Editorial October 20, 1951 Issue

PRAYER AND DESIRE

Helen Wood Bauman

"Desire is prayer," writes Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 1). Probably nothing ever written has defined prayer more tersely or more understandably than these three words. Desire is the very heart of prayer, the essential animus which makes prayer a vital and healing force. Desire lifts worship above ritualism and leaves no place for hypocrisy. Without genuine desire to know God's will and to express it, true prayer is lacking. Words and even actions may seem to conceal lack of spiritual desire, but nothing can cover up its unfruitfulness, its inability to demonstrate the power of Spirit in healing men of their ills and limitations.

Either desire for Truth is present in thought or it is not, and one's prayers in Christian Science are effective in the measure of the actual strength of spiritual desire that enters into them. Spiritual desire is evidence that Truth is acting upon the seeming human consciousness, attracting thought to things divine and away from the blighting beliefs of materialism. In fact, the vitality of our right desire shows to what extent we are letting God work in us, and it determines the haste with which we put off the mortal sense of existence for the divine in proof that Spirit, God, is All.

Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 11), "We know that a desire for holiness is requisite in order to gain holiness; but if we desire holiness above all else, we shall sacrifice everything for it." Here we learn of the requirement for invariably answered prayer—desire which is pure enough to impel the abandonment of every false belief that would conceal the true concept desired.

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