Prayer 3: Asking God for things

Introduction

It’s pretty much mandatory, I think, for Dominicans, when asked, as we sometimes are, to speak on prayer to begin with a disclaimer: we’re not the specialists here; why don’t you go and talk to the Carmelites or the Jesuits, or the Benedictines, or more or less anyone else – and, although it’s a very conventional thing for Dominicans to say, I think it’s also an honest one. So, although I actually volunteered to give this particular talk, this was not because I think I’m in any sense an expert – but precisely because I know I’m not.  But whilst I’ve been away over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to do quite a lot of thinking about the place of intercessory prayer in my own life, and I wondered if some of the questions I have about this might resonate with some of yours, and whether some of the ideas and resources that have helped me might also be of use to you.

We’ll get to those questions and those resources in a little while, but maybe it’s worth saying a few words about definitions first. We have called this talk “asking God for things” – which is obviously a pretty general topic - and the subtitle is “petitionary prayer”. That makes immediate sense: after all, petition does just mean asking, and a petition, in our everyday parlance is what we produce when we ask those in authority to consider a request. Such a request could be about pretty much anything, and the people who compose it might be asking for something for themselves, or they might be advocating on behalf of others whom they care about. So, it looks as if petitionary prayer is prayer with a similarly wide remit.   But interestingly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church actually makes a distinction between petitionary prayer, which is concerned most immediately with our own relationship with God, and intercessory prayer, which is “asking on behalf of another”. That also makes sense because the literal meaning of intercede is to go between, and thus, to be an advocate or intermediary. Then there is another term which is often used to describe the process of asking God for things, which is supplication, which is often used as a catch all, describing both intercession and petition.

I’m not mentioning this because at the end of this evening there’s going to be a test to ensure that we’re all using the terminology correctly or even consistently. But what I think is important – and exciting - is the relationship between what the Catechism calls petitionary prayer on the one hand, and intercessory prayer on the other: and particular the ways in which, as we’ll see, the boundaries between praying for ourselves and praying for others can sometimes be blurred. But more of that anon.

So here are a few questions that strike me as a good way into thinking about this topic – and we’re going to be looking at each of them in turn.

So, first: who should pray the prayer of intercession/petition/supplication?

Second, why should anyone pray in this way?

Third, for whom, or for what should we pray?

And finally – and this is the toughest question of all – what are we to say about those occasions when we ask God for things, for ourselves or for others, and He seems either not to hear us, or to reject our request- the whole question, in other words, of unanswered prayer.

Who?

So, who can and should pray in this way? I imagine that, on one level, the answer to this will appear obvious to most of us here: we all can and we all should. After all, the Church has always understood that when Jesus responded to His disciples’ request that He should teach them to pray, He intended to give a lesson for all His friends and followers for ever, and there’s a sense in which the Our Father is nothing but asking God for things. But nevertheless, I think there are a couple of ways of thinking about petitionary and intercessory prayer that can sometimes work to undermine this conviction a little.

On the one hand, people sometimes think of asking God for things as the nursery slopes of prayer; something that we can or should aspire to leave behind to ascend to some more exotic form of communing with the Lord, one, perhaps involving highly coloured emotions and experiences.   The great spiritual masters and mistresses of the Christian tradition, of course, are adamant that such things are very far from the heart of prayer, but doesn’t stop them sounding more alluring – though also perhaps more daunting – than the mundane matter of simply composing a wish list and presenting it to the Lord.  Obviously – at least I think it’s obvious – this is bad if it leads us to despise petitionary prayer – or petitionary pray-ers – but I think a more likely risk is that it will lead us to restrict our prayer to asking God for things out of a kind of false spiritual modesty – and, ironically enough, this in itself brings the risk of limiting our petitionary and intercessory prayer too. But I’ll try to say a little more about that towards the end of this talk.

Alternatively, though, we might sometimes be afraid that far from being the prayer of beginners, we have to be far advanced on the way to holiness before we might reasonably expect God to listen to us, and again, unless we are monstrously arrogant and self-deluded, this is likely to inhibit our asking God for anything, either for ourselves or for others.

