Praying for Loved Ones and Those Not So Loved
Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Initiative sponsors quite a number of activities. Among them is its semi-annual “C-21 Resources.” Here, around a chosen theme, articles are excerpted (mostly from periodicals such as “America” and “Commonweal“) that afford a basic approach to the topic. The Spring 2009 issue is devoted to “Catholic Spirituality in Practice.”
Among the excerpts is one that particularly struck me. The authors are Ann Ulanov and the late Barry Ulanov, and their topic is “Intercessory Prayer.” Here is an excerpt from the excerpt:
We pray for those we love because we must. We know that our love is not powerful enough to protect them from all harm, from all illness, from all evil, from death. Our love is not omnipotent. Our care for them, our insistence that they must have a good life, a full life, a life lived from the center of themselves, forces us to intercede with God on their behalf. By ourselves we cannot guarantee them much. We cannot even prevent our own faults from hurting them. We cannot restrain our own strong hopes and pressures so that they can find and live their own idea of the good life instead of the one we have ordained for them.
When we recognize these limiting effects of our love, it is that very love for our children, our dear friends, our husband or wife that impels us beyond ourselves to confide their souls into God’s keeping. Praying for them changes our love from a closed to an open hand, from a hand that tightly holds them under rein to one that holds them loosely. Praying for them makes us supple and flexible in our love for them.
We learn to pray for those we dislike and avoid as well, for those we hate and fear, for our enemies. Such prayer shifts our attention from all the things others have done to us or neglected to do that so wounded or enraged us, to focus on what it is in ourselves that permits others to acquire such power over us, the power to put us, in effect, in the hell of anger, or dismay, or insecurity, or fear. Prayer for them directs us to the antecedent attitudes or conditions of personality in ourselves that deliver us over into others’ power.
Praying for our enemies changes our attitudes toward them. Enemies make us bring light into painful hidden corners of ourselves that we would prefer to leave dark. By trying to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, we may discover what we do that so irritates others and makes them dislike us. We hear new voices in our prayer that usually we tune out. We see ourselves from a different angle, one we could not find either by ourselves or with the help of friends. Only enemies can help us here. In this way they are priceless.
There are many other good things in the Issue, which is available on pdf format here. I have found the various issues of the past years good for discussion groups in the parish and ancillary reading in my undergraduate courses.
I pray for people every day. I actually use yellow postems to remind me who I am praying for. The way this got started is that it was suggested to me that when I am angry or
resentful toward someone, it would help if I prayed for them for two weeks. I do this. I
pray that these people are blessed generously and profusely. I don’t know if I really expect my prayers to help them. I do know that my praying helps me change my attitude toward them.
A number of years ago I started to add people I liked to my list. They like my enemies only get two weeks of my praying. However, there is a core group of about 10 people who I pray for every day. I really am not sure if my prayers help them. For me it is mainly an opportunity to remember them and to love them.
Commitment to prayer or to anything else requires the hard work of practice. Often the practice is boring. Praying for others, however, doesn’t seem tp get boring for me. It is a way to get my daily practice of prayer started again each day. Among other things being a Christian is to have ones habits determined in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.
Are there any readable books or articles on the theology of prayer?
The author come very close to a “naturalistic” theory of the efficacy of intercessory prayer. It seems to me it would be very easy to rewrite the article to be acceptable to an atheist, since in the article, there is no mention of God actually doing anything. It is by thinking about others and wishing them well that we are changed, and the question as to whether they are changed — whether God does for them what we as, because we ask — is finessed.
Does it make any sense to pray for people who are, say, in the path of a hurricane, that the hurricane might be diverted? Could the Election Novena have had an effect on the outcome of the election by God somehow intervening to influence the vote? (The intention was: “For an outcome of the November election which is pleasing to Almighty God, and which best serves the eternal and temporal interests of all of His children.”) Of course among those who participated or knew about the novena, it may have influenced their thinking about the election therefore their vote. But does it make sense to ask God to do something merely because the act of asking has an effect? It may be a sufficient reason, but is it “realistic”?
