What? Me Pray?
If you have a group of Catholics over for a dinner party, and they’ve stayed a bit too late but you don’t want to be rude by pointedly winding the alarm clock in front of them, one thing that always works to clear the room is to bring up in conversation the efficacy of prayer and people’s individual prayer lives. We all believe that people should pray and we may even believe that everyone does pray. And probably no one would deny that the question of opening channels of communication to God is “a very important thing”. But nothing makes people start looking at their watches faster than bringing up prayer in conversation.
For those of you who have stayed with me to the end to the end of the last paragraph, let me try to tantalize you with this. For a full 35 years, I didn’t think that I could pray. This changed a few years ago. If you are interested in knowing what happened, continue reading below the fold. For the rest of you, don’t worry about the plates and cups and have a safe trip home.
“What do you mean you “couldn’t pray”, you might be saying. “Even though you are hiding behind a cunningly designed pseudonym, you have let slip on several occasions that you are cradle Catholic and went to Catholic schools. Unless you are either remarkably stupid or lazy, you would have had to learn lots of prayers. What could have kept you from saying them?”
Fair enough. What I mean by being unable to pray is that as a relatively young teenager I stopped feeling any connection to God when I prayed. I may as well have been reading the ingredients from a cereal box. The very hard thing about it for me was that when I was younger, I really DID feel the connection. In fact, I probably felt it more than most of my friends did when they prayed. When my younger brother was outside hiding behind the garage playing with matches or sneaking cigarettes or in the vacant lots catching snakes and torturing grasshoppers, I could often be found in a quiet room on my knees with a rosary in my hand. (Guess which of the two of us was considered a strange little boy?)
When I lost the connection, the advice that I got from an old Jesuit at the time was “Wait; it will come back.” So I waited. And while I waited I figured that I might as well involve myself in all of those wicked things going on around me in the late ’60′s and the ’70′s to, you know, not be wasting my time while I waited.
Over time, though, I started to grow up. I came back to the Church after a 20 year sabbatical with a desire to recapture what I had lost, but not knowing how to do it. I found myself a new old Jesuit to give me some spiritual advice and discovered that the plains of aridity I was wandering in were actually the pastures of a good old fashioned clinical depression. After working for two years with my Jesuit, I found that I was no longer depressed. But I still couldn’t pray. I was going to have to wait another 17 years.
Strange as it may be to relate, I took my first step back to real prayer because of something I read (or as so often happens, I thought I read) in a book by Alasdair Macintyre. He was talking about tradition and authority. What he seemed to be saying was that the authority of tradition rests in the idea that there are many valuable things whose value we cannot grasp until we have achieved some sort of mastery over them. To obtain this mastery, we have to make what is literally a leap of faith with a teacher, trusting that he or she is simply correct about the value that we ourselves are not yet qualified to see. I had run into this kind of thinking before in Japan. In their classical system of education (still used for arts and crafts) they have an approach that could be described as “attitude follows action”. For many things, you have to learn how to do them first before you can appreciate why its good to do them. One thing that almost always strikes the Westerner is that the classic Japanese teacher gives the student very little feedback. The idea is that the student, in following exactly the master’s example, will eventually be able to grasp for himself the subject at hand well enough to be able to assess his level of quality himself.
In the West, we tend to think that “action follows attitude”. We spend a lot of time trying to prove to ourselves that something is of value before we begin the hard work of trying to master it. The classic Japanese approach of “learn it whether you like it or not” strikes the Westerner as a brutal suppression of the Individuals God given right to exercise free choice. On the other hand, to a classical Japanese teacher, Westerners look like under educated dilettantes who need constant reassurance in order to continue doing their work.
It struck me that in the case of prayer, maybe I was stuck on waiting for the right attitude to emerge. Perhaps I was looking for a toaster upside the head by the Holy Spirit before I could actually begin the discipline of praying. Perhaps what I needed was a leap of faith of my own. I should stop whining, start praying, and see what happens.
Of course, Japanophile that I am, I needed my own “master”. I could not locate any old Jesuits at the time, so I had to resort to a book. In my case it was a book by (don’t laugh) Ralph McInerney. I have always thoroughly enjoyed his philosophical works, but I had also been particularly fascinated by his crystal clear undiluted squareness. So I had purchased his autobiography and in it he talks a great deal about his own life of prayer. This was the book I happened had in hand and I felt that I could certainly trust in his good intentions. So why not start with him?
I had a good time and place for my experiment in praying. I walk to the train station every morning. It’s a few miles away so it takes me at least 35 minutes to get there. Normally I made good use of this time fantasizing about what fatal disasters awaited me at work that day. I would have to sacrifice part of this now for the prayer thing. For a model, I decided to use something that McInerney referred to as the “Little Office”, prayed by his pious and devout mother apparently all of her life. It consists of 12 sets of one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and on Glory Be. I could do this.
Now my Jansenist Irish peasant grandmother had taught me as a lad that one’s prayers were collected in heaven in some sort of celestial bank account. In high school this idea had come to repel me as too capitalistic and too manipulative of God. In retrospect, it was this kind of thinking that probably worked to separate me from prayer. Now I was just trying to put myself into the position of clueless novice. So I wasn’t going to worry about the bank account issue. Pray, and don’t worry was my new motto.
It proved rather easy to turn it into a routine. No feelings of connection emerged, but on the other hand it did force me to push out a lot of the trash thinking I had been doing before, at least for the duration of the prayers. (Note: A Buddhist monk in Japan once told me that clearing the mind of the nasty little voice constitutes spiritual progress in itself.)
One day I found myself thinking about my mother, who had died rather young over 20 years before. Why not pray for here while I was praying? It couldn’t hurt and it might even help. A lot of McInerney’s discussion of his own prayer life involved praying for the dead.
At this point, I felt that I was rapidly becoming transformed into Forrest Gump. If I was going to pray for my dead mother, I might as well pray for my dead father. And if I was going to pray for him, why not my grandparents? And my dead aunts and uncles? And old dead friends? Old teachers? Old neighbors? I could picture these people in my mind. I could see them looking for me to remember them. I even had the odd thought that perhaps Purgatory was simply Hell with a light cool rain falling in the form of hope generated by the prayers of friends and strangers. (I told you that I used to be a strange child.)
