change. Prayer is dynamic, but only when we
cooperate with God through surrender. The man who decides to
pray for release from the slavery of carnal pleasures must
be prepared, in every part of his being, to utilise the
strength which God will give him and to work unreservedly
for a complete freedom from the sin. In dealing with other
men it is possible to have one's cake and eat it, but with
God that is impossible.
It is not difficult to
understand why many people do not pray, at all. As a workman
can become so interested in what he is doing as not to hear
the noonday whistle, so the egotist can become so
self-infatuated as to be unconscious of anything outside of
himself. The suggestion that there is a reality beyond him,
a power and an energy that can transform and elevate him,
strikes him as absurd. Just as there are tone-deaf men who
are dead to music and colour-blind men who are dead to art,
so the egotists are Deity-blind, that is, dead to the vision
of God. They say they cannot pray, and they are right, they
cannot. Their self-centredness has paralysed them. There is
also some truth in their statement that they "do not need
prayer", because they do not want to be any better than they
are - their purpose is to remain unchanged, and this
stultification can be accomplished by themselves alone.
Animals do not need prayer, either, for none of them has a
capacity for self-transcendence, which man has. A man is the
only creature in the world who can become more than he is,
if he freely wills to grow. The man who boasts that he is
his own creator need never acknowledge dependence on God; he
who affirms that he has never done anything wrong has no
need of a Saviour. Before such egotists can pray, their
selfishness must be corrected. Many refuse to correct it -
not because they fear what they will become if they do, but
because they cannot face the surrenders they would have to
make before they could be elevated to a higher level of
peace and joy.
There must always be a
relationship between the gift and the recipient - there is
no point in giving anyone a treasure he cannot use. A father
would not give a boy with no talent for music a Stradivarius
violin. Neither will God give to egocentrics those gifts and
powers and energies which they never propose to put to work
in the transformation of their lives and souls.