Prayer of Petition I
“Our Thoughts and Prayers:” A Serious CommitmentWe often tell people that we will pray for them or that they will be in our thoughts and prayers. This can mean several different things. When we are truly sincere, it almost always means we have come to a sense of our helplessness and mortality. We are turning to God for assistance. At the other end of the spectrum, this is a polite way to exit a scene in which we experience minimal concern. In between, there are various degrees of discomfort that reflect our true feelings.
When we make a commitment to pray for someone or some cause or issue, we are taking on a serious responsibility. We seldom think about it in those terms.
What are we doing when we are engaging in the prayer of petition? Are we trying to give an all-knowing God a 911 call? Of course, God is aware of the specific situation with an infinitely deeper clarity and depth than we could ever have.
Are we trying to get God to raise the intensity of divine love and compassion? God’s love for every human being is already without limits. There is no thermostat on God’s love that allows us to turn up the intensity.
Are we trying to change God’s mind to be more open to our point of view? That, of course, puts us in charge and God is seen as just waiting for our summons. This is a far too common caricature.
Then there are the times where our continual pleading seems to be based on a strong hope that we will wear God down with our persistence. Strong resolution is important in prayer but its emphasis needs to be on us and not on God.
A Personal Story of Prayer of Petition
I would like to share a personal story that is a good example of the teachings on prayer.
From my earliest moment of consciousness prayer was part of my life. My mother filled the house with phrases like “Sweet Jesus”, “Holy Mother of God”, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” and the like. Mass on Sunday was as normal as breakfast in the morning. The same prayerful atmosphere permeated my school, St. Laurence, on the South Side of Chicago.
Then in fourth grade I came to the first of many crises with prayer. I was beginning a journey of growth that continues to this day. Prayer may appear simple and beautiful but ultimately it is complex and demanding.
It was 1944 in the fall. Our fourth grade teacher, Sister Julia Anne, had us pray three Hail Marys each day of that week for Notre Dame to defeat Army on that Saturday. We truly believed that Notre Dame was God’s team. When they lost 59-0 I had a serious problem. What kind of God would let our prayer for his team go unanswered and at 59-0! That was just too much for my fourth grade mind and heart to handle.
Slowly, I got over it but the seeds of doubt and confusion were planted. Nevertheless, I continued to pray but with a little more wariness about an easy fix from on high.
Eight years later I had a more mature experience of the complexity of prayer. My passion in life was football. I was quarterback and co-captain on the Mt Carmel team. My prayer was to beat St. Leo, the great obstacle to a fourth consecutive City Championship. Each day for more than six months I prayed three Hail Marys for victory over the Leo Lions.
On the day of the game in early November, not only did we win, but I threw the winning TD pass in the final minutes. However, there was a small problem in my heavenly scenario. Earlier we had lost to De LaSalle, the only loss to this school in what was to turn out to be a forty year span. This meant we had to play St. Leo again to break the tie and go on to the championship game. In the playoff game against Leo we lost in the last minute.
I went into a deep funk for several months. Then one day walking home from school God gave me the real answer to my prayers. I decided to join the Carmelites. I entered the seminary the following fall. This proved to be one of the most significant decisions in my life. This was my invitation into “the Jesus game” where you often win by losing when it comes to prayer.
These two incidents help show the complexity of prayer. The major reason Notre Dame lost was that we were in the midst of the Second World War where well over 50,000,000 people lost their lives. Most of the good players not in the active military service went to the military academy at West Point. Notre Dame’s good players were at war in Europe and in the Pacific.
I am sure we prayed for peace in our fourth grade classroom but I do not remember it. Likewise, at that time, my brother John, just four months out of Mt. Carmel High School, was in very dangerous circumstances in the Pacific. It would seem God had different priorities than my excitement for Notre Dame. My life’s journey would teach me that as our prayer matures, we have to get in touch with God’s priorities.
With the perspective of time, the message of this prayer story is the growth from the magical to real prayer. There is a transition from myself as the center to the life-long struggle to put God at the center. There always seems to be an encounter with the darkness of confusion and pain that slowly opens up to light as we mature in prayer.
Prayer of Petition and God’s Priorities
We need to understand that is a serious responsibility to promise to pray for someone. We are entering a life-giving mystery where we recognize our helplessness in the hands of an all-loving and merciful God. Too often, our promise to pray is an incidental and often inconsequential commitment with little personal cost on our part.
God is patient with us. God’s presence in life has a way of drawing us into a developing relationship with God. As our awareness of God grows, so too, does the awareness of our self. Both our sinfulness and God’s mercy slowly surface in our consciousness as we mature spiritually. This, in turn, enlightens us to the seriousness of prayer in contrast to our frequent casual approach to it.
Prayer of Petition and Spiritual Maturity
Prayer is a serious venture. It demands a committed faith. It requires a seriousness to avoid making it trivial. The foundation of our prayer of petition to an all-knowing and all-loving God starts out with these prerequisites:
- We are sinful and need to be aware of that we need God’s mercy.
- All prayer begins with God’s initiative.
- Our request, whether spiritual or material, worldly or heavenly, must be in accord with God’s plan, the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus.
- We must come to prayer in loving and trusting submission as creature to an incomprehensible Creator.
- We must seek the attitude of Jesus in his final prayer: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.” (Lk 22:42)
These five insights lead to a prayer that is rooted in faith and nurtured by hope and love. When we pray in this way, whatever we ask for must find its true meaning as part of God’s overall plan of salvation. Our petitions have to fit into God’s design that is based on love without limit and mercy. God’s providence is well beyond the confines of our human comprehension.
These five elements help our prayer make sense in light of an all-knowing and all-loving God. Ultimately, all true prayer has to fit into God’s plans, and only later, into our plans. In this context, we can begin to address the mystery of our suffering and loss in our unanswered petitions for very good things such as health, security, reconciliation, freedom from addiction and so many others. When our prayer of petition is not rooted in faith, our prayer gradually slips more toward the magical. This gradual shift leads us to put ourselves at the center. We slowly funnel God toward the periphery. This is the beginning of a deep corruption of any prayer.
It is also critical to remember that we come to God in prayer as we are: broken and sinful. We do not need to be saints or theologians to pray. God has a way of connecting to our sincerity no matter how simple or confused it may be. Pope Francis has this insight on God’s availability to our prayer: “God does not hide himself from those who seek him with a sincere heart, even though they do so tentatively, and in a vague and haphazard manner.” ((The Joy of the Gospel: #71)
The only way we can pray is from the concrete and historical situation that is our daily experience. True prayer emerging from our bewilderment and ignorance is a simple and beautiful expression of our dependence on God. We are recognizing our limits. We are standing face to face with the deepest truth of our being: a humble sinner accepted and loved by a gracious God. It truly does not matter if our prayer is answered in our terms. More important is a deeper truth: God is God and we are the sinful creature both loved and forgiven. In our prayer, we come to know ourselves as truly in the need of God’s mercy and providential care.