But of course, the NT itself provides copious arguments against both these positions. I’ve already mentioned perhaps the most obvious example. Introducing His disciples to the list of requests that make up the Our Father, Jesus does not, on the one hand say, “when you pray, pray like this – provided you’re already holy enough to do so” and nor on the other does He say, “when you pray, pray like this, until you get sufficiently holy to pray some other way”.

If we want further scriptural evidence that not only the respectable or the conventionally pious are likely to have their prayers heard, that we somehow have to earn the right to God’s ear,  we have only to think of the parable Jesus tells of the pharisee with His self-congratulatory thanksgiving and the tax collector with His more modest but also far more honest plea for forgiveness or, for that matter, of the penitent thief on the Cross with Jesus, asking God incarnate to remember Him in His Kingdom. So, no, we need not ever be worried that we are not “good enough” to ask God for things: after all, there is also no particular reason to think that any of those whom the gospels describe as imploring Jesus for help and healing are particularly “good” or “holy”: they are simply people who know their need and recognise one who can respond definitively to it.

And as for the idea that we might potentially outgrow petitionary or intercessory prayer – well, that moment in which the good thief begs Jesus to remember Him when He comes into this Kingdom, and receives that extraordinary reply, today you will be with me in paradise – gives the lie to this notion as well. The CCC puts this beautifully. Having described how, throughout His ministry, Jesus not only tells His disciples how to pray, but also gives them His own example, it says of the Lord’s last words from the Cross that here, “prayer and the gift of self are but one”, and goes on to show us how we might thus think of Calvary as another place, alongside the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus gives us a pattern for prayer. But if all seven of the last words are prayer, at least one of them – and we’ll come back to that “at least” a little later - but at least one of them is a prayer of intercession, and, if we think of the Seven Last Words as a blueprint for Christian prayer, it is a particularly challenging, though also a consoling one.  I’m thinking of course, of the first of them, when Jesus asks His Father to forgive His executioners, “for they know not what they do”: the Lord putting into words what He is doing on the Cross, offering himself for all of humanity, for all of us who know not what we do. 

If, then, Christ himself asks His heavenly Father for things it makes little sense to say that it is something we are ever likely to outgrow.

Why?

But why should we pray like this? Why should we need to pray like this?  Surely God knows what we need, or what those we care about need, without our asking Him?

Jesus’ own teaching on prayer, however, suggests that there is no contradiction here. When He gives the disciples the Our Father, with its list of petitions as the pattern of Christian prayer, He tells them: pray like this for your heavenly Father knows what you need. It is not even, then, that we ask God for things despite His omniscience: it seems, on the contrary, that it is almost because of it. But how can this be the case?

It is frequently pointed out that whilst prayer does not, and cannot change God, it changes us – and in several related ways. Petitionary and intercessory prayer, in particular, can at least potentially, change us and how we see our relationship to the world by recalling us to an awareness of how dependent we are on God for everything: as St Thomas Aquinas puts it:

We need to pray to God, not in order to make known to Him our needs or desires but that we ourselves may be reminded of the necessity of having recourse to God’s help in these matters. [ST II iiae 83 resp. obj. 1]

Our prayer of petition and intercession then, is intended to help us grow in humility and self-knowledge, to help us to see that it is God, and not we ourselves, who is in control – which is humbling: but also profoundly consoling.

But there is more to be said here, I think. There is a rather beautiful image that St Augustine repeatedly uses, speaking of prayer expanding our hearts, or enlarging our desires, broadening our capacity to love and long and want, like a bag that widens to accept what is put in it.  The way in which prayer changes us, for Augustine, is above all, by making us bigger and bolder in our prayer, making our desires greater, opening us to the possibility that God might want to give us things greater than anything for which we might never have dared to hope or ask. This is Augustine, writing to a wealthy Roman widow named Proba, on the reasons for our asking God for things:

“Why He should ask us to pray, when He knows what we need before we ask Him, may perplex us if we do not realize that our Lord and God does not want to know what we want (for He cannot fail to know it) but wants us rather to exercise our desire through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what He is preparing to give us. His gift is very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it. That is why we are told: Enlarge your desires.”