Thank you, Father Imbelli, for sharing the Ulanov excerpt with us–and for introducing me to C21 and C21 Resources! My reading of what the Ulanovs wrote is that their thoughts are full of God’s presence and I sense that their notion of prayer for others has a lot to do with putting others “in God’s hands” because our human love for each other is so limited.
I try to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, and although I cherish it as the Prayer of the Whole Church–and praying the Hours reminds me beautifully of my union with the whole Church–I pray for individuals, especially for those I love and those whom I don’t love so much. I pray, “Teach me, Abba, to forgive, as You forgive, all of those whom I believe have offended me in any way…and for myself I ask only the grace to forgive and forget.”
David,
I find your comment challenging. The book from which the excerpt is taken is: “Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer” (Westminster John Knox Press).
The fuller excerpt given on the pdf file does add some further theological considerations, speaking of God’s eternity and the Pauline sense of the mystical body of Christ. But I think you’re right that the focus seems to be upon prayer’s effect upon the one who prays.
But the issue of “God’s action” and how we are to understand it is foundational — I think it is among the issues that the area of theology we refer to as “philosophical theology” wrestles with.
I would welcome any recommendations from others regarding accessible essays. But most of the books on prayer that I am familiar with, do not pose the foundational issues, however helpful they may be in other respects.
Lionel Trilling, in his secular way and possibly for self-interested reasons, also recommended praying for one’s enemies. He cited the example of John Stuart Mill:
“Mill, at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan of liberalism should be, ‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies…; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.’”
The LIberal Imagination
I wish prayer were a topic covered more thoroughly in RCIA and in confirmation for older kids, especially during Lent and that run up to the Easter Vigil.
Catholic notions of prayer (I’m thinking especially of Ann Olivier’s post on a recent thread about praying for the dead because with God there is no time as well as praying for enemies as above) are wide and generous.
Unfortunately, the focus tends to be on memorizing the Hail Mary, Our Father, Gloria, etc.
“Abraham Joshua Heschel, the greatest interpreter of Jewish prayer in our century, has a somewhat different notion of prayer. He balances keva and kavanah, the fixity of our prayer-book and the spontaneity of our heart. He will surrender neither of the poles of Jewish worship. He believes that we must not only express our needs, but create them, that God is not here to do what we wish, but to help us wish to do what God needs doing. Our prayer is a way of coming to feel, as well as a way of expressing concerns. In principle, we can come to need what God needs, to feel what God feels, and to become what God wants us to be. Inwardness and community are both crucial, but so is hearing the music of God’s song and coming to experience God’s love. “Spirituality” is more than seeking for God within or between our several selves…”
~ Arnold Jacob Wolf
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_n1_v47/ai_21042649
Jean — speaking as a sometime RCIA team member, I think the very fact that Catholic prayer traditions are “wide and generous” is the reason prayer tends to get de-emphasized in catechesis! There’s so much to Catholicism that’s narrow and specific and feels very need-to-know for potential converts… Broader and more personal topics like prayer tend to get pushed down the priority list (“Oh, they’ll figure it out on their own”).
We do try to build in discussions of prayer (and actual praying!) into our RCIA schedule, but you’re right, it’s not as much of a priority as it could be. Except, of course, the prayer of the Mass; that one, at least, gets attention.
“We believe that the divine presence is everywhere
and that ‘the eyes of the Lord
are looking on the good and the evil in every place’ (Prov. 15:3).
But we should believe this especially without any doubt
when we are assisting at the Work of God.
To that end let us be mindful always of the Prophet’s words,
‘Serve the Lord in fear’ (Ps. 2:11)
and again ‘Sing praises wisely’ (Ps. 46:8)
and ‘In the sight of the Angels,
I will sing praise to You’ (Ps. 13[14]7:1).
Let us therefore consider how we ought to conduct ourselves
in sight of God and of His Angels,
and let us take part in the psalmody in such a way
that our mind may be in harmony with our voice.”
~ Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 19
“‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ the philosopher Socrates
said. Benedict implies the same. If indeed we walk in the womb of
God, then reflection on the meaning of every action and the end of
the road is the constant to which we are called. There must be no
such thing as the idle decision, the thoughtless act. Every part of
our lives must be taken to prayer and the scrutiny of Scripture must
be brought to every part of our lives because we believe ‘beyond the
least doubt’ that the God we seek is there seeking us.
