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.

Prayer in Christian Science is not escapism. It doesn't coax us from reality but stirs us to see all that actually is: Mind and its infinite goodness. Leading us to accept only the good as the real, prayer simplifies our thought. Whereas sense information, imposing on us a mix of opposites—hope and fear, progress and stagnation, happiness and misery—is complicating and confusing.

Christ Jesus proved the potency of prayer. He recognized, though, that those around him did not always pray effectively. When his disciples failed to heal the individual "lunatick, and sore vexed,"^{Matt. 17:15;} he told them such works demanded faith backed up by something else. It's certain his students had tried to heal case, but it seems they overlooked the needful accompaniment. Mrs. Eddy, quoting Jesus' reply to them, adds a perceptive analysis: "This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting' (refraining from admitting the claims of the senses)."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 222;}

Our prayer too is strengthened by fasting, by rejecting the claims of the senses. If the effect of our prayer seems minimal, we might ask ourselves, Who or what is telling me so? Physical sense. Our highest spiritual prayer leaves out sense evidence either as a focus or as final proof of an answer. Though prayer satisfies and blesses human existence, its real answer is our conviction of Spirit's entirety and unbroken presence.

Ideally, prayer is listening to rather than informing God. It's easier to hear if we're not attending to the five disputers of His allness—divine Love is best heard when the senses are not heard at all.

Prayer means acknowledging perfect God and perfect man. It means negating anything claiming to contradict this reality. Prayer undergirds our confidence. If we're still worrying about the solution to our problems, we haven't really finished our prayer. Prayer uncovers as fiction the sensual argument that man is caged in matter and prodded by material woes. Though prayer frees us from anxiety, deprivation, pain, business crises, or whatever, acquisition or coziness in matter is not the goal of prayer. Primarily it lifts us spiritually above the fog of material living to see man's true life and immaculate selfhood.

Drinking in the teachings of Christian Science daily improves the quality of our prayer. It lessens its petitioning aspect, and we find affirming and acknowledging the pure truth of being becomes increasingly natural. Opening out spiritually, our prayer drops sensebased thoughts. Our human awareness of metaphysical truths yields to Truth's self-assertion and affirmation. We gain priceless glimpses of Truth, Love, affirming and knowing and sustaining its own unchanging presence. This absolute consciousness of reality evidences the presence and care of divine Love itself. In this way our prayers include their own answer!

A heartfelt realization that God is All, overruling the senses' denial of this, has divine power. It heals illness and wrongdoing. It crystallizes for us the reality of all things. Mrs. Eddy, prayerful all her life, writes of instances of her instantaneous healing work, "Certain self-proved propositions pour into my waiting thought in connection with these experiences; and here is one such conviction: that an acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power nothing else can. An incontestable point in divine Science is, that because God is All, a realization of this fact dispels even the sense or consciousness of sin, and brings us nearer to God, bringing out the highest phenomena of the ALL-MIND."^{Unity of Good, p. 7.} Through Christian Science we have well-marked guidelines to purer, more spiritual and healing, prayer.

Geoffrey J. Barratt