And I think perhaps this helps to make sense of that otherwise rather odd statement the Lord makes before teaching His disciples the Our Father: that we should ask God for things because He knows what we need. The point, perhaps, is that we should ask Him because He knows what we need, knows what we are capable of receiving from Him, when we ourselves do not.

But there’s another kind of question about the whys and wherefores of intercessory prayer in particular.  Our Protestant brothers and sisters, rightly concerned with the threat of idolatry, the danger of putting anything or anyone in the place of God, are sometimes anxious that in asking the saints, specifically, to pray for us, Catholics are watering down the role of Christ as the “sole mediator between God and humanity”. And, of course, as Catholics, we often respond by saying that it’s no different asking our friends in heaven to pray for us than asking our friends on earth. But – actually, when we think about it, why should we even do that? Why should we set ourselves up as mediators between other people and God, or ask others to do the same for us? Doesn’t this, too, undermine the sense of our total and unique reliance on God, and risk putting creatures in the place of the Creator?

One answer to the question why we should pray for others, or ask others to pray for us, is, of course “because the Bible tells us so”. Jesus himself exhorts the audience of the Sermon on the Mount to pray for those who persecute them, while in the letter of St James Christians are urged to pray for the sick and in the first letter of Timothy it is suggested that there is a close relationship between prayer and the civic duty in which Christian should be exemplary: we should pray for everyone, but especially for the emperor – and, by extension in our own time, for all those in public authority.  The NT doesn’t only provide theoretical teaching here, though:  it also gives concrete examples of intercessory prayer in practice. To me, the most moving and striking case is that of the paralyzed man let down through the roof so that Jesus can heal Him. The evangelists tell us that it is when the Lord sees the faith, not of the man himself, but of His friends that He tells Him He is healed.  

But we also, of course, find examples of intercessory prayer in the OT. The Catechism points out that the first intercessory pray-er in our tradition is Abraham our Father in Faith, who pleaded with God to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and we might also think of Moses begging God for mercy on behalf of the worshippers of the Golden Calf.  And this is I think particularly interesting, offering perhaps both some fresh resources with which to answer those questions our brothers and sisters in the Reformed Christian traditions might have about the role of the saints in Catholic intercessory prayer, specifically, but also perhaps enriching our own understanding of what we are doing when we offer prayers for others or ask them for ourselves.

I suggested that Protestant disquiet with asking for the prayers of the saints is, fundamentally, about a praiseworthy desire to avoid idolatry, and this concern is, of course, as central to Judaism as to Christianity (Catholic and Orthodox as well as Protestant) -since putting anything or anyone in the place of God is a contravention of the first of the Ten Commandments. Related to this is the conviction – again, shared by both Jews and Christians of all stripes- that the God who is uniquely worthy of worship desires that all His children should relate directly to Him in love and confidently ask Him for their needs. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jewish commentators on the Hebrew Bible have, like their Christian counterparts, wrestled with the question how it can be true that God longs to relate to each one of us and answer our prayers, and that God alone can answer our prayers, and that we are encouraged to pray for others – as we see the Patriarchs and prophets doing – and indeed to ask for their prayers.

One wonderfully beautiful way of tying these ideas together is found in the writings of a Rabbi named Moshe Shek who lived in 19^th century Hungary. On the one hand, He says “there must be nothing between a Jew and God” but, on the other “it is permissible for a Jew to ask another Jew to be an intermediary between Him and God”, and He then goes on to suggest the following resolution of this apparent contradiction.

“When one Jew approaches another and tells of the pain He is suffering, the other Jew feels it just as He does. Now they are both in need of prayer. The Jew does not feel He is praying for an "other"--He is praying for himself.”

In other words, He goes on

“All Jews can be considered as one body. If the toe is hurting, it needs the head and the heart to help it. So too, if I am in need, I can call upon all other Jews—and especially those who are the head and the heart of our people—to pray for me as well. Because if one of us is hurting, we are all hurting.”

