An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

The Friends’ 
Quarterly
published 
A Journey in
Prayer
, by Anita Billington, who 
recounted her life in the perspective of prayer and spiritual exploration.
When I was a child the language of prayer came easily to me. My 
father was a Methodist minister, and during my happy childhood the 
day often started with family prayers. Loving my father as I did, it was 
easy for me to imagine a Heavenly Father who not only created the 
natural world to which I felt so close, but also cared for me. . . .
As I grew up, prayer became a duty, and I felt guilty if I forgot. . . .
When I was twenty-two, I went to the Bahama Islands . . . I was 
given a little anthology of prayers. It is worn with use. I treasure it still 
as I remember the comfort and strength I found within its pages.
It was when I was thirty-three that I found myself in a situation 
where I did not know what to pray. After a long struggle against ill 
health, my husband was dying of a tumour in the gland beneath his 
brain and was rushed to hospital in Bristol. . . . At the hospital, the 
specialist could offer me little hope. There would first be an operation 
to put tubes through his brain. If he survived he might be paralysed 
and blind . . .. I walked out into the dark November night, not know-
ing what to do, and followed a sign that said ‘Chapel’. . ..
[I] went up to the communion rail, kneeling to pray. What could 
I say? My husband had suffered so much. How could I ask for him to 
live if it would mean more suffering? How could I know what would 
be best for him? I thought of our little family and our deep love for 
each other. Then I put us one by one into the palm of my hand and, 
lifting us high, handed us over to God.
Words are inadequate to truly share what I experienced as I waited 
alone in the chapel that night. It was my Whitsuntide. Light surrounded 
me. Joy and peace filled my heart. The figure of Jesus was with me, 
looking at me with such love and calling me little sister. I touched a 
deep level of understanding and all was made clear to me. I knew, with-
out any doubt at all, that whether my husband lived or died did not 
really matter to him. It would just be another step on his journey. 
Nothing could really separate us. If he died, it would, in truth, be just a 
little while before we were together again. When I finally left the 

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Religious Triggers
59
chapel, it was as though my feet hardly touched the ground. As I sat 
beside him, in the weeks that followed, I could feel a powerful stream 
of energy flowing from me to him. For days after his first operation, his 
mind was affected and everything he said was nonsense. I thought we 
would never communicate again. Then one day he turned to me and 
said, ‘I can feel a power bringing me back to life’. . ..
The experience I had in the chapel at Bristol totally changed my 
perception of God and my attitude to prayer. No longer could I cope 
with church services to a God outside me. I had found my treasure, my 
pearl of great price. I had found it at the time of my greatest need. 
I had found it as I sat in silence, and I had found it within me. . . .
In the years that followed I made a conscious effort to bring all of 
my life into the presence of God. I would ask for guidance in every area 
of my life and this was very painful, for it meant honestly facing up to 
myself as I was. Amongst Quakers I found real Friends . . .
My life became an exploration of ways of keeping in touch with my 
God centre, the true source of my being. I discovered that I had reached 
the state of Living in the Presence. No longer did I have to offer up my 
needs and deep concerns. My needs were known. . . .
If the presence of God is within me, it is within everyone – within 
every single human being. If I reject anyone I cut myself off from the 
Presence. I can have no enemies. If I live in the thought of love 
towards all, my life will become one continuous prayer – a constant 
going forth from God the father of all, to all.
Dwell in the place of love and you are one with God. You are part 
of God’s expression on earth.
This is the true reality.
This is true prayer.
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Experiments have been undertaken to establish whether prayers for 
healing are effective, and the results, reported in various medical journals, 
seem to indicate that such prayer is indeed effective. To the astonishment 
of many scientists, the results seem to indicate that people like Dr. Deepak 
Chopra may be correct in saying that there are healing forces in nature, 
which science is only just beginning to understand. In 
How to Know God
he reported the results of the Duke project, formally known as the 
Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Training, which presented its 
findings in 1998 to the American Heart Association.
The researchers took into account all manner of variables, including 
heart rate, blood pressure and clinical outcomes; 150 patients who had 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
60
undergone invasive cardiac procedures were studied, but none of them 
knew they were being prayed for. Seven religious groups around the 
world were asked to pray. These included Buddhists in Nepal, Carmelite 
nuns in Baltimore, and Virtual Jerusalem, an organization that grants 
E-mail requests for prayers to be written down and inserted into the 
Wailing Wall. Researchers found that surgical patients’ recovery could be 
from 50 to 100 percent better if someone prayed for them.
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Chopra explains that although the researchers found the results ‘highly 
intriguing’, what is really in evidence is a journey in consciousness, join-
ing the persons praying and prayed for beyond time and space in what is 
in fact ‘a quantum event carried out in the brain’.
There are rituals involved in prayer, with different religions having dif-
ferent requirements. Some religions require regular, formal prayer and 
many faiths have prayer beads to aid concentration. It is quite usual to 
kneel or prostrate as a sign of humility. Here just three traditions are 
considered in more detail.
Jewish 
practice requires a devout Jew to pray three times a day, 
often wearing the 
tallit, 
or prayer shawl, and perhaps two phylacteries, 
known as 
tefillin
, which are little black boxes containing verses of the 
Torah, worn on the arm, near the heart and forehead, close to the mind.
 
For Jews, prayer was established by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and is 
viewed as a continuation of the tradition of temple sacrifice, in that it 
establishes communication between earth and heaven. An emptying of 
the mind should precede prayer, enabling concentration on the Divine. 
The prayers include avowals of God’s unity and the relationship to his 
followers and also the hope of the advent of the Messiah who will unite 
God and man.
The 
Shema
, meaning ‘hear’ refers to the first prayer Jews learn:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love 
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with 
all your might. And these words which I command you shall be upon 
your heart.