فصل 19

Part Five - The Golden Rule for Conquering Worry

Chapter 19 - How My Mother and Father Conquered Worry

As I have said, I was born and brought up on a Missouri farm. Like most farmers of that day, my parents had pretty hard scratching. My mother had been a country schoolteacher and my father had been a farm hand working for twelve dollars a month. Mother made not only my clothes, but also the soap with which we washed our clothes.

We rarely had any cash-except once a year when we sold our hogs. We traded our butter and eggs at the grocery store for flour, sugar, coffee. When I was twelve years old, I didn’t have as much as fifty cents a year to spend on myself. I can still remember the day we went to a Fourth of July celebration and Father gave me ten cents to spend as I wished. I felt the wealth of the Indies was mine.

I walked a mile to attend a one-room country school. I walked when the snow was deep and the thermometer shivered around twenty-eight degrees below zero. Until I was fourteen, I never had any rubbers or overshoes. During the long, cold winters, my feet were always wet and cold. As a child I never dreamed that anyone had dry, warm feet during the winter.

My parents slaved sixteen hours a day, yet we constantly were oppressed by debts and harassed by hard luck. One of my earliest memories is watching the flood waters of the 102 River rolling over our corn and hayfields, destroying everything. The floods destroyed our crops six years out of seven. Year after year, our hogs died of cholera and we burned them. I can close my eyes now and recall the pungent odor of burning hog flesh.

One year, the floods didn’t come. We raised a bumper corn crop, bought feed cattle, and fattened them with our corn. But the floods might just as well have drowned our corn that year, for the price of fat cattle fell on the Chicago market; and after feeding and fattening the cattle, we got only thirty dollars more for them than what we had paid for them. Thirty dollars for a whole year’s work!

No matter what we did, we lost money. I can still remember the mule colts that my father bought. We fed them for three years, hired men to break them, then shipped them to Memphis, Tennessee and sold them for less than what we had paid for them three years previously.

After ten years of hard, grueling work, we were not only penniless; we were heavily in debt. Our farm was mortgaged. Try as hard as we might, we couldn’t even pay the interest on the mortgage. The bank that held the mortgage abused and insulted my father and threatened to take his farm away from him. Father was forty-seven years old. After more than thirty years of hard work, he had nothing but debts and humiliation. It was more than he could take. He worried. His health broke. He had no desire for food; in spite of the hard physical work he was doing in the field all day, he had to take medicine to give him an appetite. He lost flesh. The doctor told my mother that he would be dead within six months. Father was so worried that he no longer wanted to live. I have often heard my mother say that when Father went to the barn to feed the horses and milk the cows, and didn’t come back as soon as she expected, she would go out to the barn, fearing that she would find his body dangling from the end of a rope. One day as he returned home from Maryville, where the banker had threatened to foreclose the mortgage, he stopped his horses on a bridge crossing the 102 River, got off the wagon, and stood for a long time looking down at the water, debating with himself whether he should jump in and end it all.

Years later, Father told me that the only reason he didn’t jump was because of my mother’s deep, abiding, and joyous belief that if we loved God and kept His commandments everything would come out all right. Mother was right. Everything did come out all right in the end. Father lived forty-two happy years longer, and died in 1941, at the age of eighty-nine.

During all those years of struggle and heartache, my mother never worried. She took all her troubles to God in prayer. Every night before we went to bed, Mother would read a chapter from the Bible; frequently Mother or Father would read these comforting words of Jesus: “In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am, there ye may be also.” Then we all knelt down before our chairs in that lonely Missouri farmhouse and prayed for God’s love and protection.

When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said: “Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.”

You don’t have to go to Harvard to discover that. My mother found that out on a Missouri farm. Neither floods nor debts nor disaster could suppress her happy, radiant, and victorious spirit. I can still hear her singing as she worked:

Peace, peace, wonderful peace, flowing down from the Father above, Sweep over my spirit for ever I pray in fathomless billows of love.