What, of course, is particularly striking about this from a Christian perspective is how remarkably similar it is to what St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians about the Church as the Body of Christ, all of whose members share the same spiritual DNA, so to speak, and thus the same identity. The answer, strictly speaking, to the question of Cain: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper ?’ is- ‘No’. Not because my brother is no concern of mine but because, in the body of the new Israel as of the old, I am my brother. So here the line truly is blurred between petition and intercession; when we pray for our brothers and our sisters, we are, in fact, praying for ourselves.  Still more astonishingly, of course, there is also a sense in which we all share that same kind of solidarity with Jesus himself: He is the head of the Body the Church as again St Paul tells us, this time in the letter to the Colossians. When, then, we pray for our brothers and sisters in distress, we are offering comfort to Christ himself.

For What and for Whom?

In terms of what we are to pray for – I believe that Sr Tamsin mentioned in her introduction to this series that it is legitimate to pray for anything that it is legitimate to want. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said about that wonderfully consoling advice, and of course when we think of praying for others, there is likewise no one for whom it is inappropriate to pray. But there’s one particular version of that latter question, whom should we pray for, that does perhaps deserve slightly more attention, and that is the question of praying for ourselves.

Should we worry that to pray for ourselves is selfish? Perhaps some of us have occasionally wondered this. When we hear the command to love our neighbours as ourselves, there might be a voice in some of our heads suggesting that we are being asked to replace love of self with love of neighbour, whereas of course the point really is that we should love both ourselves and our neighbours, and, indeed that there is a kind of causal connection at work: we will only really be able to love our neighbour healthily if we love ourselves healthily. We have probably all heard many homilies making precisely these points, but I suspect many of us cannot hear them too often.

And there could surely be no healthier, more appropriate act of love for ourselves than spending time with God in prayer.  What’s more, I think this is another way in which that boundary between petition and intercession, prayer for ourselves and for others, may turn out to be rather porous, and this may in itself diffuse worries about selfishness in prayer. Earlier, I suggested that part of the trouble with seeing petition and intercession as somehow the “lowest” form of prayer is that it might lead us, with the best of intentions, to imagine that it is the only form of prayer in which we ourselves are asked to participate: after all, spiritual pride is a terrible thing and we don’t want to be guilty of it. In fact, however, just being with God, not asking anything in particular of Him, gradually allowing Him more and more to pour His love into our expanding hearts is a kind of prayer He desires for all of us. And, as we allow ourselves to allow this to happen, we may well find that part of that expansion of our hearts is an increase in our desire to pray for others, connected perhaps with an increased confidence that we are worthy of praying in the way that – as we have seen - Jesus himself prayed throughout His life and supremely on the Cross; an increased assurance that we are God’s beloved children and that our Father longs to hear us exercising our expanding desires. Not then, selfish at all, not about ourselves at all, except in the sense that, as we considered a little while ago, in the body of Christ we do indeed pray for ourselves when we pray for our brothers and sisters.

But there is something else that can be said, too.  Earlier, we were thinking of the relationship between the prayer of Jesus on the Cross and our own petitionary and intercessory prayer. We’ve already glanced at one of those seven last words – but there is also another which I think is relevant specifically to the question of prayer for ourselves: and this is that moment just before His death when, to fulfil the scriptures, we are told, Jesus cries out: “I thirst”.

There is, of course, another occasion in the gospels when Jesus speaks of His thirst: in His conversation with the Samaritan woman whom He encounters drawing water from the public well in the heat of the day.

When Jesus, tired from His journeying, sits with her by the well, and asks for a drink, He is thirsty, really thirsty, as she must be. He needs the water she is drawing as she does. Much more, as their conversation reveals, she needs the water He is offering her, the living water which cleanses sin, drives away shame, brings rebirth into abundant life.  But He too thirsts for something, besides the physical water that so aptly symbolises this longing: He longs – He thirsts - to give her that living water, to give her, that is, His love, to give her himself. And that thirst too, He suffers on Calvary. He thirsts to be thirsted for.  And that thirst can only be slaked, as it was by the Samaritan woman, when we open ourselves to His love, admit our need for Him, and allow Him to pour His living water into our parched hearts.