This crowd of dead people clamoring for my attention brought me to another crossroads. If I could pray for the dead, what about the sick? I knew several people personally who were gravely ill, and more unhappy alcoholics and drug addicts than I could count. But now, as irrational as this sounds, it looked like I was asking my 36 prayers to bear an awful lot of weight. And these prayers weren’t even getting me half the distance to the train station. So I decided to pray the rosary instead, discretely mumbled and the prayers counted on my fingers so as not to alarm the passers by. I took me several weeks to get half good at it, because I could remember few of the mysteries and was so out of touch that I didn’t even know that Pope John Paul II had instituted a brand new fourth set. Worse, I couldn’t remember any of Hail Holy Queen and I was forced to resort to a crib with embarrassingly lavish illustrations that I got at church. I had to read this prayer out loud over and over again like a third grader off this sheet to memorize it, to the wry amusement of the dog walkers and people in their jammies grabbing their morning papers off the stoop.
I found that if I prayed from the time I walked out my door until I boarded the train, I could get in two rosaries and one Little Office. This seemed to me to be heading back to the bad old days of the celestial bank account. But it was better that what I had been doing, praying fruitlessly (it seemed) half way to the train station and then torturing myself the rest of the way about why I was wasting all this time praying fruitlessly.
Some months had gone by. While I was still not feeling a connection, something else started to happen. I was starting to find it easier to pray as such. I would sometimes now find myself spontaneously praying at other times. And when I did this, I found that I wasn’t asking for anything. I was just praying. I didn’t feel like I was connected to God in particular, but this praying made me feel calm, like I was meditating.
This was fine with me. It seemed like some sort of progress. But I didn’t know where all of this was going. I continued along for a couple more months and then I noticed something happening that disturbed me. My prayers on the way to the train station were becoming almost automatic. I could pray in the background of my mind and still think about entirely different stuff in the foreground. This is something that I had been afraid would happen all along. I would be doing a rote recitation that would be little more than a low buzz in the background. I decided that I needed to focus more on the mysteries and their active visualization, because I could not bear the thought that my prayer life would consist of praying the rosary in the back of my head while I pondered the important matter of what color shoes to buy next time. I was not ready to stop the experiment. I had invested so much in it already.
So I prayed, focused on the meditations, and tried not to trip over any raccoons on the early morning sidewalk. The went on for a couple of months until… I found that both the prayers and the meditations were receding sometimes into the background while things like shoes were appearing in the foreground again. This new thing didn’t exactly drive me to despair, but it did disappoint me. Had it happened every time, I believe that I would have been tempted to stop the whole experiment and just hook myself to my I-Pod. But the problem was intermittant (for now) so I figured that I would just press on for the time being.
I am walking down the street one morning. I am praying the rosary in my head, counting the prayers discretely on my fingers. The mysteries concern the life of Christ. I am praying for the dead and have gotten so familiar with picturing them when I give them their morning rosary that it is almost like I am showing up to breakfast with them and bringing the donuts. The weather is fair. The sky is clear. The trees and grass are a vivid green. And suddenly I feel like I am deeply in love with everything around me and with the people I am praying for. I feel almost giddy with life. I feel loved, blessed, and fortunate.
I seem to have reconnected (at last) to the sweetness that I used to feel when I was young. It has happened spontaneously. I could not (and cannot) make it happen, but in my heart I am sure that it would not have happened had I not been praying at that time and place. It is one of those metaphysical moments when God moves from being a good and well thought out theory to being physically real.
These moments still happen. It’s not like putting a quarter in a jukebox. I have not turned into a rat pressing the bar for the sugar cube. Praying has become a kind of waiting, as though I am in a conversation with someone very interesting and I am waiting for them to add to the conversation. I find that it is not hard to wait because I know (not believe, but know) that there is someone there on the other side. Prayer is sweet.
A lot has happened to me in the couple of years since I reconnected, including the Toaster of Metanoia hitting me in the head (another long story). There have been additional things that have happened in my prayer life. But I will relate just one more anecdote.
I was talking to an ancient Franciscan friar about my experiences with prayer, very much as I have related them to you. He smiled and said “Ah yes, the sweetness of prayer. What a wonderful gift! But a thousand years ago when I was in the seminary, I remember the Novice Master telling us that yes, prayer can bring on this sweetness. But remember that after the sweetness, God frequently takes it all away, at least for a time. Yanks the rug entirely out from under you, just to see what you are really made of!”
And then, like a good Franciscan, he laughed.
Unagidon,
Early on you mention the efficacy of prayer — something that rarely if ever is discussed. There was a discussion quite some time ago here about a book on prayer which talked about its benefits to the persons who prayed and its benefits to the persons who were prayed for, but as I pointed out at the time, the explanation of its benefits seemed to me purely naturalistic (if I am using that term correctly). That is, it seemed to me that the authors’ descriptions of the benefits of prayer would be the same whether or not there was a God to hear those prayers. Clearly prayer (like meditation and contemplation) can bring about changes in a person. But is God effecting those changes? And does praying for the sick (or at least those who don’t know they are being prayed for) or the dead actually help them? And can praying actually convince God to do something he would not otherwise have done?
The American Bishops called on Catholics last year to pray an Election Novena, the intention of which 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.” Doesn’t this imply a belief that God might throw an election?
I am curious about the theology of asking God to intervene and do anything — heal the sick, affect election results, take care of the dead, bring back someone to the Church, or whatever. I have suggested an empirical study to determine the efficacy of prayer by determining if basketball players who cross themselves before making a free throw have better results than players who do not. Should we expect them to? Can there ever be empirical evidence for the efficacy of prayer?
Unagidon–
Thanks for such a relective post. C.S. Lewis wrote about the “habit” of prayer, i.e., making it a common occurrence in one’s life even when a connection with the Divine isn’t felt. Perhaps his habit idea might be a better motivating tool than a “celestial bank account,” though both are hopefully moving the person praying on a regular basis to the same end. (Of course, Lewis also said that the road to hell is also paved with our bad habits.)
As to the aridity you mentioned, have you read “Come Be My Light” by the postulator for the canonization of Mother Teresa? Mother Teresa experienced decades of aridity in her prayer life. She had prayed as a young nun to experience the loneliness and estrangement Christ felt on the Cross. When she related this desire to one of her spiritual advisers after many years of feeling unconnected with God, the adviser told her that he believed she had been given the “gift” she had asked for. That certainly helped change her frame of reference and made the burden easier to bear, but she also related to her adviser that she had felt the connection–the “sweetness of prayer”–for about a two week period in the midst of her aridity. Perhaps God was letting her know, “Hey, I’m still here.” That respite must have been indescribable.
As to your intro paragraph about mentioning prayer among a group of Catholics, I still remember the blank and confused looks I got one time when I happened to mention in a setting filled with Catholics that my favorite set of mysteries of the Rosary is the Luminous Mysteries. :)
Great story. I would have a story, too, but it wouldn’t fit in a comment box… I have to say, though, that even though I often know with absolute certainty that “there is someone there on the other side”, it does not prevent me from also often wondering whether that is not all a grand illusion.