My mother wanted me to devote my life to religious work. I thought seriously of becoming a foreign missionary. Then I went away to college; and gradually, as the years passed, a change came over me. I studied biology, science, philosophy, and comparative religions. I read books on how the Bible was written. I began to question many of its assertions. I began to doubt many of the narrow doctrines taught by the country preachers of that day. I was bewildered. Like Walt Whitman, I “felt curious, abrupt questionings stir within me”. I didn’t know what to believe. I saw no purpose in life. I stopped praying. I became an agnostic.

I believed that all life was plan less and aimless. I believed that human beings had no more divine purpose than had the dinosaurs that roamed the earth two hundred million years ago. I felt that some day the human race would perish, just as the dinosaurs had. I knew that science taught that the sun was slowly cooling and that when its temperature fell even ten percent, no form of life could exist on earth. I sneered at the idea of a beneficent God who had created man in His own likeness. I believed that the billions upon billions of suns whirling through black, cold, lifeless space had been created by blind force. Maybe they had never been created at all. Maybe they existed for ever, just as time and space have always existed.

Do I profess to know the answers to all these questions now? No. No man has ever been able to explain the mystery of the universe, the mystery of life. We are surrounded by mysteries. The operation of your body is a profound mystery. So is the electricity in your home. So is the flower in the crannied wall. So is the green grass outside your window. Charles F. Kettering, the guiding genius of General Motors Research Laboratories, has been giving Antioch College thirty thousand dollars a year out of his own pocket to try to discover why grass is green. He declares that if we knew how grass is able to transform sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into food sugar, we could transform civilization.

Even the operation of the engine in your car is a profound mystery. General Motors Research Laboratories have spent years of time and millions of dollars trying to find out how and why a spark in the cylinder sets off an explosion that makes your car run; and they don’t know the answer.

The fact that we don’t understand the mysteries of our bodies or electricity or a gas engine doesn’t keep us from using and enjoying them. The fact that I don’t understand the mysteries of prayer and religion no longer keeps me from enjoying the richer, happier life that religion brings. At long last, I realize the wisdom of Santayana’s words: “Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.”

I have gone back, well, I was about to say that I had gone back to religion; but that would not be accurate. I have gone forward to a new concept of religion. I no longer have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds that divide the Churches. But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me. They help me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James puts it, “a new zest for life…more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life.” It gives me faith, hope, and courage. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life and direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It gives me abounding health. It helps me to create for myself “an oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life”.

Francis Bacon was right when he said, three hundred and fifty years ago: “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

I can remember the days when people talked about the conflict between science and religion. But no more. The newest of all sciences, psychiatry, is teaching what Jesus taught. Why? Because psychiatrists realize that prayer and a strong religious faith will banish the worries, the anxieties, the strains and fears that cause more than half of all our ills. They know, as one of their leaders, Dr. A. A. Brill said: “Anyone who is truly religious does not develop a neurosis.”

If religion isn’t true, then life is meaningless. It is a tragic farce.

I interviewed Henry Ford a few years prior to his death. Before I met him, I had expected him to show the strains of the long years he had spent in building up and managing one of the world’s greatest businesses. So I was surprised to how calm and well and peaceful he looked at seventy-eight. When I asked him if he ever worried, he replied: “No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?”

Today, even psychiatrists are becoming modern evangelists. They are not urging us to lead religious lives to avoid hell-fires in the next world, but they are urging us to lead religious lives to avoid the hell-fires of this world, the hell-fires of stomach ulcer, angina pectoris, nervous breakdowns, and insanity. As an example of what our psychologists and psychiatrists are teaching, read The Return to Religion, by Dr. Henry C. Link. You will probably find a copy in your public library.

Yes, the Christian religion is an inspiring, health-giving activity. Jesus said: “I came that ye might have life and have it more abundantly.” Jesus denounced and attacked the dry forms and dead rituals that passed for religion in His day. He was a rebel. He preached a new kind of religion, a religion that threatened to upset the world. That is why He was crucified. He preached that religion should exist for man, not man for religion; that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. He talked more about fear than He did about sin. The wrong kind of fear is a sin, a sin against your health, a sin against the richer, fuller, happier, courageous life that Jesus advocated. Emerson spoke of himself as a “Professor of the Science of Joy”. Jesus, too, was a teacher of “the Science of Joy”. He commanded His disciples to “rejoice and leap for joy”.

