by  Alexis Carrel

In the west, reason seems very superior to intuition. We much prefer intelligence to feeling.
Also, we seek first of all to develop intelligence in ourselves.

DEFINITION OF PRAYER

Prayer seems to be essentially a tension of the spirit towards the immaterial substratum of the world. Sometimes it becomes a serene contemplation of the immanent and transcendent principle of all things. One can define it equally as an uplifting of the soul to God. As an act of love and adoration towards Him from Whom comes the wonder which is life. In fact, prayer represents the effort of man to communicate with an invisible being, creator of all that exists, supreme wisdom, strength and beauty, father and saviour of each one of us. Far from consisting in a simple recitation of formulas, true prayer represents a mystic state when the consciousness is absorbed in God. This state is not of an intellectual nature. Just as with the sense of beauty and of love, it demands no book knowledge. The simple are conscious of God as naturally as the warmth of the sun, or the perfume of a flower. But this God, so approachable by him who knows how to love, is hidden from him who knows only how to understand. Prayer finds its highest expression in a soaring of love through the obscure night of the intelligence.

HOW TO PRAY

Christianity has brought God within the reach of man. It has given Him a countenance. It has made of Him our Father, our Brother, our Saviour.
To pray it is only necessary to make the effort of reaching out towards God. This effort must be affective and not intellectual. Whether short or long, whether vocal or only mental, prayer should be like the conversation of a child with his father. One prays as one loves, with one’s whole being. Solemnity, grandeur and beauty are not necessary to the efficacy of prayer. In judging the value of prayer by its results, our most humble words of supplication and praise seem as acceptable to the Master of all beings, as the most beautiful invocations.
One also prays by action. The accomplishment of duty is the equivalent of prayer. The best way of communing with God is without doubt fully to accomplish His will. And doing God’s will manifestly consists in obeying the laws of life, as they are inscribed in our tissues, our blood and our spirit.
Prayers, which rise like a great cloud from the surface of the earth, differ from each other as much as the personalities of those who pray. But they consist of variations on two main themes: distress and love. It is entirely legitimate to implore the help of God to obtain what we need. Yet it would be absurd to ask for the gratification of a whim or for what our own effort would procure. A blind man, seated by the way-side, shouted his supplications more and more loudly in spite of those who wanted to silence him. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”, said Jesus, who was passing that way. At its loftiest, prayer ceases to be a petition. Man lays bare to the Master of all things, that he loves Him, that he thanks Him for His gifts, that he is ready to accomplish His Will, whatever it is. Prayer becomes contemplation.

WIn the west, reason seems very superior to intuition. We much prefer intelligence to feeling.
Also, we seek first of all to develop intelligence in ourselves. As to the non-intellectual activities of the spirit, such as the moral sense, the sense of beauty, and above all the sense of the holy, they are almost completely neglected. The atrophy of these fundamental activities makes the modern man a being spiritually blind. In truth, the spiritual shows itself just as indispensable to the success of life as the intellectual and the material. It is therefore urgent to revive in ourselves mental activities which, much more than intelligence, give strength to the personality. The most ignored among them is the sense of the holy.
The sense of the holy manifests itself chiefly by prayer. Prayer, like the sense of the holy, is, from all the evidence, a spiritual phenomenon. The spiritual world is beyond the reach of our techniques. By systematic observation of the man who prays we shall learn in what consists the phenomenon of prayer, the technique of its production, and its effects.

WHERE AND WHEN TO PRAY

One can pray anywhere. Whatever the place of prayer, God only speaks to the man who has established calm within himself. Inward calm depends at the same time on our organic and mental state and on the milieu in which we are plunged.
It is when prayer becomes a habit that it operates on the character. It is necessary therefore to pray frequently. Very brief thoughts or mental invocations can hold a man in the presence of God. All conduct is then inspired by prayer. Thus understood, prayer becomes a way of life.

EFFECTS OF PRAYER

Prayer is always followed by a result if made under proper conditions. Nevertheless, prayer is looked upon by modern men as a useless habit, a vain superstition, a remnant of an uncivilized existence. In truth, we are almost completely ignorant of its effects. First of all, this is because of the rarity of the prayer. The sense of holy is on the way to disappearance among civilized people. Further, prayer is often sterile. For most of those who pray are egoistic, lying, proud, Pharisees incapable of faith and love. Finally, its effects, when they occur, very often escape us. The reply to our demands and to our love is usually given in a slow, insensible and almost inaudible way. The little voice which murmurs this reply in the depths of our souls is easily smothered by the clamour of the world. The material results of prayer, they too are obscure. They are generally confounded with other phenomena. Few people, even among the priests, have thus had the chance of observing them in a precise way. The observers are often baffled by the fact that the reply is far from being always the one expected.
Nevertheless, the habit of prayer, though exceptional amongst the whole population, is relatively frequent among the groups that have remained faithful to the ancestral religion. It is within these groups that it is still possible today to study its influence.

PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS

Prayer acts on the spirit and on the body in a way which seems to depend on its quality, its intensity and its frequency. It is easy to perceive the frequency of prayer and to a certain extent its intensity. Its quality remains unknown, for we have not the means of measuring others’ faith and their capacity for love. Yet, the way in which he who prays lives can enlighten us on the quality of the invocations he puts up to God. Even when prayer is weak and consists mainly of mechanical recitations, it exerts an effect on the behavior. It strengthens at the same time the sense of the holy and the moral sense. In the centers where prayer is wont to be made, there is a  certain persistence in the sentiment of duty and of responsibility, less jealousy and wickedness, a certain kindness toward others.
When prayer is habitual and really fervent, its influence becomes very clear. It consists in a kind of mental and organic transformation. This transformation operates in a progressive way. One might say that in the depths of consciousness a flame is kindled. Man sees himself as he is. He discovers his egoism, his cupidity, his errors of judgment, his pride. He bends himself to the accomplishment of moral duty. He endeavors to acquire intellectual humility. Thus there opens before him the Kingdom of Grace. Little by little an inward appeasement is produced, a harmony of the nervous and moral activities, a greater endurance in regard to poverty, slander, worries, the capacity for enduring without enfeeblement the loss of dear ones, pain, illness, death. The calm engendered by prayer is a powerful aid to healing. Prayer leads to tranquility, to an integration of the mental activities, a sort of flowering of the personality. Sometimes heroism. It stamps its believers with a peculiar seal. The purity of the glance, the tranquility of the bearing, the serene joy of the expression, the virility of the conduct, and when necessary, the simple acceptance of the soldier’s or martyr’s death, betray the presence of the treasure hidden in the depths of the organs and the spirit. Under this influence, even the ignorant, the backward, the feeble, the poorly endowed make better use of their intellectual and moral forces. This contact with God impregnates them with peace. And peace radiates from them. And they carry peace wherever they go.

CURATIVE EFFECTS

The curative effects of prayer have chiefly attracted the attention of men. Even today, among people who pray, one speaks fairly frequently of healings obtained in answer to supplications addressed to God and His saints. It is only in the cases where all therapeutics are inapplicable or have failed, that the results of prayer can be surely proved. Prayer has sometimes, so to speak, an explosive effect. Patients have been cured almost instantaneously of affections such as lupus of the face, cancer, kidney troubles, ulcers, tuberculosis of the lungs, of the bones, of the peritoneum. The phenomenon is produced nearly always in the same way. Great pain, then the feeling of being cured. In a  few seconds, at most a few hours, the symptoms disappear and the anatomic lesions mend. The miracle is characterized by extreme acceleration of the normal processes of healing. For these phenomena to take place, it is not necessary for the patient to pray. Prayer made for another is always more fruitful than when made for oneself. It is on the intensity and the quality of the prayer that its effects seem to deepen.
What we already know for certain is that prayer produces tangible effects. However strange this may appear, we must consider as true, that whosoever asks receives, and that the door is opened to him who knocks.

MEANING OF PRAYER

To sum up, everything happens as if God listened to man and answered him. The effects of prayer are not an illusion. One must not reduce the sense of the holy to the anguish experienced by man before the dangers which encompass him and before the mystery of the universe. Nor must one make simply of prayer a sedative, a remedy against our fear of suffering, of illness and of death.
In the course of our history, prayer has been a need as elemental as that of conquering, of working, of building, or of loving. In truth, the sense of the holy appears to be an impulse from the very depths of our nature, a fundamental activity. Its variations in a human group are nearly always bound to those of other basic activities, the moral sense and character, and sometimes the sense of the beautiful.
It must be remembered, that man cannot without danger behave according to his whim. To succeed, life must be led following invariable universal rules which depend on its very structure.
Societies in which the need for prayer has disappeared are generally not far from degeneracy. That is why all civilized people – unbelievers as well as believers – must be concerned with this grave problem of the development of every basic activity of which the human being is capable.
First of all we must remember that man is an invisible whole composed of tissues, organic liquids and of consciousness. He is not therefore entirely contained within the four dimensions of time and space. For consciousness, if it dwells in our organs, at the same time extends beyond the physical continuum. On the other hand, the living body which seems to us independent of its material environment, that is to say of the physical universe, is in reality inseparable from it. For it is intimately bound to this milieu by its incessant need of the oxygen of the air and the foods provided by the earth. We are permitted to believe that we are plunged into a spiritual milieu which we could no more do without than the material universe – the earth and the air. And this milieu would be none other than the Immanent Being, in all beings and transcending them all, whom we call God. Prayer could then be considered as the agent of natural relations between consciousness and its own milieu. As a biological activity dependent upon our structure. In other words, like a normal function of our body and of our spirit.

CONCLUSION

To sum up, the sense of the holy takes on, in relation to the other activities of the spirit, a singular importance. For it puts us in communication with the mysterious immensity of the spiritual world. It is by prayer that man reaches God and that God enters into him. Prayer appears to be indispensable to our highest development. We should not look upon prayer as an act in which only the weak-minded, the beggars or cowards indulge. Man needs God as he needs water and oxygen. Joined to intuition, to the moral sense, to the sense of the beautiful and to the light of intelligence, the sense of the holy gives to the personality its full flowering. There is no doubt that fulfillment of life demands the integral development of each of our activities, physiological, intellectual, affective and spiritual. Spirit is at the same time reason and sentiment. We must therefore love the beauty of science and also the beauty of God.

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