Thanks for this post. It’s true – it’s hard to get people to talk about their prayer lives.
And suddenly I feel like I am deeply in love with everything around me and with the people I am praying for. I feel almost giddy with life. I feel loved, blessed, and fortunate.
I think that experience is what Ignatius of Loyola might call the First Principle and Foundation, a feeling of joy and one-ness with creation and a sort of yearning.
I don’t know about the efficacy of petitionary prayer ….. I have to admit that it doesn’t make sense to me that praying for the dead or the sick makes (or persuades) God to help them. He should be helping them as much as possible whether anyone cares for them or not, if he’s a God worth his stuff. But maybe when we pray for the dead and the sick (which I still do) it’s a way of telling God something about ourselves, what’s important to us.
I pray the Ignatian way, which I learned in a Jesuit Spiritual Exercises retreat – what Ignatius called a colloquy or conversation – I imagine Jesus and myself together talking. I talk, he talks back. Sometime it seems like I’m making it all up, but sometimes he really surprises me. I love this kind of prayer because it’s alive, it affirms the idea that God wants a personal relationship with us.
If you pray for a sick person, does that move God to heal him or her, or is that something that He would have done anyway?
Does prayer have any real effect on God?
Yes and no.
No. It does not have any real effect on what God is going to do in the sense that, being timeless, God already knows what He is going to do (from the human temporal perspective) and, indeed, has already done (from God’s out-of-time perspective). However, God not only knows what He is going to do before you pray for it, He also knows that you are going to make that prayer (or not). Thus –
Yes. God already knowing that you are going to make that prayer before He does what He is going to do does indeed have an effect on what does. If you do not make the prayer, as you might if reality where something other that what it is, which He would already know before you do not do it, then He might very well not do what He might have done had the prayer been made. With the prayer for the sick, which He already knows, He heals. However, in “an alternate reality,” where the prayer is not made, He would not.
Being eternal and transcendent of time, so that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen in the human timeline is in God’s present, all of time being a singularity, the fact that He already knows and has already done it does not mean that what we have prayed for did not play a factor in whether it was done or not.
Whether God has in fact intervened in a given situation and altered what would have happened if He had not intervened is ultimately a matter of faith. It cannot be submitted to the scientific method. God cannot be put under the microscope. Either one believes that a healing was miraculous or he doesn’t. “All I know is that I was blind, and now I see.”
As I grow older, more and more people seem to enter my prayer or, perhaps better, be present with me in prayer. It almost seems like “here comes everybody.” But there is no jostling for space, everyone is courteous and enriches the gathering, rather like the denizens of Dante’s White Rose.
Lately, as I, in my finitude, become more mindful of this blessed multitude, it has begun to dawn on me how all might be present simultaneously in the mind and heart of the eternal God.
Consider the matter of grace.
Grace is a gift. But the gift of grace from God is not an action. It is a transaction. God does not unilaterally confer grace upon someone. That would be an imposition contrary to love.
Rather, for grace to be conferred, (1) you must ask God for it and, once offered, (2) you must accept the gift. If you don’t ask and you don’t accept, you ain’t getting it. It is a two-way street, a bi-lateral communication. Even if only in a de minimus manner, if that is all you are capable of at that time, you must ask or otherwise indicate your willingness to accept if offered.
There are conditions precedent to some of God’s actions. You must ask and/or accept before He will do it. It is not a case of God merely doing what He would have done anyway. Without your doing that condition precedent, He would not have done it, even if He does know what the ultimate outcome is before it happens. God already knew that Mary would say “yes,” but that does not mean that her “yes” was required before the Holy Spirit would come upon her.
CORRECTION –
God already knew that Mary would say “yes,” but that does not mean that her “yes” was required before the Holy Spirit would come upon her.
The folly of multiple negatives in a sentence. That should be “God already knew that Mary would say “yes,” but that does not mean that her “yes” was not required before the Holy Spirit would come upon her.”
Unagidon,
What a marvelous reflection.
You’re probably aware that Blessed Teresa of Calcutta had some very long periods of spiritual aridity in her life, and it really worried her.
I love your Japanese education metaphor. My experience has been much along the same lines: it is by doing it, and reflecting on what I’m doing, that I begin to “get” it.
What a blessing to have that prayerful time carved into your daily schedule. I really think that the overall “busyness” of daily life prevents people from praying, or even thinking of praying.
The problem with coming up with empirical proofs for the existance of God is that one is setting the criteria of proof first and then demanding that the subject meets the criteria. This works for things that can be quantified, but what if something can’t be quantified? Empiricists will generally claim (in my experience) that everything can be quantified. But is that true? I have mentioned in other posts that I think there are things that cannot be quantified. They include beauty, art, love and things like that. The experience of these things is metaphysical, not because they don’t have a physical existence but because they don’t have a quantifiable existence. I have been told that these things are only not quantifiable in my idealist imagination. But why would we even think that they are not quantifiable, compared to other things that we know are?
God is something that exists in the quantitative imagination before God exists in the qualitative imagination. Not to be too cryptic, but until we have a qualitative experience of God we think of God quantitatively. So we look for the quantitative empirical proofs of God and we do this with prayer as well. I used to pray in order to transform something else when I prayed for things. But what happened instead is that I myself was transformed. And transformed in ways that I could not really predict because I had to experience God as a quality in order to even begin to understand the transformation.
We have what I might call quantitative signs. One of these is the accounts of the saints. But saint’s lives look foreign until one has a qualitative experience of God. They look like bundles of strange practices and the recipient of strange events. The first step of considering that the saints were experiencing something that was real is one of those little leaps of faith that one needs to take before one can grasp the whole thing.
I don’t know if my prayers benefit anyone. I do know that they have changed me. I also know that as my own prayer life has developed (and this has happened in a very short time compared to my 45 year long “prologue”). I now see prayer as more the opening of some kind of contemplative connection to God and less a case where I am asking the Big Daddy to give me stuff. While my prayer life seems to have developed, it does not follow that I have somehow escape the paradoxes of human life, as my reflection on the slow death of my friend last week should clearly show.
Unagidon,
It would seem to me that if, say, praying for the sick does no good for the sick, then those who pray for the sick are misunderstanding prayer and giving themselves false hope of making a bad situation better. It might be preferable instead to pray that God gives you the grace to accept whatever happens to your sick loved one. But maybe you are indicating that prayer involves a progression from asking for things (perhaps futilely) to accommodating yourself to the way things are.
It does seem to me, though, that if praying for the sick helps them get better, some kind of empirical study could verify that. A scientific experiment with a prayed-for experimental group and an un-prayed-for control group would be preposterous, since the prayers for the sick would hardly be sincere. But it seems to me that if prayer actually effects the world, or sacraments give you certain kinds of grace to strengthen you in one way or another, then it out to show.