Jesus declared that there were only two important things about religion: loving God with all our heart, and our neighbor as ourselves. Any man who does that is religious, regardless of whether he knows it. For example, my father-in-law, Henry Price, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He tries to live by the golden rule; and he is incapable of doing anything mean, selfish, or dishonest. However, he doesn’t attend church, and regards himself as an agnostic. Nonsense! What makes a man a Christian? I’ll let John Baillie answer that. He was probably the most distinguished professor who ever taught theology at the University of Edinburgh. He said: “What makes a man a Christian is neither his intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life.”

If that makes a man a Christian, then Henry Price is a noble one.

William James, the father of modern psychology, wrote to his friend, Professor Thomas Davidson, saying that as the years went by, he found himself “less and less able to get along without God”.

Earlier in this book I mentioned that when the judges tried to pick the best story on worry sent in by my students, they had so much difficulty in choosing between two outstanding stories that the prize money was split. Here is the second story that tied for first prize, the unforgettable experience of a woman who had to find out the hard way that “she couldn’t get along without God”.

I am calling this woman Mary Cushman, although that is not her actual name. She has children and grandchildren who might be embarrassed to see her story in print, so I agreed to disguise her identity. However, the woman herself is real very real. A few months ago, she sat in the armchair beside my desk and told me her story. Here is how it goes:

“During the depression,” she said, “my husband’s average salary was eighteen dollars a week. Many times we didn’t have even that because he didn’t get paid when he was ill and that was often. He had a series of minor accidents; he also had mumps, scarlet fever, and repeated attacks of flu. We lost the little house that we had built with our own hands. We owed fifty dollars at the grocery store and had five children to feed. I took in washing and ironing from the neighbors, and bought second-hand clothes from the Salvation Army store and made them over for my children to wear. I made myself ill with worry. One day the grocer to whom we owed fifty dollars accused my eleven-year-old boy of stealing a couple of pencils.

My son wept as he told me about it. I knew he was honest and sensitive and I knew that he had been disgraced and humiliated in front of other people. That was the straw that broke my back. I thought of all the misery we had endured; and I couldn’t see any hope for the future. I must have become temporarily insane with worry, for I shut off my washing machine, took my little five-year-old daughter into the bedroom, and plugged up the windows and cracks with paper and rags. My little girl said to me: ‘Mommy, what are you doing?’ and I answered: There’s a little draught in here.’ Then I turned on the gas heater we had in the bedroom and didn’t light it. As I lay down on the bed with my daughter beside me, she said: ‘Mommy, this is funny, we just got up a little while ago!’ But I said: ‘Never mind, we’ll take a little nap.’

Then I closed my eyes, listening to the gas escape from the heater. I shall never forget the smell of that gas.

“Suddenly I thought I heard music. I listened. I had forgotten to turn the radio off in the kitchen. It didn’t matter now. But the music kept on, and presently I heard someone singing an old hymn:

What a Friend we have in Jesus, All our sins and grief’s to bear! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer. Oh, what peace we often forfeit Oh, what needless pain we bear all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!

“As I listened to that hymn, I realized that I had made a tragic mistake. I had tried to fight all my terrible battles alone. I had not taken everything to God in prayer. I jumped up, turned off the gas, opened the door, and raised the windows.

“I wept and prayed all the rest of that day. Only I didn’t pray for help, instead I poured out my soul in thanksgiving to God for the blessings He had given me: five splendid children, all of them healthy and fine, strong in body and mind. I promised God that never again would I prove so ungrateful. And I have kept that promise.

