SHOULD WE ASK GOD FOR "TEMPORAL THINGS"?

[Denise]

SHOULD WE ASK GOD FOR "TEMPORAL THINGS"?
Thomas Aquinas Contra Andy Rooney

November 1999
By Brendan Kneale

Brother Brendan Kneale, FSC, is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at St. Mary's College of California.

I've been hearing lately, from here and there, surprising pronouncements about petitionary prayer (that is, praying for what we need or legitimately want). The pronouncements come from a variety of sources but seem to have a common theme. Let me list them, from small to large. Our little congregation in the college chapel was told by a Dominican preacher that petitionary prayer is useless since God is already aware of what we want and need, and anyway we can't change the mind of an unchangeable God. (When I objected afterward, he dodged the argument but said he was glad to know "at least someone was listening.")

In The Tablet, a British liberal Catholic weekly, a columnist wrote that his faith in petitionary prayer is weakened whenever he thinks about all the unanswered prayers that went up from victims of the Nazis. His reflections inspired several subsequent articles (none of which faced the basic questions squarely or brought up the traditional approaches to these ancient difficulties).

The capper came when I tuned in the "60 Minutes" television show. I and millions of others watched Andy Rooney close out the broadcast by informing America that petitioning God makes no sense because God already knows what we need and, anyway, God is infinite and immutable, so asking God for something is, to say the least, inappropriate. When an oracle of Andy Rooney's weightiness can read so blithe a dismissal of petitionary prayer from a television cue card in prime time on the Sabbath -- well, either petitionary prayer is in trouble or television is.

To be sure that Rooney and my Dominican homilist were not referring to some new teaching on prayer that had escaped my attention, I checked the Catechism of the Catholic Church and found that it states the standard Christian teaching: "When we share in God's saving love, we understand that every need can become the object of petition" (2633). The words that open the Catechism's section on prayer are equally emphatic: "The vocabulary of supplication in the New Testament is rich in shades of meaning: ask, beseech, plead, invoke, entreat, cry out, even 'struggle in prayer.' Its most usual form, because the most spontaneous, is petition..." (2629).

This reassured me. But then I encountered a dictum on petitionary prayer even more troubling in its way. George Schlesinger in New Perspectives on Old-Time Religion (Clarendon Press, 1988) declares: "The theist believes that a human being is incapable of providing God with any information He does not already have, nor can he sway Him through persuasive arguments to change a Divine decision to withhold certain benefits. Petitionary prayer has no effect on God; however, it is an important act of worship which may bring the supplicant closer to the Divine, raise his spiritual status, and thus make him worthy to be granted a given favour which before the act of praying he did not deserve."

Almost stranger than the outright dismissal of petitionary prayer is this attempt to find some "spiritual" value in it even while maintaining that those who engage in it are quite mistaken about what they are doing. This seems unsatisfying theologically. Praying may be good for the soul of him who prays, but so, of course, can be all religious practices. (Why not just stick to prayers of praise or contrition if the prayer of petition is not a legitimate category of prayer?) Nor is this view psychologically persuasive. When we ask for something and we mean it, it is strange to be told that we are really trying to "raise our spiritual status." To set aside the face-value and common-sense meaning of straightforward petitionary prayer in favor of a more "spiritual" interpretation seems unnatural and esoteric, even Gnostic.

Schlesinger is not a Catholic, and the statement quoted above contains no hint of the Catholic understanding of our natural hunger for help nor of the Church's long history of beseeching God, as, for example, in the multitudinous petitions of the Liturgy of the Hours. The hallmark of Catholic theology is that it insists on the concrete and resists the ethereal. Our beliefs are beliefs about reality, not coded statements of human optimism. We hold that Christ was really God and really man, that the Church has real authority, that Heaven and Hell really exist, and that Christ is really present in the Eucharist. These are not elaborate deceptions meant to help us cope with our needs nor a species of wishful thinking. The Catholic attitude toward petitionary prayer is of a piece with this: We believe that God wants us to pray for concrete things, for when Our Lord instructed us on how to pray (in the Our Father), He said we should ask for our daily bread. And we believe that our prayers are really effective. But what then of the Dominican homilist and the Tablet writer?

To check my understanding I turned to a great Catholic authority. One of Thomas Aquinas's virtues is that he states the objections to Catholic teaching more succinctly and forcefully than anyone else (even better than Andy Rooney). And having stated them fully, he generally offers persuasive rebuttal.