For me, praying for the sick and the dying is a way to be WITH the sick and dying when you can’t actually be there to provide the relief and comfort yourself.
It’s also a reminder that the only way God is going to show up for these people is through you, as a member of the body of Christ.
I find the answers to my prayers fairly astringent. Actually, they sound exactly like the kind of answers my Gramma would give me.
When our son was 18 months old and undergoing tests for leukemia and lymphoma (all turned out to be negative), I went to the bathroom (guessing more prayers are said in bathroom cubicles than in churches) to have a short meltdown and asked God what I was going to do if the kid turned out to be seriously ill.
“Stop blubbering and get out there and be the best damn mother you can be,” was the almost instant answer.
David,
I remember reading about just such a study and that it showed (if I remember correctly) that praying for people, even those who didn’t know they were being prayed for, helped them get well. I’ll look around and see if I can find it online.
Couldn’t find it, but here’s a news story that mentions some studies – link. Just for the record, I prayed very hard for my mother when she had lung cancer – it didn’t seem to help, at least not with getting better.
I agree with Jim, unagidon: marvelous reflection.
Thanks, William, for bringing C. S. Lewis into this conversation. Like Claire, Lewis was beset by doubts over the reality of prayer, let alone its efficacy. His definition of prayer is contained in the following extract:
The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine— something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary—not necessarily the most important one—from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.
“The Efficacy of Prayer” by C. S. Lewis from *The World’s Last Night and Other Essays* (NY: Harcourt, 1960]
If anyone is interested, Lewis is also good in “Work and Prayer,” *God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics,* Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids,: Eerdmans, 1970), 104–107
In his Summa theologica, 2a-2ae, q. 83, a. 2, St. Thomas Aquinas asked whether there is any point in praying. He gave three reasons why there is no point to it: (1) God doesn’t need to be told what we need; (2) God’s will is immutable; (3) a supremely liberal God doesn’t need to be asked. On the other hand, there was the authority of Lk 18:1: “We ought always to pray, and not to faint.”
In setting out his own answer, Aquinas noted three ancient errors with regard to praying: (1) that human affairs are not governed by divine providence; (2) that everything, including human affairs, happens of necessity; (3) that divine providence is variable and can be changed by prayers. The remainder of his answer to the question about prayer sums up the arguments by which he had refuted the three errors in the first part of the Summa.
The argument, in short, is that God has created a universe in which not only is he the first cause of all that happens but there are also secondary causes that are genuine causes. God wills not only that there be created effects, but that there be genuine created causes of created effects. We are not to pray in order to change God’s plan about things, but rather that we pray for that which God has planned was to happen because we prayed for it.
In Ia, q. 19, a. 5, St. Thomas provided a neat statement of the underlying notion. Many people imagine this scenario: A prays for B; because God sees A praying for B, God decides to do what A has prayed for. A’s prayer, then, causes God to help B. This is a popular imagination, and the one that often underlies questions about praying.
Aquinas, however, denied that there can be any cause of God’s willing anything–the divine transcendence required this conclusion. But God who created and sustains all things, necessary things and contingent things, also created and sustains the order of a universe in which certain things are causes of certain other things, either necessarily or contingently or freely. In the order of human affairs, one example of a created cause having a created effect is when one person prays for another.
In the neat Latin: “Vult ergo hoc esse propter hoc; sed non propter hoc vult hoc.” Loosely translated: “It is not because of A that God wills that B happen; but God wills that B happen because of A.” Applied to praying, this would read: It is not because A prayed that God decided on B; but God willed that B happen because A prayed.
David and Unagidon-
About empirical proof for the efficacy of prayer:
It seems to me that empirical proofs look for necessary relations between cause and effect (even though science offers at best only probabilities. But a positive a swer to a prayer is a gift — something by definition non-necessary. So there cannot be any proof that prayers “work”.
History, aesthetics and prayer are all about what is contingent, about what might have been otherwise. As such, there can be no proof that certain kinds of events necessarily cause certain kinds of effects, even though the incidence of such effects might be greater than zero.
Stillp we *know* that something is beautiful without arguing to a conclusion that “Thisust be beautiful”, Beauty *shows* itself so its fittingness needen’t be argued to.
Analogously sometimes when prayers are answered we simply *see* that the outcome is appropriate and we simply understand that there is no necessary connection between the prayer and its positive answer, but we see its fittingness, the rationale behind it. And often it is the very gratuitousness, even going against what is scientifically probable , that convinces us that the outcome was something *chosen*, not somethi g determined by the laws of physics or biology.
Unagidon,
Thanks for your rich reflection. We need more of these anthropological, ethnographic testimonies to understand better how prayer actually plays out in the hearts and minds of believers.
Some quick thoughts on some of what I’ve learned, or come to believe, over the years, about prayer.
Prayer is paying attention to God. When we do that, we don’t find that God changes, but that we change.
Prayer can be “evaluated” by asking what graces one notices being given after prayer. Grace is the ability to do what one could not do before.
An alcoholic who prays for freedom from addiction, and finds the ability to resist the next drink has received the grace to start on the road to serenity and sobriety. Spouses who pray and find they can forgive one another and rediscover love have received grace. Graces come in many ways and shades. Relishing God’s word and entering deeply into liturgy. Being able to forgive oneself and others. Realizing what an undeserved gift life is. Living in peace and spreading joy and justice. [ Being able to suffer the Phillies loss in the World series to the damn Yankees... (LOL) ] So many graces… Prayer helps us notice them.
Most importantly, prayer helps us desire rightly. To pray for one who has done you wrong and finding in your heart the desire for justice rather than revenge, or realizing why they did what they did (think teenagers) and seeing their wrong actions in a whole new light, makes us desire to help the person, rather than hold on to our wounds. Prayer helps us want God in our lives with all the peace and prosperity, justice and joy, faith and freedom, hope and healing, love and life God want to give us.
Peace, Rick
William said: “Thanks for such a reflective post. C.S. Lewis wrote about the “habit” of prayer, i.e., making it a common occurrence in one’s life even when a connection with the Divine isn’t felt. Perhaps his habit idea might be a better motivating tool than a “celestial bank account,” though both are hopefully moving the person praying on a regular basis to the same end. (Of course, Lewis also said that the road to hell is also paved with our bad habits.)”