“Even after we lost our home, and had to move into a little country schoolhouse that we rented for five dollars a month, I thanked God for that schoolhouse; I thanked Him for the fact that I at least had a roof to keep us warm and dry. I thanked God honestly that things were not worse and I believe that He heard me. For in time things improved, oh, not overnight; but as the depression lightened, we made a little more money. I got a job as a hat-check girl in a large country club, and sold stockings as a side line. To help put himself through college; one of my sons got a job on a farm, milked thirteen cows’ morning and night. Today my children are grown up and married; I have three fine grandchildren. And, as I look back on that terrible day when I turned on the gas, I thank God over and over that I ‘woke up’ in time. What joys I would have missed if I had carried out that act! How many wonderful years I would have forfeited for ever! Whenever I hear now of someone who wants to end his life, I feel like crying out: ‘Don’t do it! Don’t!’ The blackest moments we live through can only last a little time and then comes the future.”

On the average, someone commits suicide in the United States every thirty-five minutes. On the average, someone goes insane every hundred and twenty seconds. Most of these suicides and probably many of the tragedies of insanity, could have been prevented if these people had only had the solace and peace that are found in religion and prayer.

One of the most distinguished psychiatrists living, Dr. Carl Jung, says in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

“During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life, that is to say, over thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

That statement is so significant I want to repeat it in bold type.

Dr. Carl Jung said:

“During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of hie, that is to say, over thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

William James said approximately the same thing: “Faith is one of the forces by which men live,” he declared, “and the total absence of it means collapse.”

The late Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Indian leader since Buddha, would have collapsed if he had not been inspired by the sustaining power of prayer. How do I know? Because Gandhi himself said so. “Without prayer,” he wrote, “I should have been a lunatic long ago.”

Thousands of people could give similar testimony. My own father, well, as I have already said, my own father would have drowned himself had it not been for my mother’s prayers and faith. Probably thousands of the tortured souls who are now screaming in our insane asylums could have been saved if they had only turned to a higher power for help instead of trying to fight life’s battles alone.

When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons. When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: “Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective.” At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open. Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I’ll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?

During the past six years that I have been writing this book I have collected hundreds of examples and concrete cases of how men and women conquered fear and worry by prayer. I have in my filing cabinet folders bulging with case histories. Let’s take as a typical example the story of a discouraged and disheartened book salesman, John R. Anthony. Mr. Anthony is now an attorney in Houston, Texas, with offices in the Humble Building. Here is his story as he told it to me.

“Twenty-two years ago I closed my private law office to become state representative of an American law-book company. My specialty was selling a set of law-books to lawyers, a set of books that were almost indispensable.

“I was ably and thoroughly trained for the job. I knew all the direct sales talks, and the convincing answers to all possible objections. Before calling on a prospect, I familiarized myself with his rating as an attorney, the nature of his practice, his politics and hobbies. During my interview, I used that information with ample skill. Yet, something was wrong. I just couldn’t get orders!

“I grew discouraged. As the days and weeks passed, I doubled and redoubled ray efforts, but was still unable to close enough sales to pay my expenses. A sense of fear and dread grew within me. I became afraid to call on people. Before I could enter a prospect’s office, that feeling of dread flared up so strong that I would pace up and down the hallway outside the door, or go out of the building and circle the block. Then, after losing much valuable time and feigning enough courage by sheer will power to crash the office door, I feebly turned the doorknob with trembling hand, half hoping my prospect would not be in!

“My sales manager threatened to stop my advances if I didn’t send in more orders. My wife at home pleaded with me for money to pay the grocery bill for herself and our three children. Worry seized me. Day by day I grew more desperate. I didn’t know what to do. As I have already said, I had closed my private law office at home and given up my clients. Now I was broke. I didn’t have the money to pay even my hotel bill. Neither did I have the money to buy a ticket back home; nor did I have the courage to return home a beaten man, even if I had had the ticket. Finally, at the miserable end of another bad day, I trudged back to my hotel room for the last time, I thought. So far as I was concerned, I was thoroughly beaten.

Heartbroken, depressed, I didn’t know which way to turn. I hardly cared whether I lived or died. I was sorry I had ever been born. I had nothing but a glass of hot milk that night for dinner. Even that was more than I could afford. I understood that night why desperate men raise a hotel window and jump. I might have done it myself if I had had the courage. I began wondering what was the purpose of life. I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure it out.

