Article July 24, 1937 Issue

"The honest standpoint of fervent desire"

LINA PLUMER CLINGEN

"When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are." These are among the first recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew regarding prayer. They clearly indicate that for effective prayer, honest motives are necessary. As a guide by which to estimate our honesty, we have Mrs. Eddy's reference on page 13 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," to "the honest standpoint of fervent desire." The importance of this quality of fervency, which, according to a dictionary definition, means to be eager, intense, glowing, is obvious. If suggestions of apathy, vagueness, and tepidity are accepted, the lukewarm attitude may prevail in individual thinking, dimming the glow of fervent desire. Such suggestions vanish when we realize that false traits have no place in God's omnipresence, and that there is no mind to deny this omnipresence or to suggest or suppose God's absence.

While fervency of desire is an honest basis for prayer, it is well for us to remember that when we desire or long for anything, we render ourselves receptive to it. So we should recognize the importance of letting intelligence and spiritual understanding, rather than personal sense, inform us of our real needs. We may believe that what we lack is health, money, home, or friends—only to find, when we admit the light of spiritual understanding into our thinking, that our prayer should be for more patience, humility, gratitude, and unswering fidelity to reveled truth, for a firmer trust in God, a higher sense of Love.

Every sincere Christian Scientist is striving to obey Jesus' solemn charge, "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils." If at any time we have failed, as the disciples did, to cast out an evil spirit, may it not be because, like them, as related in the ninth chapter of Luke, we have lacked faith and receptivity, or been intolerant or critical of other workers? If such is the case, let us humbly echo the disciple's appeal, "Lord, teach us to pray." In response to this appeal Jesus gave them the Lord's Prayer. Beginning on page 16 of Science and Health, our Leader reveals the spiritual sense of that prayer. As seen through the lens of spiritual thinking, the clause, "Give us this day our daily bread," means, "Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections." May not grace be defined as the understanding of divine Love? If we seem to need larger capacity, greater ability, wider opportunities, the joy of real achievement, we shall find they are abundantly supplied when the presence and availability of divine Love become real to us. Through the understanding of Love, human consciousness receives of Love's nature and becomes Love's witness.

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