I have run into the idea about making a habit of prayer in other religions. I knew a Sufi once from the Mosque of Hussein in Cairo who felt that if a Muslim did his five prayers a day for 45 consecutive days that he would do them daily for the rest of his life. I asked why 45 days in particular and got the rather sensible answer that most Muslims do them for the 30 day period of Ramadan, but it doesn’t have the same effect. Zen Buddhists I have known felt that Buddhist meditation fulfilled the same function. And Hesychasts and people interested in the “Jesus Prayer” in our sister Orthodox Churches (“Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner”) try to somehow incorporate this prayer into every waking moment.
Some non-believers that I have discussed this with have simply felt that this is just some kind of “auto-indoctrination”. And while I was doing my experiment I often wondered why I even expected it to work. I think that some of the saints have suggested that perseverance is an important part of praying, and of course if it not doing anything for you at first, perseverance becomes almost a primary part of it. But it also struck me that in getting into the habit of prayer, I was physically doing the following: 1) I was clearing my mind of things that were not prayer; 2) I was focusing on and internalizing the message of the prayer 3) I was practicing a form of meditation even though I was walking down the street and not sitting quietly in a room. Did these things create a “desire” that then caused me to imagine being fulfilled? A non-believer could certainly claim this. But again the ultimate effects of prayer and having a real prayer life were quite different from what I expected. So my reply would be “you don’t know until you try it.”
William said: “As to the aridity you mentioned, have you read “Come Be My Light” by the postulator for the canonization of Mother Teresa?”
I can’t compare myself to her. But I will say that I feel that I had a prayer life when I was a child, I feel like I lost it for decades, and I feel that I found it again in late middle age. My prayer life now seems to me to be an adult prayer life; it not only comes, but it develops. But the aridity that I felt was a feeling of loss. I wonder if in order to feel the loss, one must have lost something. My impression of Mother Teresa was that something like this happened to her. There were people who seemed surprised that Mother Teresa persevered all of those years with that feeling. I wasn’t. It would be like falling deeply in love as a young person, losing it, and not falling in love again for the rest of one’s life. One might give up on oneself as ever going to experience it again, but one will not from that deny the existence of that love in the first place.
Claire said: “Great story. I would have a story, too, but it wouldn’t fit in a comment box… I have to say, though, that even though I often know with absolute certainty that “there is someone there on the other side”, it does not prevent me from also often wondering whether that is not all a grand illusion.”
Part of the human condition. The Franciscan friar was warning me to expect the same thing, and to not feel to let down when it happened. It’s part of the paradox of being human. And I think that’s why he laughed. That’s the only way one can deal with paradox.
You know, you could fill as many comment boxes as you wished. There is an endless supply of them.
Crystal said: “I pray the Ignatian way, which I learned in a Jesuit Spiritual Exercises retreat – what Ignatius called a colloquy or conversation – I imagine Jesus and myself together talking. I talk, he talks back. Sometime it seems like I’m making it all up, but sometimes he really surprises me. I love this kind of prayer because it’s alive, it affirms the idea that God wants a personal relationship with us.”
I like this. I also experimented with different forms of prayer in this experiment of mine. For one thing, I felt that I was too old, educated, and sophisticated to be doing something so basic as a bunch of rote prayers. Much cooler, I thought, to be able to say that I was doing lectio divina or Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. I myself kept coming back to the more simple stuff because I found that I simply could not tame my mind otherwise. Perhaps I was going back to the start in some ways; that I was still a child in the development of my prayer life even though chronologically I wasn’t a child any more. But I will say that once I started to have a prayer life, the other kinds of prayer started to become productive as well.
In any case, I now believe that a prayer life develops. And this means that we should look to what works for us. But as a good businessman I also have to say that we should be prepared to move to other things if something fails. And to be broad minded about trying other things.
Bender said: “No. It does not have any real effect on what God is going to do in the sense that, being timeless, God already knows what He is going to do (from the human temporal perspective) and, indeed, has already done (from God’s out-of-time perspective). However, God not only knows what He is going to do before you pray for it, He also knows that you are going to make that prayer (or not).”
Fair enough. But I think of this this way. Not being encumbered with God’s perspective (because I think one would have to be God to tolerate the idea that everything is fore ordained) I have my own inadequate perspective of the current moment. In the current moment, I am sitting (say) in a Mexican restaurant wondering whether or not I should order the guacamole. I am really struggling with this, because if I order it I will have to order a less expensive entree that I don’t especially want because I forgot to bring very much cash with me. After agonizing about it for five minutes, I use my free will and order the guacamole after all. This of course has unanticipated ramifications for the rest of my life that I won’t go into here. But the point is, I have a different viewpoint of the same event tomorrow when I can look back to today and ask myself “Will unagidon order the guacamole or not?” In hindsight, since I know what was going to happen, it looks like it was inevitable that I would order the guacamole, since that is what in fact I did. But at the time I made a choice. It is in retrospect that the choice seemed preordained.
The point is, why should I care if free choice is an illusion? It isn’t to me. Maybe it is to God. But what kind of dull terrible life would I have if I didn’t believe in what is obvious to me from my non-divine viewpoint? Could it not put into some terribly useless place where I am always looking for signs of pre-destination? No thanks.
Fr. Imbelli said: “As I grow older, more and more people seem to enter my prayer or, perhaps better, be present with me in prayer. It almost seems like “here comes everybody.” But there is no jostling for space, everyone is courteous and enriches the gathering, rather like the denizens of Dante’s White Rose.
Lately, as I, in my finitude, become more mindful of this blessed multitude, it has begun to dawn on me how all might be present simultaneously in the mind and heart of the eternal God.”
This has been my experience too. I know a priest who in his recent sermons has been talking about the four (and only four) times that he thinks Jesus has actually spoken to him in his entire (prayer) life. He says that he thinks that one of the signs of the authenticity of this is that each time he has some sort of insight so startling that he can only think that it came from outside of himself. This of course may or may not prove anything. But in my short time of having a prayer life again I have been very surprised at how it has transformed my understanding of things. I am not a scholar at all; I’m just a guy. But I am pretty well read and I am still surprised at what I see. (And no, I have not yet been blessed with a feeling that Jesus has spoken directly to me as such).
When I said that I don’t ask for things as I used to, I don’t mean that I don’t ask for things. But it seems that as my prayer life has become richer, I find myself simply in communion with God, with creation, and with the dead as well, who don’t seem to me to be as “gone” as they used to be. Creation seems to transcend time and prayer seems to put me into the presence of this somehow.
Jim said: “I love your Japanese education metaphor. My experience has been much along the same lines: it is by doing it, and reflecting on what I’m doing, that I begin to “get” it.”
This Japanese attitude seems to me to have been the general human attitude toward life and is reflected in old attitudes toward “craft” and a life as craft that I see reflected in ancient ethical philosophy. We have sort of lost this somehow, and not just in terms of prayer. Maybe the Enlightenment made us too cerebral and we lost some kind of connection between mind and body and between thought and practice. But I will say that if you see someone really engaged in a craft, you would almost say that they are engaged in prayer. Perhaps a “prayerful life” meant something different in those days when there was a craft mentality. Maybe part of my problem was that I was bracketing out my “prayer life’ from the rest of my life.
