The Prayer is Life podcast by Majellan Media with Redemptorist priest Fr David Hore CSsR 

Prayer and Asking.

There’s no right way to pray. Pray as you can. That’s what we’ve been emphasising right through these podcasts, and it was the great St Thomas Aquinas when he defined prayer. He said it was asking God for things that are right and fitting. And so simply asking is to admit our need, to admit to our helplessness, our poverty.

And prayer is not a matter of hiding from God, but really honestly presenting our need or our needs to God so that we can receive God’s grace, so that we can be open to God’s grace, open to God’s healing, open to God’s love and mercy that God wants to give us through our prayer, and our fundamental attitude towards God in prayer must always be one of honesty To be who we are and to come to prayer exactly as we are, whatever we’re experiencing at this time of our lives. And so prayer is not only a call for help. It’s, first and foremost, an acknowledgement that everything we are and everything we have comes from God, and God is deeply interested in us and wants us to come to him openly, honestly, and to share our hearts as friend speaking to friend.

Underlying all of our prayers, and especially our prayers of petition, is a firm belief in God’s providence and a strong awareness that God is very much present and active, not only in our lives, but in our world.

God is not absent or remote.

God is present to and within us and creation, ultimately involved in all that concerns this world, and this doesn’t mean that God acts without care or interferes at random in the universe.

God respects the universal laws that God has made, just as God is the first to honor the freedom and the independence that’s been given to every human person. What it does mean, though, is that God cares for each of us, knows us by our name and is always moved to try and order things creatively for our own good, and every prayer of petition then, implies an act of faith in the reality of God’s presence, a presence that’s both immediate and active. Now, it’s easy to see God’s hand in the pleasant and happy things of life. It’s not so easy to see God in the more difficult and painful things, and I think we have to remember when we’re asking for assistance. It is important because God is the master artist who writes straight with crooked lines, in other words, bringing good out of evil, beauty out of chaos and changes good Friday into Easter Sunday morning in our lives and in our world.

Prayer is more than a last resort, a desperate cry for help when all else has failed. No, that’s not what prayer is. Asking God for help means more than just simply turning to God when we’ve reached the end of our own solutions. We’re all pilgrims, journeying on the road of life. We’re all experiencing all kinds of joys and challenges, and so prayers of petition, prayers of asking, they’re natural, they come from our heart, they come out of our experience, and we can’t adopt an attitude that says that God knows our needs, so it’s not necessary to ask.

Prayer is not a matter of telling God something, god that God doesn’t know, but rather a way of reminding ourselves of something that we so easily forget that God is God and we are the creation. We are dependent on God, and that calls us to look at things very differently when we remind ourselves that we’re really not in charge, although we try to be. God is God. We’re dependent on God, and so when we ask God for something, we bring out into the open our real relationship with God. We acknowledge the truth about God and about ourselves. We cannot hide our hearts from God, nor should we try to do so. Rather, as we accept our brokenness, our littleness, our limitations. We’re actually making space within our hearts and our lives to receive the gifts that God wants to give us, the gifts that God knows are important for us. So nothing is too trivial in prayer. It’s always important to be honest and open with God.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he taught them the Our Father, which is almost like one continuous prayer of petition. He taught them to ask for many things the coming of the kingdom, the fulfillment of God’s will and the everyday necessities of life, daily bread, pardon for faults, deliverance from evil. And so the Our Father is the prayer of a person who is really conscious of their fundamental relationship to God. It’s the prayer of a person who has their feet firmly on the ground and their faces set steadfastly towards God. In the Gospels, jesus’ own personal prayer was a reflection of everything that he taught His disciples. And if you think of the Our Father, jesus gives us seven steps, if you like, in the form of what to ask for. So, if you look at the seven of them, may your name be held holy. In other words, may God or may who you are for us, your name always remains sacred and be held in awe and deepest respect. To be held holy. So that’s the first one. May your name be held holy. The second one may your kingdom come. In other words, may the world become as you would have it to be. Thirdly, may your will be done on earth as in heaven. In other words, may love rule among us and in our world, as it does beyond us and our world.

Fourthly, give us this day our daily bread. In other words, give us that nourishment that comes from you and without which we cannot exist, much less flourish, namely Christ Himself. Fifthly, forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are in debt to us. In other words, set us free from the burden of our selfishness in the very setting free of others that God’s love empowers us to do. And sixthly, lead us not into temptation. In other words, keep us from being seduced and sucked in by a world of violence and envy and resentment, which is the opposite of God’s kingdom. And lastly, deliver us from evil. Help us to remain free of the power of and death, which is the opposite of who God is for us. And so, if we think of the, our Father, it’s a kind of rehearsal for life. If we can learn how to ask, how to desire according to God’s will, then we’ll truly come alive, we’ll truly flourish.

I think all of us probably, at some time, struggle with that notion of unanswered prayer where we feel that somehow our prayers should have a magic power, if you like, to achieve what we ask. But I think it’s easy to forget that some prayers are impossible even for God, either because of the nature of the request or because God loves us too much to grant them. And think for a moment what parent would permit their child to play with a hot oven or let their child roam unattended on a busy road, no matter how much the child wants it or wants to do it? The truth is that God always answers our prayers with an eye on eternity. God sees the bigger canvas and God sees beyond the passing needs, to something deeper and greater. And after all, the object of all prayer is to embrace God, not just God’s answers. It’s not what God gives that we need so much as God Himself. Someone rightly said that God answers every prayer. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it’s no, sometimes it’s weight, and I think it’s the weighting that so often tests our faith.

And if we look back through the Scriptures, there are examples of unanswered prayers. Moses prayed to enter the Promised Land and his prayer wasn’t granted. David prayed in vain for the life of his child, Paul was refused when he asked to be freed from the thorn of the flesh. And perhaps the strangest and the starkest refusal of all was in Gethsemane, when Jesus asked that the chalice might pass him by. And Jesus who said ask and it will be given? You did ask and it was not given, At least not then. Even Jesus had to wait and three days later his prayer was answered. So, yes, we may not always receive what we ask for, but we have to always try to understand that God has God’s eye on eternity. God sees a much bigger picture and goes beyond what is just immediate in our lives.

It is in the actual coming to prayer and the discipline of praying and the opening ourselves to God and to God’s presence that we begin to move beyond what we’re really asking for.

And if I could use one small example, I lived with a priest, an extraordinary man, a very gifted and popular man, who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Now, with all of his friends and supporters and he himself, they launched an extraordinary prayer campaign asking God to bring healing and wellness again to his life, and it didn’t happen. But what happened? The miracle that happened was the acceptance that this man came to, the peace that this man came to with his diagnosis and his extraordinary witness then of the way to live the end of life. It was the most extraordinary thing I’ve seen the transformation and the miracle that happened within him. The miracle wasn’t healing. The miracle was the acceptance and the peace and, through his life and witness, the miracle then that touched all those other people who had been praying for his healing. They somehow more miraculously touched by God, who had an eye on eternity.