Here is a personal view from John Hodgkinson ) me, prayer is an expression of the human spirit, reaching out in love and concern. In The Age of Gaia, James Lovelock quotes Gergory Bateson: ‘The individual mind is immanent, but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. The larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by God, but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social systems and planetary ecology.’ The Jesuit priest and scientist, Teilhard de Chardin, coined the word ‘noosphere’ [from the Greek nous, mind] to describe this envelope of thought that seems. to encompass the earth, and is like a great network linking together all the individual sparks of consciousness.
Carl Jung created the term ‘The Collective Unconscious’, by which he meant that part of the mind or consciousness which is an inheritance from the past. In the same way that the body has remnants from its past history of development, so does the mind. There is the rich symbolism and inherited memory of past experience that reaches us in dreams and in our imagination, but which is stored deep down in our unconscious. Jung also uses the word ‘synchronicity’ to account for the seeming coincidences in our lives, which may well be the result of the linking of our minds/spirits with the rest of creation.
Telepathy must now be regarded as an accepted phenomenon. The African bushmen, relatively untouched by modern civilization, have preserved their natural instincts of telepathy and direction finding. Perhaps prayer draws from similar latent human powers: according to the intensity of our love and concern, we can radiate a power for good or evil, bringing another factor into every situation. This may be a form of telepathy, even kinetic in its power, and unhindered by distance. In addition to this, we may recognise that the heightening of our own consciousness must affect the total consciousness of the world. The prayers of religious orders in their isolated strongholds may indeed influence the decisions of nations.
Such prayer may be restricted by our selfishness and limited vision. However, prayer linked with meditation upon God would, in our terms, lift our thoughts to all the high ideals which are symbolised by the word God. And so we could draw upon the rich heritage of the past, the prayers of many cultures and nations, expressed in the convictions and images of their own times, but still full of spiritual power to us, for whom poetry and parables can be the vehicles of truth.
Traditional teaching on prayer has emphasised the need for praise and confession before intercession. This is based on experience. We find and meditation, and this leads us to put our own house in order and enhances the intensity and effectiveness of our love and concern for others.
Such prayer should lead to action, for in the end prayer is the totality of the life that each one of us lives. As John Donne says:
No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine. If a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Thoughts, actions and desires radiate from us like ripples on the surface of a pond, and our influence for better or for worse is incalculable. Prayer is the intent that our influence shall be for good, and in our Western tradition this is achieved by the ‘Imitation of Christ’. By ‘Christ? we mean the ideal man, as perceived in Jesus of Nazareth, where human nature is fulfilled in the spirit, and in universal love. This is where we start, but ultimately we can learn from the religious experience of all mankind. 0 inspiration through worship ~ ~~ —* =.