The Nature of Prayer

Abstract

Prayer is the intercourse of the human spirit with a reality, or being, realized as greater-than-human and either conceived or treated as personal. This definition, it will be observed, leaves open the question whether the object of religion is always reflectively known to be personal; yet it regards prayer, the characteristic religious experience, as a personal and personifying consciousness, the worshipper's awareness of superhuman reality in vital connection with him, the worshipper. As William James has said, “The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications has shown itself to consist, everywhere and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related.” Or, to quote Jevons, “rites and ceremonies, sacrifices and altars exist” for the sake of “the prayer in which man's soul rises or seeks to rise to God.”This paper considers the nature of prayer thus conceived as the expression of intercourse with God—or with the gods.