Jean said: ““Stop blubbering and get out there and be the best damn mother you can be,” was the almost instant answer.”
One of the things that I really like about your comments is that there often seems to be this streak of realism and pragmatism to them. No airy fairy stuff for you. Things seem to be so grounded. On the other hand, you sometimes seem to say that you are suffering from some sort of lack of faith. I would like to know how you picture this thing that you think you lack. It has always seemed to me that perhaps you in fact have it, but are not necessarily seeing it, because you have some sort of idea of what it would have to look like if you really had it. I don’t know if I am being clear; I do know that you look to me like someone who already really has it.
Paul said: “The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine— something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary—not necessarily the most important one—from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.”
I agree. But before one can experience this, it seems as though one is driven to a cause and effect theory of prayer, because the true effects of prayer (if in fact I am anyone to talk about this) are hard to describe until one experiences them.
Joseph said: “In the neat Latin: “Vult ergo hoc esse propter hoc; sed non propter hoc vult hoc.” Loosely translated: “It is not because of A that God wills that B happen; but God wills that B happen because of A.” Applied to praying, this would read: It is not because A prayed that God decided on B; but God willed that B happen because A prayed.”
I can see this. But sometimes I think that these explanations are formed to uphold the “honor of God”. What I mean is that I think I understand the implications of what it would be to have a God that can be “influenced” by prayer. And while I would like it if God did what I requested I also know that we pray for “Thy Will be done” and probably most of the time we have no idea what this Will is. But while I can understand that it is most probable that it is God that willed that I have this prayer life that I have outlined (I certainly wasn’t able to make it happen) I also can’t escape the idea that I myself have to persevere in it in order for it to continue to develop. This perseverance appears to me as my choice. My alternative is to think that I have been predestined somehow so I don’t have to necessarily persevere. I can see the difference between how things look to me from my narrow viewpoint and Thomas Aquinas’ other explanation of how it may really be. But it doesn’t bother me. I can only operate from within myself.
Ann said: “It seems to me that empirical proofs look for necessary relations between cause and effect (even though science offers at best only probabilities. But a positive answer to a prayer is a gift — something by definition non-necessary. So there cannot be any proof that prayers “work”.
…
Still we *know* that something is beautiful without arguing to a conclusion that “This must be beautiful”, Beauty *shows* itself so its fittingness needen’t be argued to.”
Bingo. Prayer seems to me to have more to do with the kind of creativity we see in art than the kind of creativity that we see in hammering a nail. But to expand on that, we would have to talk about art.
Applied to praying, this would read: It is not because A prayed that God decided on B; but God willed that B happen because A prayed.
Fr. Komonchak,
I am having a hard time seeing the difference, unless the meaning is that all along it was part of God’s plan that A would pray for B, and that it was also part of God’s plan that God would help B because A prayed for B. And that would seem to indicate that it is all predetermined, although of course there are then arguments that just because God knows it’s going to happen doesn’t mean that God causes it to happen. As I recall, the argument (from the Baltimore Catechism?) was was about someone standing on the corner of a tall building and watching two cars speeding along the two sides of the building toward an intersection, where they would inevitably crash into each other if they continued.
I am sure many people must have observed that it is suspicious that Aquinas was always arguing with himself and never once lost, but I am saying it on the very slim chance that I am the first.
Richard Dawkins in frustration once said, “If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!” How in the world that could be relevant here I am not sure, but it just popped into my head.
I don’t have time to pull all the relevant quotes, or I will be late for work. We all know them, anyway. What about the things Jesus said about asking and receiving? Many of them seem to be outright statements that you will get what you pray for.
David said: “It does seem to me, though, that if praying for the sick helps them get better, some kind of empirical study could verify that. A scientific experiment with a prayed-for experimental group and an un-prayed-for control group would be preposterous, since the prayers for the sick would hardly be sincere. But it seems to me that if prayer actually effects the world, or sacraments give you certain kinds of grace to strengthen you in one way or another, then it out to show.”
Saved you for last.
I mentioned in my little screed that at one point I realized that I knew of a number of people who were gravely ill. I started to pray for them. Let me tell you a bit more about them. One was a cousin with an advance brain tumor. She died. One was the brother of a friend of mine who drank his liver to oblivion and needed a transplant. He got the transplant and has made (according to his doctors) an astonishing and fast recovery. One of them has cancer which lately seems to be improving, but then again he has been undergoing many rounds of progressively severe chemotherapy and maybe he has finally hit upon the right one, One of them is a little girl who recently broke her neck in a diving accident and is paralyzed from the waist down. And one was my friend Noel in Ireland, who died last week.
I have no idea whether my prayers had any effect on the condition of any of these people one way or another. The liver transplant has almost been miraculous in his recovery. My cousin seemed to get worse and worse the more that I prayed for her. The case of Noel I spoke about last week outlined a particular problem. I can pray for someone to get well, but I don’t even necessarily know what I am praying for, much less what might be God’s Will in the matter. To construct a test as you suppose would be for me to define God as someone who listens to prayers and who I can influence if not bend to my will by prayer. Such a test would seem to me to carry within it a certain contradiction. The God who always makes people better when we pray for them would “prove” Himself to be a certain kind of God that isn’t exactly god-like in the sense that we think.
You would be entirely reasonable to ask “why pray for people to get better, then?” The closest expression of how I feel about this comes from Jean Raber’s comments above. But I will say this. It is impossible to prove that God exists empirically for the same reason that it is impossible to prove that art or love or a number of other things like them exist empirically. People have argued to me that at least they can see a work of art. Well no, they can see a plastic representation that “contains” the “art-ness”, but the “art-ness” of the thing is not the same thing as the representation. You may find this an entirely bogus explanation, but the efficacy of prayer is to be found in the praying and I can only tell you that it isn’t exactly cause and effect but it is exactly like love; you really don’t know it until you feel it.
David added: “I don’t have time to pull all the relevant quotes, or I will be late for work. We all know them, anyway. What about the things Jesus said about asking and receiving? Many of them seem to be outright statements that you will get what you pray for.”
All too true. But sometimes you don’t understand what you are really praying for until you get it. That’s the very strange thing about it. There’s not just cause and effect involved; there’s another transformation that happens as well.
