Editorial September 22, 1973 Issue

Prayer Overruling the Senses

Geoffrey J. Barratt

Always, prayer can change something wrong. It can change our thinking—for the better. It does so when we pray rightly. Actually prayer can't change anything but our thinking. And it doesn't need to, because God and His creation are perfect and unchanging. Turning our thought from belief in physical sense evidence to an understanding of God's unending care for us, it fulfills its vital purpose. And moral renewal and healing result.

What is prayer? It's opening our thought to Mind and its teeming ideas and closing the door on the talk of the senses. They may be telling us of a malfunctioning body or business. But Christian Science insists we don't have to be impressed. We pray more effectively as we're not. Also, if we let the problems that are channeled to us through the senses creep into our prayer, we're more easily tempted to look out through the senses to check if it has worked. This sensuality limits our prayer.

But the more spiritual our prayer, the more effective it is. Through prayer we throw off bullying sense arguments that we're suffering from a virus or struggling to make a living, or whatever, and we become more positive of God's all-presence. Prayer brings clearer sights of divine Love and its emanation, man and the universe, and it works by adjusting our misconceptions of them. This is its main aim, rather than to remove inflammation or an avalanche of debts—which, however, it can certainly do.

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