October 20 2013

Persevering in Prayer

There is a puzzle here. “I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them.” So why then do we have to “pray always and not lose heart?” Why do we have to persevere? If God is willing, even eager, to give us what we want, why do we have to keep on asking?

It isn’t about God. There is no reluctance on God's side. Even nature gives you everything it is able to give at the time. The trees don’t begrudge you fruit or shelter, the fields give you crops, the rivers flow willingly for you, the skies don’t shy away. Likewise our Father in heaven: “If you who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mt 7:11).

It isn’t about God, it is about us. I once knew someone who would never accept an invitation until he had been asked twice. He said he wanted to make sure that the invitation wasn’t given out of mere politeness. This probably freed up his diary remarkably, but he was happy to know that he was wanted when he was invited a second time. We wouldn’t want to say that God is being precious when God lets us ask again and again. But there is a parallel all the same. I'm afraid we do often ask God for things out of mere politeness and for the sake of good form. In the ‘Prayers of the Faithful’ at Mass, especially, we slip easily into this. “For the poor, the old, the lonely….” How could we take in such a vast swath of human misery in one smooth phrase? I imagine God simply unable to hear smooth phrases. God listens to the heart, and there is often no echo of heart in the things we pray for.

We don’t really want what we pray for. We want half of it. We want the bit that will make us comfortable. Or we want to be rid of the things that challenge us, the very things we prayed for yesterday, thinking they would make us comfortable. So we have to ask many times before we know what we want, or before we know with our whole being that we want it. Would I go through fire and water for it? If not, I don’t really want it; I would like it but I don’t want it. It is the difference between starving and being ready for your supper. If I really wanted it, God would give it immediately, granting that it was God's providence for me. “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you” (Mark 11:23).

We want half of what we ask for, because we want to remain in control. If we threw ourselves fully behind something we would feel too vulnerable. We don’t want to lose our grip. But faith means losing our grip, entrusting ourselves, not just a few details of our affairs, to God. -- from Today’s Good News, the Dominicans of Ireland ______________________________________________________________

According to Jesus, by far the most important think about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from atmidnight. … Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there’s nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair. …. Be importunate, Jesus says – not, one assumes, because you have to beat a path to God’s door before he’ll open it, but because until you beat the path maybe there’s no way of getting toyour door. … Believe someone is listening. Believe in miracles. That’s what Jesus told the father who asked hm to heal his epileptic son. Jesus said, “All things are possible to him who believes.” And the father spoke for all of us when he answered, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

What about when the boy is not healed? When, listened to or not listened to, the prayer goes unanswered. Who knows? Just keep praying, Jesus says. Remember the sleepy friend, the crooked judge. … even if [God] does not bring you the answer you want, he will bring you himself. And maybe at the secret heart of all our prayers that is what we are really praying for. – Frederick Buechner, from Wishful Thinking

Reflection for October 20, 2013: Praying as if your life depends on it

When Jesus talks about prayer, he does it very differently than we do. We take the subject seriously, yes, but we talk about it in such a tediously somber and abstract way that we make having a regular prayer life sound about as enjoyable, and rather less essential, than attending to one’s regular dental hygiene. Jesus very seldom talks about prayer; he’s usually too busy actually praying – engaged in living a life that is itself a prayer every minute of the day. But then when he does try to give us advice, he confounds our expectations by telling us parables that are more along the lines of humorous anecdotes about sticking to your purpose, no matter what – banging on your next-door neighbor’s door until all the dogs are barking and your neighbor hollers “All right! ALL RIGHT, blast you!!!” and comes grumbling noisily down the stairs to give you the loaf of bread you’ve been begging for. Or the story in today’s gospel, in which a widow refuses to take no for an answer, badgering a famously unjust judge until he gives her the hearing she demands, simply because her incessant nagging is driving him out of his ever-lovin’ mind. This judge is quite a character: He even brags about how he fears neither God nor any human being. He sounds like one of those old-fashioned Mafioso-style judges, less interested in the legal niceties than in collecting lavish payoffs, lounging around with known criminals after hours in fancy restaurants while the soundtrack to The Godfather plays in the background. But this widow – well, she just won’t leave the man alone! Every morning she’s there at the courthouse, waving her hands and calling his name. (“Yoohoo!” she hollers. “Over here! Remember ME???”) He can’t pick up the phone without hearing her voice on the other end of the line; his email box is overflowing, and letters are constantly being shoved underneath his door. In fact, look! there she is now, coming into his special restaurant, pushing right past the flustered maître d’ to interrupt his postprandial snifter of brandy and embarrass him in front of his friends, who try as they might can’t keep from sniggering behind their cigars at the sight. In the end, of course, the judge has to surrender; he might be mean and nasty and heartless, but he’s worn out by the struggle; he just can’t cope with this woman’s stubborn, noisy, determined, tireless persistence.