Rick said: “Most importantly, prayer helps us desire rightly. To pray for one who has done you wrong and finding in your heart the desire for justice rather than revenge, or realizing why they did what they did (think teenagers) and seeing their wrong actions in a whole new light, makes us desire to help the person, rather than hold on to our wounds. Prayer helps us want God in our lives with all the peace and prosperity, justice and joy, faith and freedom, hope and healing, love and life God want to give us.”
Very true. It is very hard to describe how prayer transforms one until one has begun to experience it. But your description seems to be to be close. Very hard for a Westerner to accept the idea of “right desiring”. We are so convinced of our utter sovereign freedom in the way we think we choose things. We think that our desires spring from some irreducible base of our individuality. We may not fully understand them and we may need to learn lessons from the distance between what we think our desires are and the effects that they actually produce. But the idea of “right desiring” destroys this very foundation, even though in fact it does begin to describe what happens.
With regard the assertion that “prayer helps us desire rightly,” I think it corresponds with the conclusion of an (as always) stimulating article by Paul Griffiths in the current issue of “First Things:” He is disputing the widespread theological tendency to speak of particular desires as “natural.”
“This rejection of the language of natural desire opens to us, instead, the truth that we are creatures—inchoate, unformed, and hovering over the void from which we were made—who must seek either to return to that void or to find happiness in the arms of the one who brought us forth from it. There is no glassy essence to discover; there is nothing but an unformed gaze that receives form only by looking away from itself and receiving the gift of being looked at by God.”
The whole article is available here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/11/the-nature-of-desire
I was very moved and inspired by this post. I have recently started to reconnect with prayer again myself. I have two young children, and to teach them how to pray, I need to relearn it. I’m at the very, very beginning stages: I get a daily e-mail from the Loyola Press website with a “three minute retreat”. I feel a little embarrassed I do this; it sounds really lame to be praying by e-mail. I was very encouraged to hear how you built up your prayer life. Congratulations and thank you.
David Nichol: You wrote: “I am having a hard time seeing the difference, unless the meaning is that all along it was part of God’s plan that A would pray for B, and that it was also part of God’s plan that God would help B because A prayed for B. And that would seem to indicate that it is all predetermined, although of course there are then arguments that just because God knows it’s going to happen doesn’t mean that God causes it to happen.”
Does it help to put the past tense of your first sentence in the present tense: “…that it is also part of God’s plan”? So that the plan and its realization are simultaneous?
Secondly, Aquinas’s point was that it was not because A prayed for B that God would help B; it is rather that God’s plan is that A’s prayer help B. As for pre-determination, we have to remove from the prefix all connotations of temporal priority, which would eliminate contingence and freedom. All of our successive moments are simultaneously present to God. If God is the cause of all that is, he is the cause also of all determinations of all that is, and this includes whether what happens occurs necessarily or contingently or freely. The Thomist perspective is of a contingent universe (it need not have been created) whose summit is found in intelligent and free creatures who fulfil the goal for which they were created by exercising their intelligence and freedom (as distinct from other creatures who fulfil their natures necessarily or instinctively).
Creaturely contingence and spiritual freedom are intrinsic to the order, the plan, of the universe, and among the contingent and free actions that contribute to the realization of the divine plan are the love and prayers of those who pray for themselves and for others. The order of the universe is not realized without love freely given, one expression of which is prayer.
“Prayer is paying attention to God.”
I like that comment from Rick Malloy. It reminded me of a book I’m reviewing now for possible reading and discussion by our parish book club. It’s called “Interior Prayer” and it’s available at amazon.com. Written by an anonymous Carthusian monk in a style that is easily accessible to a lay person, it contains many insights on prayer, including a chapter on the efficacy of intercessory prayer. If you’ve seen the remarkable movie “Into Great Silence,” then you know that the Carthusians know a thing or two about the interior life and about prayer. The quote from Rick Malloy’s post that I reproduced above pretty much sums up the major theme of the book, though there are many passages in the book that will cause the reader to pause and reflect on what prayer is and how it can best be effected.
BTW, if you’ve ever thought about joining (or starting) a parish book club, I recommend the experience highly. Our parish book club is in its fourth year. We meet monthly except for July and August, though we read a book during that time period for discussion in September. I’m happy to share a list of the books we’ve read over the years, and some do’s and don’t's regarding a successful book club. Feel free to contact me offline if you are interested.
“On the other hand, you sometimes seem to say that you are suffering from some sort of lack of faith.”
I’d say I have faith in God, or at least enough not to have cashed in my chips even though I find life a pain in the neck, mostly.
I simply don’t have the connection that all of you have to the Church, and have pretty much given up on organized religion. I do stay connected with Catholicism b/c that’s where the saints live (from whom I first heard the voice of God), and because my husband and kid are Catholics.
I suppose my tenuous connection to the Church is also an excuse to stay connected here, where I learn things. But let’s not get mushy.
I’m a bit stymied by threads like this one that try to parse out what “prayer” is. It’s just something that happens, that’s always in my head and occasionally comes out in words. It’s not a big thank you for putting me in this vale of tears, that’s for sure, but mostly a constant request for strength not to be a trial to myself and others.
I find the notion of ‘teaching” someone else to pray kind of unfathomable. It’s just out of the realm of my experience. You can make space and time for it, but it happens when it happens.
OK, outta here for a week’s break from all things computer, so happy Thanksgiving to all.
Jean said: “I find the notion of ‘teaching” someone else to pray kind of unfathomable. It’s just out of the realm of my experience. You can make space and time for it, but it happens when it happens.”
I hope you don’t think that I was trying to teach people how to pray. Even if it could be taught, I am not qualified. I am groping around just as I always have. Some of the shapes in the darkness have changed for me, but I’m still groping around. I was hesitant to post this thing even to begin with because I was afraid of (among other things) that people might think I’m saying “Hey, look at me!”
On the other hand, one persistant thought that I have had throughout my “experiement” is that I was some sort of outlier screw up because nothing seemed to be happening. Since something eventually did happen, in one sense I am posting to give heart to my fellow screw ups who might need to know that they should press on.
(And on the third hand, I would be suspicious of anyone who thinks they can train people to be saints. But we have the lives of the saints, which probably at first we dimly understand. And if we are interested in trying to become one ourselves, we may use a saint’s life as a sort of handbook, arbitrarily taking out things in our all too non-structured and human way. It’s kind of like trying to teach oneself Greek using nothing but a dual language reader.)
I have one more comment and then I’ll shut up.
If I had to have a guarantee that prayer is effective, I would never have tried to start praying, because there are no guarantees. There is no way that I can scientifically prove that God exists. So let me put it this way:
When I saw the beautiful sunrise over the water and found myself deeply moved, was it because the sea, light, and sky came together and I happened to just be there for it? Or was it because something came together in me?
