PRAYER

an act of communication by humans with the sacred or holy-God, the gods, the transcendent realm, or supernatural powers. Found in all religions in all times, prayer may be a corporate or personal act utilizing various forms and techniques. Prayer has been described in its sublimity as "an intimate friendship, a frequent conversation held alone with the Beloved" by St. Teresa of vila, a 16th-century Spanish mystic. a petition or other address by a human being to God or a god in word or thought. Found in all religions throughout history, prayer may be a personal or corporate act. Prayer seems to have originated independently of magic, although their paths perpetually crossed and indeed intermingled as they developed. The characteristic bodily attitudes (standing, kneeling, crouching, prostration, bowing of the head) and position of the hands (raised, outstretched, folded, crossed, clasped) associated with the act of praying are seen to signify an inward attitude of submission, homage, and devotion, but may also represent a survival of magical techniques designed to defend against a taboo or against a danger from the superhuman being. Communication with divine beings in prayer is carried on in the same way as ordinary social intercourse, whether the divine being is a natural force (e.g., a rain god), a patron of human activity (e.g., a goddess of childbirth), an ancestor, or the highest power of all, the god of heaven and the creator. Thus the terms of address "Father," "Mother," "Lord," "King," are used in prayer, as are such forms of speech as confession of sins, requests, thanks, praise, reference to presents (sacrifice), or the promise of presents (a vow) if a request made in prayer is fulfilled. A characteristic feature of prayer at its primitive level is the desire to be free from earthly ills and dangers and to gain earthly goods. This primitive prayer, whose simple forms are found among preliterate peoples, lived on into the ancient civilizations, where it developed from its spontaneous and free expression into fixed formularies. Another development was the hymn, which gradually escaped from ritual rigidity and formality into pure contemplation of God's working in nature and reached its highest point in the hymns to the sun of the Egyptian king Ikhnaton. As religion became more spiritual and moral, man's prayer life developed comparably. Requests for earthly goods assumed much less importance and in some cases disappeared completely, while prayers for spiritual and moral qualities, for the knowledge and love of God, and for union with him came to the fore. Confession of sin, praise and thanksgiving, and expressions of trust and acceptance of the will of God also predominated. On a higher level, there arose the practice of wordless prayer, often called "spiritual prayer" or "prayer of the heart," the holy silence, which mystics experience as the purest form of adoration of the deity. Public as well as private prayer is found at all stages in the development of religion. Among primitive peoples communal prayer takes the form of responses by the community to the prayers of their representative, who may be the head of a household, a chieftain, or a priest. An elaborate development of such communal prayer is found in Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70) and in Christianity, which carried on the Jewish tradition. Prayer in public worship is, first and foremost, praise of God for the creation and for the redemption. After praise comes intercessory prayer for the needs of God's people and all of mankind. The apogee of communal prayer in Christianity is the Lord's Prayer (q.v.), which combines the chief petitions used by Jesus' Jewish contemporaries. Its central feature is the prayer for the coming of the Kingdom of God. A parallel prayer in Buddhism is the following: "May every living thing, movable or unmovable, tall, big, or medium-sized, clumsy or refined, visible or invisible, near or far, already born or aspiring to birth-may all beings have a happy heart." The four prophetic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism, teach the observance of a daily set form of prayer for certain individuals, in addition to spontaneous private prayer and public worship in common. Every male Jew must twice a day recite the Shema, the commandment to love Yahweh as the only true God, and the so-called Prayer of 18 Requests ('Amida), also simply called "prayer" (Tefilla), which combines praise, thanksgiving, and petition. The latter must be recited three times a day by women, slaves, and children, as well as by men. The canonical hours of the Christian Church, which developed out of these obligatory Jewish prayers, are said or sung communally by monks and nuns in convent chapels and said privately by secular priests. In the Anglican Communion and in Lutheran churches a simplified form of the canonical hours is used as a congregational service. The Islamic salat, more closely related to the obligatory Jewish prayers, is performed five times a day (at dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, immediately after sunset, and about two hours later) after the call to prayer made from the minaret. Ritual ablutions take place before the prayer. Strict regulations govern both the recital of the texts (the first sura of the Qur'an, a prayer of praise, a confession of faith, a benediction of the prophet and the faithful) and the bodily postures (standing, bowing, prostration, crouching, raising or stretching out the hands, etc.). Similar recitations of formulas take place in Zoroastrianism. In all these religions, further, the repetitions of obligatory prayer formulas are regarded as particularly meritorious. Additional reading The classical work is still that of F. Heiler, Das Gebet, 5th ed. (1923), which includes a bibliography and defends the theory of religious syncretism. R. Boccassino (ed.), La preghiera, 3 vol. (1967), is a historical and psychological study of prayer and includes a useful bibliography. G. van der Leeuw, Phnomenologie der Religion (1933; Eng. trans., Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 1963), is an excellent overview and general introduction of the psychology of prayer. Also of a psychological bent are William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); and H.U. von Balthasar, Das betrachtende Gebet (1955; Eng. trans., Prayer, 1961). For prayer in various religions, in addition to La preghiera, one should refer to M.P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion, 2 vol. (1941-50; Eng. trans., A History of Greek Religion, 2nd ed., 1963); A. Falkenstein and W. von Soden, Summerische und akkadische Hymnen und Gebete (1953); G.C. Lounsbery, La Mditation bouddhique (1935; Eng. trans., Buddhist Meditation in the Southern School, 1950); E. Conze, Buddhist Meditation (1956); and R.C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi (1956) and The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (1961). For a bibliography on biblical prayer, see "Prire," Dictionnaire de la Bible, suppl. 8, pp. 604-606 (1968). I. Elbogen, Der jdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, 4th ed. (1962), is a classic on Jewish prayer. This can be supplemented by A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and Its Development (1967). On the origins of Christian prayer, see A. Hamman, La Prire, 2 vol. (1959-63). Kenneth Leech, True Prayer (1980), is an Anglo-Catholic introduction to Christian spirituality.