“Since there was no one else to turn to, I turned to God. I began to pray. I implored the Almighty to give me light and understanding and guidance through the dark, dense wilderness of despair that had closed in about me. I asked God to help me get orders for my books and to give me money to feed my wife and children. After that prayer, I opened my eyes and saw a Gideon Bible that lay on the dresser in that lonely hotel room. I opened it and read those beautiful, immortal promises of Jesus that must have inspired countless generations of lonely, worried, and beaten men throughout the ages, a talk that Jesus gave to His disciples about how to keep from worrying:

Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; not yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

“As I prayed and as I read those words, a miracle happened: my nervous tension fell away. My anxieties, fears, and worries were transformed into heart-warming courage and hope and triumphant faith.

“I was happy, even though I didn’t have enough money to pay my hotel bill. I went to bed and slept soundly, free from care, as I had not done for many years.

“Next morning, I could hardly hold myself back until the offices of my prospects were open. I approached the office door of my first prospect that beautiful, cold, rainy day with a bold and positive stride. I turned the doorknob with a firm and steady grip. As I entered, I made a beeline for my man, energetically, chin up, and with appropriate dignity, all smiles, and saying: ‘Good morning, Mr. Smith! I’m John R. Anthony of the All-American Law book Company!’

” ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ he replied, smiling, too, as he rose from his chair with outstretched hand. ‘I’m glad to see you. Have a seat!’

“I made more sales that day than I had made in weeks. That evening I proudly returned to my hotel like a conquering hero! I felt like a new man. And I was a new man, because I had a new and victorious mental attitude. No dinner of hot milk that night. No, sir! I had a steak with all the fixin’s. From that day on, my sales zoomed.

“I was born anew that desperate night twenty-one years ago in a little hotel in Amarillo, Texas. My outward situation the next day was the same as it had been through my weeks of failure, but a tremendous thing had happened inside me. I had suddenly become aware of my relationship with God. A mere man alone can easily be defeated, but a man alive with the power of God within him is invincible. I know. I saw it work in my own life.

” ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ “

When Mrs. L. G. Beaird, of 1421 8th Street, Highland, Illinois, was faced with stark tragedy, she discovered that she could find peace and tranquility by kneeling down and saying: “0 Lord, Thy will, not mine, be done.”

“One evening our telephone rang,” she writes in a letter that I have before me now. “It rang fourteen times before I had the courage to pick up the receiver. I knew it must be the hospital, and I was terrified. I feared that our little boy was dying. He had meningitis. He had already been given penicillin, but it made his temperature fluctuate, and the doctor feared that the disease had travelled to his brain and might cause the development of a brain tumor and death. The phone call was just what I feared. The hospital was calling; the doctor wanted us to come immediately.

“Maybe you can picture the anguish my husband and I went through, sitting in the waiting-room. Everyone else had his baby, but we sat there with empty arms, wondering if we would ever hold our little fellow again. When we were finally called into the doctor’s private office, the expression on his face filled our heart with terror. His words brought even more terror. He told us that there was only one chance in four that our baby would live. He said that if we knew another doctor, to please call him in on the case.

“On the way home my husband broke down and, doubling up his fist, hit the steering wheel, saying: ‘Berts, I can’t give that little guy up.’ Have you ever seen a man cry? It isn’t a pleasant experience. We stopped the car and, after talking things over, decided to stop in church and pray that if it was God’s will to take our baby, we would resign our will to His. I sank in the pew and said with tears rolling down my cheeks: ‘Not my will but Thine be done.’

“The moment I uttered those words, I felt better. A sense of peace that I hadn’t felt for a long time came over me. All the way home, I kept repeating: ‘O God, Thy will, not mine, be done.’

“I slept soundly that night for the first time in a week. The doctor called a few days later and said that Bobby had passed the crisis. I thank God for the strong and healthy four-year-old boy we have today.”

I know men who regard religion as something for women and children and preachers. They pride themselves on being “he-men” who can fight their battles alone.