The widow’s stubborn approach offers quite a contrast to how we usually pray, which is usually in stilted formal prayers or self-conscious “informal” ones, made up of a vague combination of holy-sounding generalities and a laundry list of desires – prayers that we’re likely to abandon if they’re not fulfilled soon enough for us. Jesus’ prayer life is different from ours not just because Jesus is Jesus, but because prayer for him is part of an actual, honest-to-heaven relationship. It is not an abstraction; it is a conversation, as real as the ones you have with your closest friend over a glass of something nice, late at night around a cozy fire, those special times when all the barriers come down. You can’t have that kind of conversation with a stranger. You have to have a genuine, long-term, committed relationship first.

Of course, we’re not Jesus, and it’s a lot harder for us to have a relationship with a God that we can’t see or hear in the usual way. We have to take a lot on faith, which is of course why this business of ours is called “faith.” Still, it’s easy to get discouraged when you feel at times like you’re yelling off the edge of a cliff, listening in vain for an echo, or when you pray with every fiber of your soul and the answer still comes back, silently and often heartbreakingly, as what appears to be a definite “NO.” But as C.S. Lewis reminds us, even Jesus himself had prayers answered “No,” particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s another reminder that God is not a vending machine or a computer that can be programmed to do what we want. In order to have a relationship with God, we need to pray. And yet even to the saints, prayer – like Love itself -- is always a mystery. As the Bible often reminds us, God’s ways are not our ways. We may never get the answers we want or the results we think we deserve. An old song (one rarely sung as a hymn) puts it best: “You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometimes you just might find / You get what you need.”

Skeptics often say in response: Then why even bother to pray? If God loves us and is paying attention, then God already knows what we need; and if our request aren’t fulfilled, why bother to pray? Why go through all this rigmarole?

Well, as somebody (probably Lewis) pointed out wryly: By the same logic, we’d never bother to ask our dining partners to “Pass the salt.” I mean, our friends know by now that we look to sprinkle a little salt on our eggs or French fries. So according to the skeptic’s theory, if they don’t automatically pass us the salt, then that means they must not exist, and the whole thing’s pointless. Quod erat demonstrandum. But of course nobody goes through life really thinking like this. We accept that a good relationship is built on conversation and a basic sense of courtesy – which is why we politely ask each other to do everyday things like pass the salt. Everything we do in a good relationship is intended to help us achieve a deeper closeness. We don’t sit down with our closest friends with a list of goals, to be marked off as we achieve them. And we don’t stop saying friendly truthful things like “It’s so good to see you! Thanks for bringing the wine and the chocolate. Isn’t a beautiful evening?” just because our friends already know that we’re glad to see them and the wine is welcome and we all love chocolate and obviously it’s a fine night. Of course, you can treat your friends that way, if you want to. But don’t be surprised if they stop inviting you over, and you find yourself sitting at home alone, in the end.

All relationships require time, and work, and tending, and the more important the relationship is, the more it requires. If we want a genuine relationship with God, we have to keep working at it. But not in a humorless tedious formal fashion! Instead of worrying about how we pray, maybe we should just talk about our troubles, as with a true Friend; rejoice in the good things – “What a beautiful day it is!” -- thanking the Giver for the gifts; asking for what we need, as one would ask a loving Parent. God is there, whether we pay attention or not. We, however, have a choice as to whether we want to have a Relationship. In Jesus’ name– Diane Sylvain