• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 613 0

lesson in the art of prayer—and prayer, be it remembered, is our only means of returning to our communion with God. To the casual reader this Beatitude might sound like a mere conventional religious generalization, even a sententious platitude of the kind too often favored by people who are anxious to be edifying without having anything in particular to say. As a matter of fact, prayer is the only real action in the full sense of the word, because prayer is the only thing that changes one’s character. A change in character, or a change in soul, is a real change. When that kind of change takes place, you become a different person and, therefore, for the rest of your life you act in a different way from the way in which you have previously acted, and in which you would have continued to act had you not prayed. In other words, you become a different man. The amount of the difference may be only very slight for each time that you pray: nevertheless it is there, for you cannot pray without making yourself different in some degree. If you should get a very strong realization of the Presence of God with you, it would make a very great and dramatic change in your character, so that, in the twinkling of an eye, your outlook, your habits, your whole life, in fact, would completely change in every respect. Many such cases are on record, both in the East and in the West; the genuine cases of what used to be called “conversion” being instances in point. Because the change caused by prayer is a radical one, Jesus refers to it as being “born again.” Since it makes you into a different man, it is actually as though you had been born anew. The word “prayer” should be understood as including any form of communion or attempted communion with God, whether vocal, or purely mental. It includes both affirmative and invocatory prayer, each of which is good in its own place; meditation; and the highest of all forms of prayer, which is contemplation.

In the absence of prayer, all that you can do is to express the character that you have, in whatever circumstances you find yourself. So much is this the case that most of your friends would be prepared to predict beforehand what your conduct would be in various kinds of crises that could arise. Prayer, by changing your character, makes a new reaction possible.

The great essential for success in prayer—for obtaining that sense of the Presence of God, which is the secret of healing oneself and others too; of obtaining inspiration, which is the breath of the soul; of acquiring spiritual development—is that we first attain some degree of true peace of mind. This true, interior soul-peace was known to the mystics as serenity, and they are never tired of telling us that serenity is the grand passport to the Presence of God—the sea as smooth as glass that is round about the Great White Throne. This is not to say that one cannot overcome even the most serious difficulties by prayer without having any serenity at all, for of course one can. In fact, the greater the trouble one is in, the less serenity he will able to have, and serenity itself is only to be had by prayer, and by the forgiving of others, and of oneself. But, serenity you must have, before you can make any true spiritual progress; and it is serenity, that fundamental tranquility of soul, that Jesus refers to by the word “peace”—the peace that passes all human understanding.

The peacemakers spoken of in this Beatitude are those who make or bring about this true peace, or serenity, in their own souls, for it is they who surmount limitation and become actually, and not merely potentially, the children of God. This condition of mind is the objective at which Jesus aims in all the instructions which he gives us in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you…let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” As long as there is fear, or resentment, or any trouble in your heart, that is to say, as long as you lack serenity, or peace, it is not possible for you to attain very much.

Some degree of