How surprised they might be to learn that some of the most famous “he-men” in the world pray every day. For example, “he-man” Jack Dempsey told me that he never goes to bed without saying his prayers. He told me that he never eats a meal without first thanking God for it. He told me that he prayed every day when he was training for a bout, and that when he was fighting, he always prayed just before the bell sounded for each round. “Praying,” he said, “helped me fight with courage and confidence.”

“He-man” Connie Mack told me that he couldn’t go to sleep without saying his prayers.

“He-man” Eddie Rickenbacker told me that he believed his life had been saved by prayer. He prays every day.

“He-man” Edward R. Stettinius, former high official of General Motors and United States Steel, and former Secretary of State, told me that he prayed for wisdom and guidance every morning and night.

“He-man” J. Pierpont Morgan, the greatest financier of his age, often went alone to Trinity Church, at the head of Wall Street, on Saturday afternoons and knelt in prayer.

When “he-man” Eisenhower flew to England to take supreme command of the British and American forces, he took only one book on the plane with him, the Bible.

“He-man” General Mark Clark told me that he read his Bible every day during the war and knelt down in prayer. So did Chiang Kai-shek, and General Montgomery, “Monty of El Alamein”. So did Lord Nelson at Trafalgar. So did General Washington, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and scores of other great military leaders.

These “he-men” discovered the truth of William James’s statement: “We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to His influence, our deepest destiny is fulfilled.”

A lot of “he-men” are discovering that. Seventy-two million Americans are church members now an all-time record. As I said before, even the scientists are turning to religion. Take, for example, Dr. Alexis Carrel, who wrote Man, the Unknown and won the greatest honor that can be bestowed upon any scientist, the Nobel prize. Dr. Carrel said in a Reader’s Digest article: “Prayer is the most powerful form of energy one can generate. It is a force as real as terrestrial gravity. As a physician, I have seen men; after all other therapy had failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. Prayer like radium is a source of luminous, self-generating energy. In prayer, human beings seek to augment their finite energy by addressing themselves to the Infinite source of all energy. When we pray, we link ourselves with the inexhaustible motive power that spins the universe. We pray that a part of this power be apportioned to our needs.

Even in asking, our human deficiencies are filled and we arise strengthened and repaired. Whenever we address God in fervent prayer, we change both soul and body for the better. It could not happen that any man or woman could pray for a single moment without some good result.”

Admiral Byrd knows what it means to “link ourselves with the inexhaustible motive power that spins the universe”. His ability to do that pulled him through the most trying ordeal of his life. He tells the story in his book Alone. (*) In 1934, he spent five months in a hut buried beneath the icecap of Ross Barrier deep in the Antarctic. He was the only living creature south of latitude seventy-eight.

Blizzards roared above his shack; the cold plunged down to eighty-two degrees below zero; he was completely surrounded by unending night. And then he found, to his horror, he was being slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide that escaped from his stove! What could he do? The nearest help was 123 miles away, and could not possibly reach him for several months. He tried to fix his stove and ventilating system, but the fumes still escaped. They often knocked him out cold. He lay on the floor completely unconscious. He couldn’t eat; he couldn’t sleep; he became so feeble that he could hardly leave his bunk. He frequently feared he wouldn’t live until morning. He was convinced he would die in that cabin, and his body would be hidden by perpetual snows.

What saved his life? One day, in the depths of his despair, he reached for his diary and tried to set down his philosophy of life. “The human race,” he wrote, “is not alone in the universe.” He thought of the stars overhead, of the orderly swing of the constellations and planets; of how the everlasting sun would, in its time, return to lighten even the wastes of the South Polar regions. And then he wrote in his diary: “I am not alone.”

This realization that he was not alone, not even in a hole in the ice at the end of the earth, was what saved Richard Byrd. “I know it pulled me through,” he says. And he goes on to add: “Few men in their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.” Richard Byrd learned to tap those wells of strength and use those resources by turning to God.

