© 2014 Linda Buselli
© 2014 The Urantia Book Fellowship
More than thirty years ago, as one of the original editors of the Urantian Journal, I decided to do an issue on prayer, and I asked a number of people in the Urantia community to submit articles on the subject. Every person I asked looked embarrassed and stammered out virtually the same answer: “Uh, I don’t pray, I worship.” People finally donated articles, but only if they could write about worship as well as prayer. No one was comfortable enough with the subject of prayer in itself to deal with it. And one person, a well-respected reader, said: “Prayer? Why Bother? God knows everything already anyway.”
The answer shocked me, but somehow didn’t surprise me, because since becoming a Urantia Book reader, I had had my own problems with prayer. I had been a pray-er since childhood. I was brought up Catholic, and while I couldn’t ever get interested in the saints or Mary, I became devoted to Jesus. I prayed regularly and relied on it for help as a young woman. For example, in college I lived across the street from the church, and made it a regular practice each evening to stop there for a few minutes of prayer.
But when I read The Urantia Book, I virtually stopped praying. I became self-conscious about talking to Jesus for the first time in my life. Prayer was no longer a refuge and refueling time; it was a self-examination to be sure I was doing it ‘correctly’. I hungered for something, for that closeness with Jesus that I had known through prayer, but the joy was gone, and I didn’t know how to reclaim it.
I believe this self-consciousness affects other readers also. This became apparent in the discussions regarding prayers for a terminally ill friend. This is from one letter: “…I have a problem with prayers…not that I don’t say them all the time.” And later, “The hardest thing I had to do when I discovered The Urantia Book was to pray.” Those might have been my exact words.
But why? The Urantia Book certainly uses a lot of pages telling us to pray, how to do it, and even how Jesus did it and how he felt about it. The authors must certainly have considered it to be of great importance to us. Then why did I and others stop praying? Or is there a lot about prayer that the book didn’t tell us—couldn’t tell us—that can be discovered by a sincere prayer, more particularly a mortal prayer, who because of his very nature is going to have a different experience with prayer than the super-mortal revelators?
The Urantia Book says on page 1616: “Prayer is designed to make man less thinking, but more realizing; it is not designed to increase knowledge but rather to expand insight.” [UB 143:7.4] Almost accidentally in 1992, I began a personal adventure in and with prayer, which I would like to share with you.
In October of that year I heard about a young man who had been diagnosed with cancer. As Reiki practitioners, my husband and I sent some healing energy his way even though we had never met him. By chance, a friend introduced me to him on Christmas Eve. He was in pain, but it was the look in his eyes that disturbed me more. I went home and began to pray for him on a daily basis and asked the study group to pray for him also. I didn’t ask for a physical cure. My only request was that he somehow feel God’s love, no matter what happened. I figured this would fall within the guidelines for prayer set out by The Urantia Book.
But I began to do something more. At first I pictured him being flooded with love and light until he literally glowed, until all the shadows of pain and illness and despair were transcended by the light. And then one day I brought Christ Michael into it. Thereafter, I pictured Michael with his hands on this man’s shoulders, looking into his eyes, and communicating directly with him. I visualized Michael laying his hands on this man’s head in a healing gesture, and sometimes holding him in his arms like a child and just loving him. Somehow the inclusion of Michael brought a new dimension into it for me, a new kind of relationship, something involving the three of us.
A month later I received a phone call from his friend. She had spoken with him and he made this comment to her. “The funniest thing has happened. Lately, for the first time in my life, I am beginning to feel loved,” this from a man who did not know he was being prayed for. A few months later his friend called again and reported that he had told her that every morning and every evening he felt a warmth come over him that stayed with him as long as half an hour. And then she said to me, “Do you pray for him in the morning?” “Yes.” “Then I’m the night shift!”
One of the reasons why Peter, James, and John, who so often accompanied Jesus on his long night vigils, never heard Jesus pray, was because their Master so rarely uttered his prayers as spoken words. Practically all of Jesus’ praying was done in the spirit and in the heart—silently. [UB 144:4.10]
I have continued to pray for people in this manner. I visualize the person in close personal communion with Christ Michael, and I allow love to flow through me to them. Most often there are no words formed in my mind, and I find I don’t need them. The cry of the child to the parent is enough, and Michael responds. I have prayed for a good many people I don’t know, and in most cases, I never learn anything regarding their subsequent condition. But it doesn’t matter because now I know from personal experience that love gets through and that it promotes healing at all levels of the personality.
This has given me a new understanding of what happens when we pray. First of all, if you regard prayer only as a ‘petition’ you miss the richness of the partnership of yourself with God. I now define prayer as the conscious awareness of the actualization of the potentials acquired in worship. Prayer can be more than a communion of me with deity. It is the partnership of the two of us to bring into being a third reality—the actualization of a potential resident in the Supreme. Normally I don’t think we have any concept of the power inherent in this partnership. When we pray we tend to think of ourselves as “power-less”; but if we view this as a partnership, we activate enormous potentials. In partnership with God we are not powerless; we act as a conduit for the living experience of love, the single most powerful force in the universe. We can act as a focusing device for this love, and this brings up another interesting aspect of prayer.
