| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 7 |
Page 6 |
A writer defines religion as friendship with God. If this be a true definition, what, then, is prayer? When you visit your friend and are welcomed, and you sit together for an hour or for an evening, do you spend the time in making requests, asking favours of each other? Do you devote the hour to telling your friend about your troubles, your hard work, your disappointments, your pinching needs, and asking him to help you? Rather, if you have learned the true way to be a friend, you scarcely even refer to you worries, anxieties, and losses. You would spend the hour, rather, in sweet companionship, in communion together on subjects dear to you both. There might not be a single request for help in all the hours you are together. There might be moments of silence, too, when not a word would be spoken, and these might be the sweetest moments of all. Our prayer should be friendship’s communion with God. It should not be all requests or cries for help. When we enter our inner chamber and shut the door and pray to our Father, it should be as when two friends sit together and commune in confidence and love.
“When thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father.” But some one says, “It would be impossible, with the duties that are required of us, in our busy days to spend large portions of time in the inner chamber, even with God.” There is a way to live in which in a sense we shall be always in our inner chamber, with the door shut, in communion with our Father. This must have been what St. Paul meant when he said, “Prayer without ceasing.” There never was a more strenuous Christian worker than St. Paul. He certainly was not on his knees “without ceasing.” But we can learn to be in our inner chamber with God through all our busiest days. That is, we can commune with him while we are at our work, and literally shut our door to pray to our Father. Jesus prayed that way. His days were all days of prayer. He was in communion with his Father when he was working in his carpenter’s shop, when he was teaching by the seaside, when he was performing miracles of healing in people’s homes or upon the streets, when he was walking about the country. There really never was a moment when he was not in the inner chamber, with the door shut, praying to his Father.
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