Editorial December 3, 1984 Issue

Prayer: magic words or holy inspiration?

WILLIAM E. MOODY

The magician says a few words—his "abracadabra" or "hocus-pocus"—and presto! A rabbit pops out of a hat, or the coin in the magician's hand disappears.

Is prayer ever considered to be something like the magician's "abracadabra"? Is there ever a suggestion that if only the right words can be found and voiced, the desired results will be automatically obtained? But this is not the way prayer actually works. Truly effective prayer isn't a matter of merely repeating certain words or phrases that might have some magical quality to them. Rather, when one prays deeply, he is fundamentally engaged in the activity of divine inspiration; spiritual truth is being revealed to human consciousness by the Christ.

Surely prayer does change things. It can produce even radical changes in human conditions. It enables one to overcome limitations. And the scientific prayer that brings to light the truth of God and of man's real being has undeniable healing power behind it. Through prayer in Christian Science, disease disappears—and this is no trick or sleight of hand. Disease vanishes into its actual nothingness, because as a mortal belief it cannot hold up in the face of truth. The spiritual fact of divine reality (the only reality), where God, good, is All-in-all, and where man is God's pure spiritual likeness, invalidates the error of disease.

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Hearing angels
December 3, 1984
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