Dr. Carolyn Myss, author of the book Anatomy of the Spirit, tells the story of a woman in one of her workshops. This woman had a friend who had a near-death experience as the result of a traffic accident. She apparently left her body and floated nearby, listening to some drivers around her complaining bitterly about being delayed. But from the fifth car back, a brilliant white light suddenly shot out and arced over into her mangled body trapped in the car. Curious, the accident victim found herself seated next to the driver of this car who was praying as hard as she could for whomever was injured in the wreck. The injured woman felt called back into her body; but before she went, she memorized the license plate of the pray-er’s car. After she recovered she traced the woman who had prayed for her and paid her a visit to thank her.
The function of mind in prayer cannot be underplayed. It may be why The Urantia Book spends so much time telling us how to frame our petitions “effectively.” (By the way, I have always wondered about the authors’ definition of ‘effective.’) I think the purpose of focusing verbally and visually is to mentally and spiritually direct this energy of love more fully, just as that woman focused her mind and heart in sending help to the accident victim.
I long ago simplified everything by sending love. I focus this love like a living stream on the consciousness of the individual I’m praying for. And I add love as it is personalized by passing through me. I visualize it as a stream because this is what The Urantia Book says: “By opening the human end of the channel of the God-man communication, mortals make immediately available the ever- flowing stream of divine ministry to the creatures of the worlds.” [UB 146:2.4] When we pray for our fellows, we become an active part of that stream of service ministry.
I also use a form of prayer to send love to individuals who may or may not need healing as such. Here is one of the ways I have found to help resolve conflicts between two people, or to help a person improve some aspect of her life. I visualize a person, or two if there is a conflict, in Michael’s presence of love. If you are having a difficulty with someone, giving them a hug during this visualization can help. I have seen people change for the better when ‘prayed for’ in this way.
If you are saying to yourself “Wait a minute, this isn’t prayer.” Then I ask you what is it? Isn’t it the partnership of you and God bringing aid to someone who needs it? Too often, prayer is defined as self-interest and we’re afraid that if we pray even for someone else, we’re doing it for our own selfish reasons, that what we want may not be God’s will. Praying for or sending love simplifies things.
But aren’t we supposed to be more specific so that our unseen friends know how we would like to help this individual? How much more specific can you be than focusing your entire heart and mind in sending love to this person to be used according to their need at every level of their being? Love is the universal constant.
There is a direct relationship between healing and prayer. I’m a Reiki Master, and I wouldn’t dream of sending love, which is how I define what I do, without divine help. I am not a healer, I am a practitioner of the healing arts. The combination of the patient’s will and the Father’s will determine the healing. A healing session for me is a constant focusing of the divine energy of love into the individual being treated. Since I am in partnership with God, and subject to His will, I think of this as being as much a prayer session as a healing session. And I always include Michael.
Your persistence, however, (in prayer) is not to win favor with God but to change your earth attitude and to enlarge your soul’s capacity for spirit receptivity. [UB 144:2.5]
The soul’s spiritual capacity for receptivity determines the quantity of heavenly blessings which can be personally appropriated and consciously realized as an answer to prayer. [UB 144:4.4]
As part of a Reiki treatment, I ask the patient to take five minutes a day for two weeks to pray for or send love to another person, preferably a different person each day. I tell them that I believe their willingness to give determines their capacity to continue to receive, and that this practice will speed their reception of divine energy. What I don’t tell them is that I hope they will enjoy this experience enough to make it a regular part of their daily routine indefinitely, that even if they start with the motive of expediting their own healing, they will discover the joy of helping others through prayer. I have found that the importance of what I preach to someone pales beside their own living experience with that truth.
Prayer, when used in this way, comes under the heading of service. If we think of the motivation of service as the desire to serve our fellow men, then praying with the same motivation is service also. In fact, prayer and service are inextricably linked when prayer is so defined. Why must our vision of prayer be restricted to the term ‘self-interest’? Ideal prayer goes beyond the self. It reaches from the divine source of love, through us, to others. Every time we engage in prayer, we actually create a greater receptivity for the flow of this divine love of the Father. It nourishes our ‘roots’ and flows on to nourish others.
Here is another link between prayer and service. Have you ever considered that we may be the answer to our own prayers? Jesus told the apostles: “When you pray for the sick and afflicted, do not expect that your petitions will take the place of loving and intelligent ministry to the necessities if these afflicted ones.” [UB 146:2.11]
The Father uses us to bestow loving service on our fellows, and in that fashion we can become a living answer to a prayer for help from another. A good friend of mine said to me: “Every time you perform a genuine service for another, you answer a prayer, spoken or unspoken.” On hearing this another friend remarked “I always consider that in what I ask for others, I might be the answer.” Even what I write today is the result of my own request for articles on prayer all those years ago.
