© 1977 David Gray
© 1977 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
Prayer is self-reminding. It is like putting a letter on a clip on the inside of your front door so you will remember to mail it when you go out. Prayer is putting a note in a place where your mind will notice it, to keep yourself on the path of progress.
And prayer is getting in touch with the wisdom of the universe, making it applicable and active in our lives. An amazing and widely heralded advance in the technology of measuring time is the quartz-regulated movement, in which a tiny crystal of quartz is stimulated by a small electric current which causes it to vibrate. Because of its crystal structure, the quartz chip maintains a constant rate of vibration, so that by electronically linking the movement of the watch to the crystal we achieve great accuracy in timekeeping. Just as a mechanism is needed to apply the vibratory property of the quartz crystal to keeping time, so is prayer the means by which we tune in our consciousness to catch the accurate wisdom forecasts of the spirit within.
Have you ever tried to wipe up water with a hard, dry cellulose sponge? All it does is spread the water around. To be effective it must be immersed in water, then wrung out. Only then is the sponge pliable and absorbent.
Human beings long to experience the water of life, spirit energy, the love of God. Our spirit Father actually orders and sustains the vast universe of universes by the almighty power of his love. But unless that love is within us, as part of us, we no more experience it than a bone-dry sponge picks up spilled water.
In prayer we open our lives to the love of God, his perfect will. We acknowledge the presence and the transforming power of his spirit which dwells in our minds; we immerse our awareness in that crystal-clear presence; we are filled.
In worship, as in service to others, we express the fullness we have received from God. We experience our Father’s grace as a smile on the face of the universe; the clouds of the warm night sky are like swaddling clothes of mortal nativity, their Creators our divine parents.
A twenty-year-old woman, deaf from birth, was recently enabled to hear music for the first time in her life by the surgical implantation of a miniature electronic device in her inner ear. Imagine the thrill, the exquisite joy of her experience at the moment of revelation, as the universe of sound-only an idea, a theory in her mind before-suddenly became a pulsating, vital reality. Through prayer and worship, God becomes increasingly real to us-and we to him.
A certain recital hall manager wanted very much to break through the traditional formality of musical performances, to replace the sense of distance between audience and musician with a feeling of friendliness and involvement. As he pondered various ways of creating bridges between audience and musician, he decided to put a beautiful, richly designed Persian prayer carpet on the steps to the platform, physically extending from the stage to the floor of the hall. Look into the night sky and think of our Father stretching out a glowing carpet of stars from Paradise, inviting us on a journey to find him. God always does his part in reaching out to us; prayer and worship accept and reciprocate that love, and together with service, unfailingly expand our capacity to receive and to give more love.
—David Gray