“Prayer in the Benedictine tradition, then, is not an exercise done
for sake of quantity or penance or the garnering of spiritual merit.
Benedictine prayer is not an excursion into a prayer wheel
spirituality where more is better and recitation is more important
than meaning. Prayer, in the spirit of these chapters, if we ‘sing
praise wisely,’ or well, or truly, becomes a furnace in which every
act of our lives is submitted to the heat and purifying process of
the smelter’s fire so that our minds and our hearts, our ideas and
our lives, come to be in sync, so that we are what we say we are, so
that the prayers that pass our lips change our lives, so that God’s
presence becomes palpable to us. Prayer brings us to burn off the
dross of what clings to our souls like mildew and sets us free for
deeper, richer, truer lives in which we become what we seek.”
~ Joan Chittister, O.S.B.
“Commitment to prayer or to anything else requires the hard work of practice. Often the practice is boring. Praying for others, however, doesn’t seem tp get boring for me. It is a way to get my daily practice of prayer started again each day. Among other things being a Christian is to have ones habits determined in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.”
I agree with this, Michael, what a great insight about how praying for others never gets stale.
I also have a couple of prayer lists (one for the living and another for the dead). Although I haven’t written them down, which does pose a daily challenge for my memory. I also have a “list of lists” that I pray for, e.g. “for the intentions that my friends on the Internet have asked us to pray”, “for the intentions in the prayer basket at church”, etc.
Also, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet (I’ve meant to several times) – I’m in awe of your ability to be a fount of wisdom. I love it when you produce these wise quotes, seemingly effortlessly. I’m guessing you have them already typed-up somewhere. You should start a Daily Wisdom email list, or something like that.
Mollie, didn’t mean to make you feel defensive. RCIA is a very mixed bag depending on the parish. Locally it’s all about untangling people’s marital and living arrangements in time for Easter, and talking about the rules.
Magnificient excerpt. What can one say but just read it over and over again
I shall try to find passages from the many Ulanov books that address the point that David Nickol and Bob Imbelli mention: the question of whether those prayed for actually change through God’s action.
Truly, I am so moved to see “Primary Speech” gain a wider audience. I was privileged more than I can say to have been taught by Barry at Barnard and at Columbia. Barry taught English at Barnard and “Contemporary Catholic Thought” at Columbia in 1960.
It was the first instruction on Catholicism (by a Jewish convert no less) that moved beyond the desert of the brittle, pre-Vatican II catechetics I grew up with in Catholic school. Barry autographed my copy of Primary Speech when I visited him about a year or so before he died in 2000. Ann has been a source of inspiration as well in her many books. BTW, she is a cherished colleague of Roger Haight at Union Theological, where incidentally he will be a scholar in residence after this year — a way to still benefit from his presence, though he will not be teaching as he is this year.
Chapter 10 in “PS” is called “Answers to Prayers.”
Excerpts:
To doubt that our prayers are answered is a modern worry, reflecting the temper of our times. But the question sounds an ancient human theme, that of wanting to reach out, to feel in relation to life around us, somehow to touch the source of all life, mysterious as it is….
Answers do come to prayers, both clear and unclear answers. What starts as an anxious query to God – “Are you there? Do you hear me? – or a defiant demand – “Prove it to me! Show me a sign!” – turns into fear in the presence of the holy. What begins as worry that our prayers are not answered, end, if we keep on praying, in awe that answers really do come. When that comes, we grow cautious about what we pray for…
More excerpts:
Prayers are answered by our being drawn more thoroughly into the life of God. As Eckhart put is, God is born in us”…
We move from knowing about God to knowing God directly, much less interested in self and much more attracted to the otherness…
We are well drawn beyond the rules of an ethic or a theology that attempts to chart God’s actions and to justify suffering and disappointment by the logic of reason. We come to pray more through Jesus and the Spirit than through charted principles or proclaimed precepts. We gain more of the heritage of Christ’s passion;, knowing the dying and resurrection that defy our explanations yet come to be more appropriate than our efforts to understand. Like Job, we give up our single viewpoint, what Ricoeur calls our “narcissism,” even though it is narcissism at its ethical highest, asking God why God does not adhere to the best rules of human justice.”