The Urantia Book states that prayer “…is the most potent spiritual growth stimulus.” [UB 91:8.11] This confused me for a long time because I thought worship played that role. In what way is our spiritual growth more stimulated by prayer than by worship? I truly believe that as children of the Supreme we cannot grow without helping others to grow. Our spiritual growth is not an isolated event because we are not isolated from our fellows. Prayer used in a positive fashion, that of helping others to experience the presence of God, is not only a growth stimulus for them, but absolutely essential for our own spiritual growth. And this is why I link the use of prayer with the actualization of divine potential in time and space that The Urantia Book refers to as Supremacy. We will not find the Supreme separately. We all grow together in and with the Supreme.
This concept of the Supreme has affected my idea of family as well. I can guarantee you that if you pray regularly for someone, he becomes family to you. I first recognized this when I began praying for the young man many years ago. From the beginning I thought “That man could be my son.” And then one day “This man is my son.” I had actually developed a parental attitude toward a person I had met only once.
Sometimes I think of things this way: worship is the relationship between Father and child, but including another in prayer creates a family. This is an especially beautiful way to begin to recognize a stranger, even an ‘enemy’, as a brother. The Urantia Book tells us that love is infectious. I have not been able to pray for a person, send them God’s love, without catching it myself. “It is not so important to love all men today as it is that each day you learn to love one more human being.”[UB 100:4.6]
Prayer is one way to do just that.
Until now I’ve been talking about praying for others. I think most of us still find it much easier to do that than to pray for ourselves. Self-interest and selfishness have very similar definitions, and neither is regarded as spiritually fragrant. The warnings in The Urantia Book seem so severe that for a long time after beginning my prayer odyssey I still didn’t include myself in my prayers. I was benefiting from all the love flowing through me as I prayed for others, and often didn’t think of myself at all. But sometimes I did, and I still didn’t know how to reconcile my cry for help with feelings of selfishness.
I have come to understand that how we approach prayer can be determined by our concept of the Father and conditioned by our own experience with parenthood. Are you a parent? Do you remember your own two-year-old coming to you, placing his hands on your knee and looking at you with a wordless plea for help? He couldn’t put it into words for you or himself, but what was your response? Even if he could have put it into words, wasn’t his cry to you vastly more important than what might have been said? And didn’t you respond instantaneously with love? Can we really be selfconscious in our approach to the Father if we’ve ever had such an experience? The cry of the child to the parent is primal, and so is the response of love. Don’t Michael and the Father know every thought in our minds, every craving in our hearts, anyway? Would you want your children to be so self-conscious that they wouldn’t come to you at all? When I realized that I wouldn’t want that to happen with my children, I assumed that the Universal Father and Christ Michael wouldn’t want that either.
I have slowly come to realize that the view of prayer as expressed by the supermortal authors of The Urantia Book is conditioned by their experiences as they hear the human petitions that are forthcoming and as these are compared to their knowledge of universe realities regarding prayer—and not from the inner human experience with prayer under conditions of total physical, intellectual, and spiritual exhaustion due to agonizing pain, fear of the unknown and apparently unfriendly universe, mental and emotional confusion and despair, and the loss of loved ones. Nor can they ever know experientially, as Urantia mortals do, the sheer joy, even ecstasy, experienced by the human who finds communion with the Father under such conditions, even when praying in a manner considered by the celestials to be primitive.
Once more I pray freely and joyously, and sometimes even for myself. I have learned to pray not only from the mind, but more from the heart. This is what prayer was to the human Jesus:
. . . Jesus never prayed as a religious duty. To him prayer was a sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving, an avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation of intellection, an ennoblement of desire, a vindication of moral decision, an enrichment of thought, an invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration of impulse, a clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a transcendental surrender of will, a sublime assertion of confidence, a revelation of courage, the proclamation of discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation of consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and the mighty mobilization of the combined soul powers to withstand all human tendencies toward selfishness, evil, and sin. . . . [UB 196:0.10]
I have come up with some of my own and very personal definitions of prayer. To me, prayer is the joy of spiritual freedom of expression, the sublime peace of a thankful heart, an adventure that reaches from time to eternity, a living partnership with God in the service of man, a mobilization of mindal and spiritual forces, a consecration of purpose, an expansion of family, a living trust in the goodness of the divine parent, an attitude of soul, a way of life. Worship nourishes me, but prayer helps to spiritually nourish others.
Prayer is the actualization of Supreme values in the bestowal of love to my fellows as I become part of the living stream of blessings that flows from the Father to his children.
Words are not adequate to express my feelings about prayer because it is an entirely and uniquely personal experience for every individual. And I do mean experience. Prayer may be studied, intellectually dissected and re-assembled, defined and re-defined, but the benefits to be derived from it can be had only by DOING it.
We can live with a prayerful consciousness of partnership with God throughout our day, in our homes, at our jobs, anywhere, any time, and with anyone. If you haven’t already begun your own adventure with prayer, I strongly suggest that you do so, to find your own personal insights into, and very human definitions of, prayer. Lose the ‘guilt trips,’ go with the flow of divine blessings, and enjoy every moment of it—so that when someone says to you “Why bother?” you will have your own answers. Thank you for letting me share mine.
Linda Buselli discovered The Urantia Book in 1971, and has been active in the Urantia community ever since. She is a member of the Orvonton Society, and currently serves on the General Council and Executive Committees of the Fellowship as Chair of the Publications Committee.