Praying for people, and being prayed for

I once had a young Muslim woman for a student in English as a second language. When I asked her about what she liked to do in her free time, she said, “I love to pray!” She said it with a sincerity that moved me, and I didn’t doubt that what she said was true.

I love to pray. Though I have at times felt like prayer was a duty or a burden, those times were when I wasn’t really succeeding at praying. It was more a thing with myself, a declaration of things I had been told that, if I knew were true, would heal me. But I didn’t know they were true, so my declaration didn’t have any effect.

Mary Baker Eddy says that the key to healing people is love. That is a thing I struggled for years to comprehend, mostly because I didn’t know how to make myself love more than I was already loving. Now I sometimes get it – it works when I don’t leave God out of prayer. I let myself feel loved by the divine presence of Love, and let that Love spill out in my love of others. So when I pray, I get to be lifted up in Love. I get to soar with it, and be in love, and have my thought lifted in love towards whoever I’m praying for.

What is amazing to me when I pray for someone is the love that endures afterwards. It is a spirit-bond, a sense of deep joy at the contemplation of the existence of the person. It is a gift to me – I get to keep it. And it feels just like love, the kind everyone wonders if they will ever find. And the more of that love I have, the more accessible the healing prayer.

Now here’s the really cool thing: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of you.” When people share the Christ presence, it generates for all of them more of that pure love that heals. And they get to keep it, and use it. I am part of an ecumenical spiritual formation group, and over a period of several months, we have prayed together, for each other, many times. At this point, I don’t even need to gather with them to reap the fruit of the Christ presence. I just invoke them in my thought, and there is the love. I can use it to get to the heart of prayer, where healing takes place.

Here is a description of my process of praying for someone. First, I “go into the closet.” In anticipation of the joy and peace that will arise, I retire from all of the trains of thought which say they need to be resolved first. Next, I let God “deliver me into the large place” – the place in consciousness in which I begin to grasp an inkling of the scope of the Infinite. Then I carry my thought of the person into the light of Truth and Love, and bear witness to what God reveals to me about that person. I get to experience the depth of God’s love for that person and the specific provisions of Love to meet the current need. I get to see God’s face in God’s image and likeness.

Also, when people have prayed for me, I have felt the same deliverance of love – They have gone into the closet and been delivered into the large place, and then the influx of love that they bring back floods to me, bringing something I couldn’t have generated by myself.

I think this is a taste of the Holy Ghost which the apostles gave to people when they traveled to see them. There’s a part in Acts where it tells about some of the faithful who have heard of the Holy Ghost but don’t know for sure if it exists. Then the Apostles come and give it to them, and then they have it. Prayer, Christ, faith – these things can be total enigmas to those who haven’t experienced them. But once we have, it is our duty and joy to share them as we can.