Essentially I think Barry and Ann are saying we ask the wrong question when we want to treat prayer as a cash transaction, wondering if God will act as we ask. It is a moving beyond, to the utterly mysterious; trusting God when we cannot understand. The important thing is to register all our reactions, whether joy or pain or anger, by bringing them to God. Please, I am far removed from any skill in theology, so I hesitate to continue, but let me offer a list of Ulanov books that are more meaningful than anything besides Scripture. Their writings on evil and the psyche are profound and dead accurate.
The Wisdom of the Psyche
The Healing Imagination
Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung
The Unshuttered Heart: Opening Aliveness/Deadness in the Self
The Living God and and Our Living Psyche
Religion and the Unconscious
Transforming Sexuality
Finding Space: Winnicott, God and Psychic Reality
Cinderella and Her Sisters: the Envied and the Envying
Long excerpts are available on google books, if I can remember how to access them.
I thank your indulgence with such a long post (I broke it up actually). This hits home to the core. To read the Barry and Ann’s moving, elegant, insightful prose is a feast.
Sorry, Jean, I didn’t mean to sound defensive! We have bumped “prayer” back on our schedule/priority list a couple times, so your comment got me thinking about why that happens.
Essentially I think Barry and Ann are saying we ask the wrong question when we want to treat prayer as a cash transaction, wondering if God will act as we ask. It is a moving beyond, to the utterly mysterious; trusting God when we cannot understand.
Carolyn,
I think I understand their point, but they are not answering the question I am asking. Jesus speaks quite plainly about asking for what we need. When he tells the disciples how to pray, he says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” No doubt we can come up with something very profound meditating on that sentence. (Everything comes from God. Don’t try to amass a fortune, but take things day by day. And so on.) But I certainly get the feeling from reading “give us this day our daily bread” that Jesus was recommending to ask God for food for the day, with the expectation that we would get it. And he goes on to say the following:
Of course, it is perfectly understandable that prayer is not magic or a cash transaction. One might think of prayer as equivalent to children asking their parents for something. No parent is going simply give a child something because the child asks for it.
The question I am asking is closely related to another question, which is whether God intervenes in the world (or in history). But of course it goes beyond that, since I am asking whether prayers can “influence” God to do something he would not do otherwise. (I see a real problem in asking God to “change his mind.”)
It seems an important question to me because it is a matter of reality. If someone is sick, and we pray for her to get well, even if that somehow brings us closer to God and deepens our own spirituality, if God isn’t moved to heal at least some sick people because of the prayers of their loved ones, then any belief that the sick person will be made well by God is a fantasy. The only realistic prayer would be something like, “Your will be done.”
One thing popped into my mind about the efficacy of prayer, and that is how in grade school we used to go in and out of church several times on All Souls Day, saying the required prayers each time to release a soul from purgatory. Unfortunately, there’s no way to verify empirically when a soul leaves purgatory! And I wonder if we weren’t taking the whole thing a bit too literally as children.
David,
I am as curious as you about prayer’s influence on God, and how theologians theorize/speculate about that. On a practical level, I have to and do believe in prayer’s efficacy. Otherwise there is no hope, and having touched its edges, despair is a devouring darkness.
I pray for my daughter who is surviving cancer so far (two years) after chemo and radiation, and for her six-year old son with a rare skin disease (husband took off). I put them in God’s care, and sometimes wonder how I would handle things if God allowed her to die before her son was grown. I don’t want to face the question. There was a time when I felt the Scripture you quote is essentially a cruel joke.
The image we have of God is so critical to prayer. When those images are shattered, which in a way they inevitably will be, what then, but to enter another kind of darkness and wait in faith and trust (while shaking a fist now and then). Easy to write, harder to live. That’s why I must develop a prayer life, to know from experience of God’s love and goodness.
BTW, the Ulanovs are pretty hard on literalism, and the great harm it does. Theological bullies who live by it (my way, my image, or else) come in for harsh judgment. They speak of being liberated from the literal to find the mystery, truth and aliveness behind it. The Jews never were in Egypt, but we certainly know about enslavement and freedom.
I just know I am offered bread, not stone, in reading their books, and can look forward to more than darting between the raindrops in life. After a while, their language and eloquence seeps in like the rain.