We do indeed sometimes fear, I think, that it is somehow wrong, or self-indulgent, to bring our own needs before the Lord when we should be concentrating on the sufferings of others, perhaps others “worse off than ourselves”. But when the sight of Him in agony evokes our own need for healing, and we end up weeping for ourselves beside the Cross, we are responding to this word, helping to assuage this sacred longing. We can, of course, feed Him in the hungry homeless on our streets, clothe with a kind word or an invitation the naked, shameful loneliness of that one person in our workplace, at our church, among our family circle, who never quite fits in. And, of course, we should. But when we find ourselves in the pain of rejection, or failure, or anxiety, or bereavement, whispering, or screaming, for our Lord to help us, then, too, we are seeing Him thirsty and giving Him to drink.

If then, we can console the Lord, not only in reaching out to Him in prayer for others, but also through admitting our own need., selfish is the last thing that prayer for ourselves is.

Unanswered Prayer

Finally, then, what about unanswered prayer?

It is often suggested, of course, that there is no such thing as unanswered prayer – it’s just that sometimes the answer is ‘No’. We may think we know what is good for us or for those we love – but God knows better. There is obviously a profoundly important sense in which this is true – as we’ve considered already, we do not always know how to pray as we ought. However, the idea is one that requires very careful handling. Specifically, I think it comes into the category of spiritual precepts – a little like counting our blessings - that it is rather often more appropriate to use as a reminder for ourselves than as advice for others. It is one thing for me to tell myself not to be a cry-baby when God doesn’t immediately give me what I want – though, again, a proper self-love should very often encourage me to be somewhat more gentle with myself here. But it’s quite another thing for me to talk – as I’ve seen seriously suggested – in terms of how we don’t give a toddler a carving knife to play with just because it’s bright and shiny and she is crying for it, when we are asked to console someone else who is crying, crying desperately to God for a loved one in pain, for example. I am not saying it is never right to point out to others that no is sometimes the right answer, but I do think it is something to be approached with tremendous caution.

Then there is the variant of this response that suggests, again, God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is - not yet. Once more, this is profoundly true, and has a venerable place in the tradition. Evagrius, the fourth century Desert Father, for example, expresses this beautifully: “do not be troubled if you do not immediately receive. God desires to do something even greater for you, while you cling to Him in prayer.”. We might also think of -and find consolation in those episodes in both Testaments in which God’s faithful wait in prayer: personally, I find the examples of women suffering the grief and stigma of infertility, from Sarah the eventual mother of Isaac to Elizabeth the eventual mother of John the Baptist, the most poignant and inspiring. These examples of course symbolize and point to the overarching story of Salvation History in which all of God’s people are waiting for the blooming of the desert, for the consolation of Israel, for the promised Messiah, for the day when all tears shall be wiped from every eye. God’s hand in on the whole of history, even when it seems most absent – and our forbears’ trust in His providence may comfort us when we too are awaiting its manifestation in our own lives.

Finally, though I don’t think there is a one size fits all answer. to the question. Sometimes, I think, we just don’t, and can’t know why God does not respond as we long for Him to do when we ask Him for things for ourselves or for others.  In this regard, the issue of at least apparently unanswered prayer is part of the broader question of the mystery of suffering, and I think honesty is the best policy here as elsewhere: when our friends ask us why God has not given them their hearts’ desire, I think we do have to say, in truth, we cannot tell them, and hope that our presence with them in their perplexity is itself some comfort. But there is perhaps one more thing we can say. We have been thinking a lot already about how – incredibly enough – in the body of Christ, not only are we one with one another - one in the one, in the words of Pope Leo’s motto – we are also one with Jesus himself, the one who is head of His body the Church. And we do know of at least one occasion when the Lord himself asked for something of His Father that was not immediately granted Him: when in the Garden of Gethsemane He prayed, let this cup pass me by. Perhaps then, knowing that He is with us in our unanswered prayer, as we are with our brothers and sisters in theirs, may bring us the consolation we can find nowhere else.