Faith & Spirit Quote by Ernest Holmes

Holmes drags prayer down from the rafters and pins it to the corkboard of the human psyche. By calling it "a thought, a belief, a feeling", he strips away the usual furniture of prayer - the kneeling, the pleading, the sense of a message hurled upward toward a distant authority. The line is doing quiet but radical work: it relocates the action from God to the person. Prayer, here, isn’t a supernatural transmission. It’s an interior event.

That framing fits Holmes's New Thought context, where mind is not just a private theater but a force with consequences. In that world, prayer is closer to mental practice than religious petition: disciplined attention, emotional alignment, belief held long enough to become real. The phrasing also sidesteps sectarian conflict. No mention of doctrine, church, or even deity. Anyone with a mind can pray, because prayer is defined as something the mind already does.

The subtext is a gentle rebuke to religious outsourcing. If prayer "arises within", then spiritual power isn’t locked behind clergy, ritual correctness, or moral bargaining. It also dodges the hardest theological problem - why prayers go unanswered - by reframing the purpose. Prayer isn’t primarily about changing God’s mind; it’s about changing your own. That’s both empowering and risky. Empowering because it offers agency. Risky because it can slide into self-blame: if outcomes hinge on thought and belief, failure can look like a personal defect. Holmes’s sentence is elegant precisely because it refuses to argue; it simply redefines the terms so the debate can’t proceed on the old terrain.