Christians often do not waste any time bringing all their heartfelt needs and simple desires to the Lord in prayer. "God help me pass my test" or "God, please heal this person."
While I can certainly sympathize with many of the wishes being prayed for, they can reflect a mentality of people who want the universe and God to bend to their wishes. "God do what I want; God make my life the way I want it to be" as if God is some genie in a bottle that will bark on command. It is easy to visualize our wish list as some scroll that is so long that when it is unraveled it rolls across the room, out the door and down the street.
It is easy to look down on this, especially when the thing asked for doesn't seem to weigh too heavily in comparison to oh, shall we say: world peace. It can look like the person does not want to grow in relationship with God, but rather just boss God around.
But I think there's more going on during petitions that that.
St. Augustine has impressed me recently in his Discourse on the Psalms, The Easter Alleluia:
Our praise is expressed with joy, our petitions with yearning. We have been promised something we do not yet possess, and because the promise was made by one who keeps his word, we trust him and are glad; but because possession is delayed, we can only long and yearn for it. It is good for us to persevere in longing until we receive what was promised, and yearning is over; then praise alone will remain.
What I take from this is the importance of being in a state of longing. It is good to nurture this thing called desire. We were promised justice, joy and fulfilment from a God of love. It is good to imagine what that would be like. It is good to reach for it and dream of it, and savor it like a meatloaf in the oven you can smell from the outside that compels you to want to come inside for dinner. We are hungry, and we can almost taste the feast ahead of us. The feast that was promised.
It is often said that prayer results not in getting what you ask for as much as it is about transforming the person who is doing the praying. As my professor Sr. Fatula says, this theology increases our capacity to receive what it is we ask for. Our yearning opens us up and increases our passions. It stretches us as we reach deep and far at the same time. It is good to reach and to reach out to relationship with God. Even when we are just praying for a good grade, we are living in desire.
It is important not to judge someone else's petitions (or our own). Even if they seem trite, we need to start somewhere. And besides, they may not be so trite, after all! They may be the very thing that fans a spark into a full flame.
I always too humble to actually ask for something. When I pray, I'm usually saying something like, "Please give me the strength to deal with this [difficult situation]." Or, more accurately, "Please help me tap into my strength to handle this difficult situation."
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of a deist (or so I'm told). I think that God--or whatever higher power--is not all that concerned with the minute details of each individual's life. It's rather braizen to think that you can change the events that are about to unfold, anyway, with prayer. If there is a God determining the path of every person's life, then this event has already been set in stone. If your philosophy of God is less rigid, you still have to consider that there are some things that will happen for a reason you cant really imagine. Asking God to stop it is kind of fruitless. I dont think a hundred prayers can stop events that are about to happen.
Maybe the positive energy has some affect in that it gets the subject's mind lifted to fighting something (I'm thinking of disease). But I kind of think that even God's powers are limited in his interaction with the physical world. I think there are certain laws of nature (that maybe even he instilled) that really cant be broken in this part of our soul's lives.