Does Prayer Change Things? (Lent Newsletter)
One of the things that seems “right” to me about our Sunday worship, is the freedom and acceptance people feel to share their prayer concerns with the congregation. Even in our more formal, traditional service, this is a moment of informality in which we are able to reach out and respond to one another in a more personal way. This practice of sharing specific prayer concerns, or reasons for our joy and gratitude, shows our faith that prayer is for us more than an empty ritual. We believe God is real, hears our prayers, and will respond. We believe Jesus when he says, “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search and your will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Luke 11:9).
But what do our prayers really do? Do we, by prayer, accomplish something that God wouldn’t have accomplished without us? Without a doubt, yes! The first thing prayer accomplishes is something inside of us. By turning to God in prayer, as Jesus teaches us, we are doing two things: asking for God’s will to be done in all things (“thy kingdom come”), and asking to have our basic daily needs met (nourishment, forgiveness, perseverance in faith). That is, we are acknowledging that we depend upon God for the most basic elements of human life: food, relationships, and hope! We become stronger when we pray because we become more open to the Source of Life.
Beyond our own inner strengthening, can prayer change things beyond us? Or is it simply magical thinking to believe that our prayers can change circumstances in the world? To appreciate the power of prayer, we must first believe that God is real. One spiritual teacher suggests that “the first thing we need to ask in this prayer business is whether we take God seriously. For starters, I suggest considering that God is more real than the desk, the tree, the rain – more real than we are”1 God is in our breathing, our heartbeats, the sound of our voices, the air between us, the bending of space that we know as gravity, the molecules that are in our body now but may be in our neighbor’s body years from now, or in a maple leaf, or the wing of a hawk. God’s doesn’t act over-against the creation, but through it, through us. Philosopher Xavier Zubiri says, “God’s movement is not a second movement added to my own.” Rather to ask God’s help “is not to ask assistance from someone who is outside and whom one requests to draw near to help…[but] to ask that God intensify God’s own activity within us.” To pray is to ask God’s life and love to “intensify” within us, and through us.2
The other thing that happens when we pray is that we become more open to working with the God. Have you ever had moments where good things happened by “coincidence”? I call those “holy coincidences!” Like the day I wondered how I was going to see all the people I need to see, or do all the church business I need to do. After a longer-than-expected cell phone call about a personnel matter (which resulted in the employment of our new custodian, Frank), I was later-than-expected in visiting Lois Cooper at Montefiore hospital. On knocking at the door of her hospital room, I found that it wasn’t a good time to visit. So, I decided to go down one floor and take a walk across the pedestrian bridge between the hospitals. While meandering and enjoying the photographs of famous bridges on the wall, I heard someone behind me say “Hey, what are you doing here?” It was one of the people I needed to see – Jane Hackett, on the way back from her blood test. So I walked with her to her part of the hospital and caught up on situation. After going back and visiting with Lois, I had to catch a quick and unplanned lunch in the hospital cafe in order to make it to my next appointment. Who walks in but Corey Pacek, just the guy I needed to see to coordinate some important details for Adult Spirituality classes. A simple coincidence? Or an answer to prayer?
Of course, things don’t always work out this nicely. Some prayer do seem to go unanswered. Some of the suffering in our lives and in the world continues despite our prayers. This is where faith comes in. Do we believe God is real? Do we believe God is who Jesus reveals God to be? Then this faith leads us to trust that God is at work in ways that are hidden to us, but nonetheless live-giving.
I hope these reflections on our life of prayer will serve as invitation into the Season of Lent. The purple colors of these 40 days remind us that we are welcome directly into the throne room of the Great and Loving Sovereign of the Universe, where we will find grace, forgiveness, and the power of new life. Will we lose this invitation amidst the clutter of our busy lives? Or will we do as we do with other less important matters: schedule some time in our calendars to be with God to contemplate how God is at work in our reality, and to pray that God’s life and love would intensify within us.
Yours in Christ and in prayer,
Rev. Mike
1 Dean Brackley, SJ in The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times (New York: Crossroad, 2004) p. 226.
2 Quoted in Brackley, Discernment, p. 231.
Mike ~ Divine intervention seems to us, as finite beings, so random. I value prayer for the way it shapes us individually and as community and the way in which it focuses us on our intention to wish everyone every kind of wholeness or as a way to arrive at a healthy contemplative state. In the end I am reduced to this prayer: Lord let everything that happens (or fails to happen {seemingly})draw them closer to you.
Yes, and perhaps the apparent randomness keeps the wise person from claiming to know too much about God’s particular designs. Still, I think prayer opens our eyes to moments of grace in which we can affirm, as much as we can affirm anything at all, that this moment is a gift from God, an answer to prayer. When our particular requests are not granted, and we suffer, but we find God at work to comfort and heal in the suffering, rather than seeming like an arbitrary denial of our prayers, we can rejoice that even in our suffering, God responds to us.
God already knows what is on our minds, and He is being patient as He always is, and waiting for us to express our thoughts and needs to Him through our sincere prayers. He already knows what we are going to ask of Him, but so many times we do not ask Him in the right way.
We pray out of a sense of urgency, or desperation, or dare I say selfishness.
We need to come to God after we have calmed ourselves and become quiet before Him. Then will He listen to our petitions that we have layed up before Him.
Blessings
I like this, Al, but I would slightly reframe one piece of it. Instead of saying that we need to come to God after we have calmed ourselves down, I believe we are already coming to God in the calming. For me, sometimes prayer is simply a quietness that allows me to grow more and more aware of God’s powerful and loving presence. Then having drawn closer – or rather, with God’s help, seeing that we always abide in the presence of God whether we know it or not – I am better able to commune with our Lord and to see more clearly what pleases him. Then, as you have well said, I am able to lay my petitions before God “in the right way.”