Prayer in the Contemporary World

Douglas V. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College for more than three decades and served as an observer at the Second Vatican Council, wrote Prayer in the Contemporary World in 1968 as a Pendle Hill pamphlet. It was published at a moment when the pressures that make prayer difficult for modern people were plain to see: a restless culture of noise and activism, a loosening of inherited religious habits, and a widespread suspicion that contemplation was a luxury for those with nothing urgent to do. Steere addresses the person who wants to pray and finds the ground shifting underfoot.

The essay is short and unhurried, and its argument is less a program than a reorientation. Steere draws on the Christian mystical tradition and on the Quaker practice of waiting worship to insist that prayer begins not with our speaking but with our being addressed. The first move of the soul is attentiveness, a willingness to be still enough to be found. From there he widens the lens. Prayer, he argues, cannot be fenced off from the rest of life, because the same attention that listens to God must also listen to other people, and the love that deepens in solitude is tested in service. He is wary of both extremes the age offered: a privatized piety that withdraws from the world's suffering, and an activism that burns itself out for lack of any interior source. For Steere the two belong together, and each corrects the other. He also writes with unusual honesty about dryness, distraction, and the difficulty of beginning, treating these as the ordinary terrain of prayer and not as signs of failure.

The essay has lasted because its diagnosis has only grown more apt. A reader today, surrounded by constant stimulation, will recognize the condition Steere describes, and will find in him a guide who is neither technique-driven nor sentimental. His voice carries the quiet authority of someone who had spent his life practicing what he described and learning from Christians of many traditions. It remains a good entry point to the Quaker contemplative stream and to the conviction that prayer and costly love are one movement.

Who should read this: Anyone who prays haltingly, or has stopped, and wants a patient, ecumenical companion rather than a method. It suits pastors and lay readers looking to hold contemplation and service together. It is not for readers seeking detailed instruction in specific prayer practices, nor for those wanting a rigorous theological treatment of prayer; it is a short, reflective invitation, not a manual or a systematic study.