Glenn A. Arnold learned amidst the cornfields of Illinois the same lesson that Admiral Byrd learned in the polar icecap. Mr. Arnold, an insurance broker in the Bacon Building, Chillicothe, Illinois, opened his speech on conquering worry like this: “Eight years ago, I turned the key in the lock of my front door for what I believed was the last time in my life. I then climbed in my car and started down for the river. I was a failure,” he said. “One month before, my entire little world had come crashing down on my head. My electrical-appliance business had gone on the rocks. In my home my mother lay at the point of death. My wife was carrying our second child. Doctors’ bills were mounting. We had mortgaged everything we had to start the business, our car and our furniture. I had even taken out a loan on my insurance policies. Now everything was gone. I couldn’t take it any longer. So I climbed into my car and started for the river, determined to end the sorry mess.

“I drove a few miles out in the country, pulled off the road, and got out and sat on the ground and wept like a child. Then I really started to think, instead of going around in frightening circles of worry, I tried to think constructively. How bad was my situation? Couldn’t it be worse? Was it really hopeless? What could I do to make it better?

“I decided then and there to take the whole problem to the Lord and ask Him to handle it. I prayed. I prayed hard. I prayed as though my very life depended on it, which, in fact, it did. Then a strange thing happened. As soon as I turned all my problems over to a power greater than myself, I immediately felt a peace of mind that I hadn’t known in months. I must have sat there for half an hour, weeping and praying. Then I went home and slept like a child.

“The next morning, I arose with confidence. I no longer had anything to fear, for I was depending on God for guidance. That morning I walked into a local department store with my head high; and I spoke with confidence as I applied for a job as salesman in the electrical-appliance department. I knew I would get a job. And I did. I made good at it until the whole appliance business collapsed due to the war. Then I began selling life insurance, still under the management of my Great Guide. That was only five years ago. Now, all my bills are paid; I have a fine family of three bright children; own my own home; have a new car, and own twenty-five thousand dollars in life insurance.

“As I look back, I am glad now that I lost everything and became so depressed that I started for the river, because that tragedy taught me to rely on God; and I now have a peace and confidence that I never dreamed were possible.”

Why does religious faith bring us such peace and calm and fortitude? I’ll let William James answer that. He says: “The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed; and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities, the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth.”

If we are worried and anxious-why not try God? Why not, as Immanuel Kant said: “accept a belief in God because we need such a belief?” Why not link ourselves now “with the inexhaustible motive power that spins the universe?”

Even if you are not a religious person by nature or training, even if you are an out-and-out skeptic, prayer can help you much more than you believe, for it is a practical thing. What do I mean, practical? I mean that prayer fulfills these three very basic psychological needs which all people share, whether they believe in God or not:

Prayer helps us to put into words exactly what is troubling us. We saw in Chapter 4 that it is almost impossible to deal with a problem while it remains vague and nebulous. Praying, in a way, is very much like writing our problem down on paper. If we ask help for a problem, even from God, we must put it into words.

Prayer gives us a sense of sharing our burdens, of not being alone. Few of us are so strong that we can bear our heaviest burdens, our most agonizing troubles, all by ourselves. Sometimes our worries are of so intimate a nature that we cannot discuss them even with our closest relatives or friends. Then prayer is the answer. Any psychiatrist will tell us that when we are pent-up and tense, and in an agony of spirit, it is therapeutically good to tell someone our troubles. When we can’t tell anyone else, we can always tell God.

Prayer puts into force an active principle of doing. It’s a first step toward action. I doubt if anyone can pray for some fulfillment, day after day, without benefiting from it, in other words, without taking some steps to bring it to pass. A world-famous scientist said: “Prayer is the most powerful form of energy one can generate.” So why not make use of it? Call it God or Allah or Spirit, why quarrel with definitions as long as the mysterious powers of nature take us in hand?

Why not close this book right now, go to your bedroom, shut the door, kneel down, and unburden your heart? If you have lost your religion, beseech Almighty God to renew your faith. Say: “O God, I can no longer fight my battles alone. I need your help, your love. Forgive me for all my mistakes. Cleanse my heart of all evil. Show me the way to peace and quiet and health, and fill me with love even for my enemies.”

If you don’t know how to pray, repeat this beautiful and inspiring prayer written by St. Francis seven hundred years ago:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning, that we are pardoned and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.