Any theologians here to wrestle with “philosophical theology?” There was a compelling presentation on PBS recently about a trial of God held in a concentration camp, in which the verdict was guilty. Then they all went to pray.
Thank you, Michael Miller for the RB and Chittister (I have heavily marked that book) selections, and as well as Herschel.
“My father [Abraham Herschel] thought of prayer as not an occasional exercise but rather like an established residence, a home for the innermost self. In his essay “On Prayer,” he says that all things have a home: the bee has a hive, the bird has a nest. For the soul, home is where prayer is, and a soul without prayer is a soul without a home. Continuity, permanence, intimacy, authenticity and earnestness are its attributes. “I enter [this home] as a supplicant and emerge as a witness; I enter as a stranger and emerge as next of kin. I may enter spiritually shapeless, inwardly disfigured and emerge wholly changed.” We pray because there is a vast disproportion between human misery and human compassion. We pray, he said, because our grasp of the depth of suffering is comparable to the grasp of a butterfly flying over the Grand Canyon…”
~ Susannah Herschel
(An interview with Susannah Herschel in America, June 18, 2007)
Jim Pauwels, thanks for your kind words. One of the first things I did today was to pray for you.
Carolyn Disco, thanks for your insights today and yesterday and for many other days. Tommorrow one of the first things I will do is to pray for you and your family.
Carolyn Disco:
Thanks very much for the mention of Barry Ulanov’s book and for your memories of having him as a teacher in 1960 (“I was privileged more than I can say to have been taught by [him],” As I read that, I suddenly remembered that, two years after he taught you, he came and spoke to our college’s Newman Club. It was such a good talk.
I too appreciate the depth of the exchange here. And I agree with Carolyn that prayer is a practice that must be engaged in, and that it does issue in some experiential knowledge of the One to whom we pray.
In reflecting more “speculatively” (which can, I think, also be a prayerful practice), the Gospel quote that David cites may be a good point of departure: “how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
St.Paul seems to use a tri-partite anthropology. The human is body, mind, spirit. God will always nourish our spirit with his Holy Spirit in answer to prayer. Sometimes this endowment with the Spirit will also affect our minds and bodies as well (and even the minds and bodies of those for whom we pray) — as the church’s tradition seems to attest.
Why this occurs at times and not at others, I do not know. But unless I affirm this (and I can be corrected), it seems that one must either maintain, in deistic fashion, that God leaves his creation to its own devices, or, in gnostic fashion, that the material and the spiritual have nothing to do with one another. Neither alternative corresponds to the biblical tradition.
I had hoped, since my last contribution, that theologians, more tutored than I, would enter the discussion, but here at least is my inadequate attempt. There is no doubt but that on this and other matters we only see through a glass darkly.
David Nikol –
About God’s listening to us, then making up His mind, then deciding whethere or not to answer our prayers: the medievals thought that God’s time (which they called “aeveternity”) is only analogous to our time. Boetheius’ definition of it (as I remember it) is “the perfect and simultaneous possessiont of eternal life”. There is no before and after for God. All the listening, deciding and answering are within the same, one instant that is God’s all-encompassing time. We have to think of it as a process because that is the way our time, our lives work. Furthermore, to be exact, He doesn’t live “in” that instant, He IS that instant. So the question about what happened before God is a meaningless one.
The medievals make a great deal of sense to me. For Aquinas all our knowledge of God is only analogous to what He is in Himself. His justice, His love, His very being are “beyond” what we can know, and that very notion of “beyond” is itself only a metaphor for what He is. And when Jesus about God but not in parables He too is speaking metaphorically.
Ann,
You have identified one of the great problems, it seems to me, in talking about God at all, and definitely in talking about whether God answers prayers. If God is outside of time, how can he listen and decide? How can he be persuaded? How can he change his mind.
Nevertheless, a great many prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer, assume that in some way God listens to what we ask for and decides whether or not to grant it.
There have, I know, been some “empirical tests,” such as the one recounted here:
On the one hand, I tend to believe that any phenomenon that is real should be open to some kind of empirical verification. On the other hand, I am not sure how much a study like that has to do with real prayer.