Evelyn Underhill On Prayer

1.
       a. I think the lines for section 1 that are most important are "Prayer... is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God by withdrawing it from earthly thoughts." This is a consolidation of her definition of prayer I think, so it is a helpful thing to keep in mind when reading.
       b. I think the lines for section 2 that are most important are "The wholeness, sanity and balance of our existence depend entirely upon the perfection of our adjustment to this double situation." This is her claim about the analogy of the pendulum and shows how it relates personally to our lives.
       c. "There are three capacities or faculties which we have under consideration- the thinking faculty, the feeling faculty, and the willing or acting faculty." These three faculties cover all the ways that we react to our environment, so they are key for us to understand.
       d. "Prayer should take up and turn towards the spiritual order all the powers of our mental, emotional, and volitional life." This is a very important challenge that Evelyn has shared with us that we all should work towards, so it is another important overarching idea.
       e. "first we think, then we feel, then we will." This is an important realization that can hold a light to how we make the decisions in our life.
       f. "There are some who believe that when we return to God we ought to leave our brains behind us." While this is a statement that should not be taken too far, it is one that can give us insight into how our mentality should look when approaching God, as our own thinking is soiled in comparison to the mentality of God.
       g. "Prayer, then, begins by an intellectual adjustment." This is a small but challenging statement because this calls us to shift our natural way of thinking that we've grown accustomed to, because we need to exclude other distractions from God.
       h. "Desire and intention are the most dynamic of our faculties; they do work." This is a very insightful statement into the nature of humanity, as this is a huge motivator in what makes humans have the tenacity they have.
       i. "Sometimes we are mentally dull, sometimes we are emotionally flat." This is something that is important to bear in mind because we all have many days when we cannot force ourselves to be emotional or spiritual, and it is important to not beat ourselves up about it.
     
       2. I think that what she means by this is that when we pray, we are experiencing the presence of God- and that experience is not affected by the secular world around us, though it may look like it. Rather, we experience the realm that actually affects the changing world that we see everyday, but it is the realm of "Eternal truth, true Love, and loved Eternity."

       3. This excerpt from Evelyn reminds me of our reading of the four levels of love. One of the main themes I see in Evelyn's writing is that of the levels of our consciousness that affect us in our lives. She talks of how first we think, then we feel, then we do, and also of the three capacities in which we can react to our surroundings, and these remind me of the four levels of prayer that we talked about before.

       4. The main question I have for Evelyn is in the statement of leaving our brains behind us when we go to prayer. How far should we take that, and strive towards being so far on the road towards God that we leave our brains, because she seems hesitant to agree with this.