Dimensions of Prayer

Dimensions of Prayer is a short book by Douglas V. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College and was long active in ecumenical and Friends' service work. It grew out of the Pendle Hill Pamphlets and lecture settings in which Steere had been speaking about prayer to mixed audiences of Friends and other Christians, and it was published in 1962, when the postwar revival of interest in contemplative life was beginning to reach Protestants who had little inherited vocabulary for it. Steere wrote for readers who sensed that prayer was more than petition but did not know where to begin.

The book's central move is to widen what prayer is taken to include. Steere does not offer a method. He treats prayer as a many-sided human response to God and takes up its aspects one at a time: the attentiveness that precedes speaking, adoration and thanksgiving, the confession that clears the ground, petition and intercession, and the surrender in which the one who prays is changed rather than merely heard. Throughout, he leans on a wide company of witnesses, drawing on Quaker writers such as John Woolman and Rufus Jones alongside Catholic and Orthodox figures, and on philosophers and poets, so that prayer appears as a shared inheritance of the whole church rather than the property of one tradition. He is especially concerned with intercession, which he presents as a costly act of holding other people before God rather than a list of requests. He also insists that prayer cannot be separated from daily life: the quality of attention cultivated in prayer shows itself in how one treats those nearby, and the reverse holds as well.

The book has stayed in print and in use because it is brief, unhurried, and free of technique. Steere writes as one who prays and trusts the reader to do the same, and he avoids both sentimentality and the notion that prayer is a skill to be mastered. Its ecumenical breadth, unusual for its decade, still serves readers who come to the contemplative tradition from outside it. It also remains a gentle corrective to the assumption that prayer is mainly a way of asking for things.

Who should read this: Readers who want a thoughtful, spacious introduction to prayer's many forms, and those whose prayer life has narrowed to petition alone, will find it helpful. It suits individuals and small groups looking for a companion rather than a manual. It is not for those seeking a step-by-step program, nor for readers wanting a rigorous scholarly treatment of the theology of prayer.