Jean: A good deal of the Christian spiritual tradition is about teaching people how to pray. One of the helps it offered is that we have to “make space and time for it.” That in itself, in our very busy world, is a piece of practical wisdom. You’re correct, of course, that prayer happens when it happens, and St. Paul said that we need the Holy Spirit to teach us what and how to pray. But we have some inherited wisdom on which to draw if someone says, as happens not rarely, “I don’t know how to pray. Can you help me?”
Fr. K, thanks for these points and the Aquinas.
Jean Raber, have you ever written about your story with the saints? In Commonweal or elsewhere? Or your conversion stories in general? You often reference them and I would be interested to hear more.
Father K., I’m in no way trying to deny the Church’s wisdom, or that teaching people to pray was impossible (though I don’t know how Irene might do that with her kids; I can teach my son prayers, but praying is something altogether different).
All this is stuff I don’t understand and am not plugged into, and I presume that’s my failing not the Church’s or its wisdom.
I’m sure that as a priest you’re able to teach people how to pray, and that’s one of the multitude of reasons God in his wisdom made you a priest and not me. I am too impatient with theology and theoretics.
God gave me much more prosaic gifts. Somebody’s got to be able to make the chicken soup, argue with doctors, run errands, and change the beds. It doesn’t make for great conversation, but it has to get done.
OK, gone now.
Unagidon,
A good example of attitude following action is the example of Mary Karr (and countless others) when she was told to just pray to God to help her stop drinking and all of a sudden she stopped. There is certainly a natural explanation for this but what non-spiritual scientists lose is that someone created the possiblilty of that connection. Hucksters manipulate these natural phenomenon but even a cursory look at the life of Jesus leads one to authenticity.
What is most essential in your prayer is how you reach out to others. Mystics are always suspicious when they cannot relate to others. I have always found that praying for others is always effective and personally rewarding. It is the second commandment converging with the first.
More from C. S. Lewis (to the rescue?):
Pascal says that God ‘instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality’. It would perhaps be truer to say that He invented both prayer and physical action for that purpose. He gave us small creatures the dignity of being able to contribute to the course of events in two different ways. He made the matter of the universe such that we can (in those limits) do things to it; that is why we can wash our own hands and feed or murder our fellow creatures. Similarly, He made His own plan or plot of history such that it admits a certain amount of free play and can be modified in response to our prayers. If it is foolish and impudent to ask for victory in a war (on the ground that God might be expected to know best), it would be equally foolish and impudent to put on a mackintosh — does not God know best whether you ought to be wet or dry?
The two methods by which we are allowed to produce events may be called work and prayer. Both are alike in this respect — that in both we try to produce a state of affairs which God has not (or at any rate not yet) seen fit to provide ‘on His own’. And from this point of view the old maxim laborare est orare (work is prayer) takes on a new meaning. What we do when we weed a field is not quite different from what we do when we pray for a good harvest. But there is an important difference all the same.
You cannot be sure of a good harvest whatever you do to a field. But you can be sure that if you pull up one weed that one weed will no longer be there. You can be sure that if you drink more than a certain amount of alcohol you will ruin your health or that if you go on for a few centuries more wasting the resources of the planet on wars and luxuries you will shorten the life of the whole human race. The kind of causality we exercise by work is, so to speak, divinely guaranteed, and therefore ruthless. By it we are free to do ourselves as much harm as we please. But the kind which we exercise by prayer is not like that; God has left Himself a discretionary power. Had He not done so, prayer would be an activity too dangerous for man and we should have the horrible state of things envisaged by Juvenal: ‘Enormous prayers which Heaven in anger grants.’
Prayers are not always — in the crude, factual sense of the word — ‘granted’. This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind. When it ‘works’ at all it works unlimited by space and time. That is why God has retained a discretionary power of granting or refusing it; except on that condition prayer would destroy us. It is not unreasonable for a headmaster to say, ‘Such and such things you may do according to the fixed rules of this school. But such and such other things are too dangerous to be left to general rules. If you want to do them you must come and make a request and talk over the whole matter with me in my study. And then — we’ll see.’
“Work and Prayer,” *God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics,* Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids,: Eerdmans, 1970), 104–107
There is certainly a natural explanation for this but what non-spiritual scientists lose is that someone created the possiblilty of that connection.
By the same token, you might argue that the fact that hydrogen and oxygen combining to form water has a natural explanation, but the chemical reaction works because that is the way God created the universe. So for a believer, everything has a “religious” explanation.
I notice, by the way, that Mary Karr’s new book is getting rave reviews in the secular, anti-Catholic press.
My Baltimore Cat notion was that I could call on God, and the saints and ancestors to intercess for ‘actual’ grace to be sent to whatever. . and that any sincere petition would be heard and acted upon.. but how that ‘actual’ grace was received/landed on earth after being sent is a still mystery.
Unagidon,
I myself kept coming back to the more simple stuff because I found that I simply could not tame my mind otherwise. Perhaps I was going back to the start in some ways; that I was still a child in the development of my prayer life even though chronologically I wasn’t a child any more.
I didn’t mean to say that Ignatian prayer was more complicated or better in any way. Somebody once said, Pray as you can, not as you can’t :) I think you’re right that simple works best. It’s just this conversation kind of prayer seems the most simple for me – like talking to a friend about what’s on your mind. I tried the rosary once and wow was it hard to remember!
One thing that has also helped my prayer life a lot has been to have a spiritual director.
Dear Crystal,
I’ve been looking for a spiritual director.
Maybe I could say that Ignatian prayer (at the time) seemed more sophisticated than what ended up working for me. Now, however, I’m not sure that it matters how one prays (in the technical sense).
I’m not sure that it matters how one prays (in the technical sense).
I’m not so sure. I remember a cartoon (quite possibly with two of the Peanuts characters) in which two children are kneeling by a bedside, palms together, and one says to the other, “If you pray with your fingers pointing down, you get the opposite of what you pray for.”
So THAT’S what I was doing wrong for 35 years!
I always liked this definition of prayer:
“Washing your face from the inside” — or perhaps God washing our face from the inside.
Geoffrey Rowell, Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar, in the “Credo” section of the London Times, 7/29/2006,
“I asked God what I was going to do if the kid turned out to be seriously ill.” I have myself told God sometimes: “if my kid gets seriously hurt, I’m through with You”. So far He has yielded to my threats :)
When I tried to tell some priests that I loved my children to a fault, more than God himself, on both occasions they looked at me blankly and said: “But it’s normal that you love your kids. You’re just being a good mother!” – I think that they just don’t get it.
This thread is wonderful. This kind of threads are the reason why I read the Commonweal blog!
Claire — I could not agree more. This thread has been wonderful. Thanks to all, but esp. to Unagidon for his original post.