The Power of Prayer"If we understood that every word, thought, and action was a prayer sent right to God, a request sent right to the heavens, I believe we would change much of what we think, say, and do."
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Edited by Dale Salwak
New World Library, 1998
218 pages (hardcover), 240 pages
(paperback)
Reviewed by SYD BAUMEL
IF PRAYER is a state of heightened awareness of the sacred, then this small collection of essays on prayer is a prayer itself.
Forget any limiting notions you have about the p word. As deconstructed, reconstructed, and resurrected by the volume's 29 multifaith contributors (from Mother Teresa to Marianne Williamson, Jimmy Carter to Brooke Medicine Eagle), prayer is anything a human being does with spiritual intent or awareness.
For Neale Donald Walsch of Converations with God fame, even that definition isn't inclusive enough. Life itself is a continuous prayer, Walsch argues. "If we understood that every word, thought, and action was a prayer sent right to God, a request sent right to the heavens," he warns, "I believe we would change much of what we think, say, and do." And we would not be so surprised when life gives us what we tacitly pray for every day rather than what we explicitly pray for in the foxhole or the pew.
Assuming we formally pray at all.
"The special problem of prayer for the contemporary person," Maurice Friedman observes, "is the feeling of self-consciousness or awareness that I am praying." That's a regrettably far cry from the "unreserved spontaneity" Martin Buber identified as "the principle presupposition of genuine prayer."
But then The Power of Prayer is a meditation on so many varieties of prayer, it can help most any reader awaken or deepen the prayer principle in their lives.
Including those who wonder if there is anyone out there to pray to.
Enter Albert Low, who seeks to bridge the conceptual gap between theistic prayer and atheistic meditation. For the 19th century Russian priest, Theophan the Recluse, Low points out, the essence of prayer was "lifting the heart towards God" and "standing before God." Is this so different, Low argues, from zazen meditation which "could be said to be, at its best, sitting in the presence. Its purpose is just to be still and know."
Whether that still communion is with God, self, or anything in between, The Power of Prayer will make you wonder if it's possible to live a full life without tapping into that reserve as frequently as you can.
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