Am I “Praying Aright?”

By Jeff Miller

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Ernest Holmes promises that “All Prayers will be answered when we Pray aright.”[ii]  But how do we do that?  The answers he provides to this question go beyond simply using the accepted five step affirmative prayer format.  He is speaking to how we apply that portion of the affirmative prayer that is called “the realization,” that point in prayer when we speak into reality our desired good.   Here is his advice:

• We need to understand that “Prayer does something to the mind of the one praying. It does not do anything to God.”[iii]
• Thinking aright requires that we see the condition we aspire to in our minds, “we must have a mental equivalent of whatever we desire.” [iv]
• Perhaps most importantly, we must beleve that our prayer, our realization, is answered as we utter it: “The first necessity is Faith.”[v]

To the above conditions Holmes adds that we must pray unselfishly.   He says: “I believe that we pray aright when there is nothing in our prayers that would hurt anyone.”[vi]    In this he follows Jesus who said we should love our neighbors as ourselves.    In addressing prayers for others, Holmes also reminds us: “when we think with the One Mind in which everyone is united, the good we know for another is known in Mind for that person and becomes his [or her] experience.” [vii]  He cautions however, that we must take care not to assume that we know the desires the others.  

So, we have work to do to pray aright.  Thomas Troward, Holmes’ mentor, sums it up: “We must do our share of the work, and not expect God to do for us what He can only do through us.”  More succinctly, he adds: “God will provide the food, but he will not cook the dinner.”[viii]   

But praying our realization doesn’t always work, or seem to work.  Holmes explains:“We must always be honest with ourselves about our prayers.  IF we have prayed aright there are specific and tangible results which can and should be verified.”[ix]    He also tells us to be patient.  “We do not expect to give a treatment today for prosperity, and have a million dollars tomorrow.”[x]  Prayers are answered in “Divine Time,” not our time.    And, Troward reminds us, thinking must produce action to create an effect, “we must exert ourselves.”  Finally, Holmes warns us that our prayer may be answered in a different place or in a different way that we might have expected: “it is not our business to say how our good shall come.“[xi]   

Holmes provides the following example of praying aright, a timely reminder for NVC: “We should believe that we have and own a home, but we should leave the idea free to fulfill itself, without any definite choosing of how, where, why or when.  In this way, we pray aright and when we pray, we pray effectively.”[xii]

This example is an interesting one.   Note that Holmes does not envision a beautiful home, or a multimillion dollar home,—- just a home, knowing that the person who prays for this will indeed get a home, in Divine Time.   Holmes also understands that the chances for this home are poorer to those who do not pray, and are especially dim for those that doubt they will ever have one.   The prize in the Crackerjack box is that those who pray aright for a home may get that million-dollar beautiful home even though it’s not what they visualized, for its not the prayer’s business how their good shall come.  After all, what do we really mean when we think “home?”

The Meditations section of Holmes’ 1938 Science of Mind text provide numerous additional examples of praying aright.  The following healing prayer for the hearing impaired illustrates the general pattern: “My hearing is perfect. It is God in me hearing His own voice. I hear That Voice, and no belief in inaction can hinder that hearing. There are no impaired organs.”[xiii]   Notice that Holmes does not set the intention to literally heal a physical hearing defect, though he does not rule that out.  Instead he sets in motion the higher thought that we are absolutely perfect as we are, and that nothing can hinder hearing the voice of God within us.   “Disease is a fact but not a truth; it is an experience but not a spiritual reality.”[xiv]

So, praying aright sounds easy and does hard.  The easy part is in understanding the guidelines for praying aright.  The hard part is in constructing our mental equivalents in Spiritual, rather than literal terms, and remembering to that we must “cook the dinner” that God has prepared for us.   To work from our wholeness rather than from that which we lack.   Someone born with no arms can pray for healthy natural arms to miraculously appear so they can reach out and touch, manipulate, create, or write.   The chances are small that prayer will come true in both that person’s time and Divine Time.   What works is for that person to realize that they are a perfect manifestation of God and that Spirit provides many ways for them to reach out and touch, manipulate, create, write.  It’s not their business how this broader mental equivalent shall come about—it may be artificial arms, it may be by learning how to use their teeth or feet, but it will happen.

“The first necessity is Faith.”

JGM 8/7/2019