Prayer: Renewing Religious Life, #1

By Rudolf Steiner

"Prayer, in its true nature, can be rediscovered as the very source and foundation of our life with God. It is waiting for resurrection. In this light, Rudolf Steiner's lecture on the nature of prayer contained in this booklet can reorient, renew and enlighten human hearts to the true flame of prayer for our times." -- from the Introduction by Rev. Jonah Evans

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seminary of the Christian Community
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201011420

Book preview

Copyright

This lecture, The Nature of Prayer, was given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin, February 17, 1910, and is contained in the work Transforming the Soul: Vol 2 (CW 59).

Revised translation by Gail Ritscher and Patrick Kennedy, on the basis of a translation by Charles Davy and Christian von Arnim.

Originally published in German under the title Metamorphosen des Seelenlebens, Pfade der Seelenerlebnisse.

Cover and final page art: Spring Tree, 2020 by Claire Coleman

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Introduction

Rudolf Steiner¹ — whose life’s work, Anthroposophy, restores a full and modern spirituality to Christianity and who assisted and inspired the founders of The Christian Community Movement for Religious Renewal — did not, himself, write or speak much about prayer. Even though he gave more than 6,000 lectures and wrote over 30 books, his guidance in prayer is limited mostly to this one lecture. And yet, Steiner tells us in another lecture given to the founding priests of The Christian Community that finding a new relationship to the reality of prayer is central and most important for our work of religious renewal:

This pivotal point lies in prayer, in the significance of prayer. The religious person has to feel that there is a real significance to prayer; in prayer there must be a link to some kind of reality. But in an age in which the cognizing human being cannot go beyond his cognition so as to grasp reality through this cognition: in such an age, the religious person finds it impossible, when praying, to become aware that prayer is not merely a subjective act, but that it holds within it an objective experience. It is thus impossible for someone who cannot clearly perceive an objective experience within prayer to find a proper religious footing. Because of the way modern human beings are constituted, it is precisely in prayer that we must concentrate our religious life: its other aspects must concentrate in prayer. But prayer with only subjective significance would be bound to leave him rudderless in the religious life.  Steiner, Sep. 26, 1921

In our time, prayer is mostly understood as making requests to God, and many modern spiritual seekers remain uneasy and unconvinced about the often-self-centered nature of prayer. Moreover, among the spiritually inclined, there is an unfamiliarity with devotion to a higher being, an uneasiness about relating to a god outside of our innermost self. Because of