In the Summa Theologiae (written for beginning Christian theologians) Thomas examines the questions "Whether it is becoming to pray?" and "Whether man ought to ask for temporal things when he prays?" (Question 83 of the II-II, 2nd and 6th articles). Thomas states the objections fully, noting that it may seem unbecoming to pray to God Who knows our needs, Whose "mind" cannot be changed, and Whose liberality we can count on. He quotes the proud dictum of the Roman philosopher Seneca that anything gained by prayer is gained at too high a price. And Thomas makes four strong objections against praying for temporal things: (1) Christ told us to "seek first the Kingdom of God and...all these things will be added to you"; (2) Christ said, "Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat..."; (3) prayer by definition is a raising of the mind to God, not dwelling on the things of earth; and (4) mundane goods are often harmful so that to ask for them is unworthy of real prayer.

Thomas replies to all these with careful argumentation, compelling passages from Scripture, and the dictum of St. Augustine that "it is lawful to pray for what it is lawful to desire." Certainly, he says, we must seek first the Kingdom of God, but many secondary things which are conducive to that Kingdom need to be sought also. Mundane things, if they are not harmful, can be raised by prayer to a higher level. Thomas reminds us that God is in charge. "Divine providence disposes not only what effects shall take place, but also from what causes and in what order these effects shall proceed." Thomas makes clear that human actions are themselves causes; they do not change Providence, they effect it. In prayer we are asking "for that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers." For God "wishes to bestow certain things on us at our asking" and does so to inspire our confidence in Him.

When writing for non-Christians, Thomas (in an earlier book, Summa Contra Gentiles) handles the question thus: "Prayer is not established for the purpose of changing the eternal disposition of Providence, since this is impossible, but so that a person may obtain from God the object which he desires." God's far-seeing Providence "fulfills the holy desires which are brought to completion by means of prayer," and "it is proper to God to bring to a fitting conclusion the proper desires that are expressed by our prayers." He adds that it is appropriate for rational creatures "to participate most perfectly in divine providence." Finally, he reminds us that liberality and mercy are eminently present in God, so that His answering of our petitions is naturally to be hoped for.

This is the sound Catholic view. Yet it seems to be perennially prey to doubt, and notable Catholics have strayed from it. Dame Julian of Norwich's classic spiritual work, Revelations of Divine Love (1371), is in print and popular today. Oddly, she completely avoids recommending petitionary prayer and instead claims, in a famous phrase, that all is well and will always be well. Such a confident attitude toward God is attractive, and might be seen simply as an extension of the confidence we express in our doxology: "Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be." Dame Julian's formulation seems to recognize that God's glory is certainly achieved now and forever. But does this mean that there is no need to ask for anything? As a matter of fact, all is not well, as God knows better than we do. To omit prayers of petition is to deprive myself of an instrumental role -- the kind of role Aquinas says God wants me to play -- in the scheme of things. It is, to that degree, to decline to share in the great dignity of bringing about the glory of God.

Another attitude that some find attractively lofty is that of Miguel de Molinos, author of A Spiritual Guide (1675), who was a major inspiration for the Quietist movement of the 17th century. (Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine calls Molinos, with curious oxymoronicity, an "energetic... propagator of Quietism.") One of Molinos's propositions claims, "It is not suitable that one who is resigned to the will of God should ask God for anything, because to ask is an imperfection, since it is an act of one's own will and choice, and it is to wish that the divine will be conformed to ours and not ours to the divine. Moreover, what is in the Gospel -- 'Ask and you shall receive' (John 16:24) -- is not said by Christ for internal souls, who do not want to have a will [of their own]; on the contrary, such souls arrive at this, that they cannot ask God for anything." Molinos's views were officially condemned by the Church in a decree of 1687. God may be perfect and lofty, but we are not. We Christians are supposed to be humble enough to ask our Father for what we need.

Since Thomas Aquinas is not around to write a Summa Contra Rooney, we must make our own effort to find a stance toward petitionary prayer that is well founded in human experience, Scripture, and the teaching of the Church. The proper stance would be one based on the standard doctrine that divine Providence provides for us in part by way of our own actions, which includes our prayers.

Consider a clear example of Providence in practice, namely, the Incarnation of the Word of God at the time of Mary's response, "Let it be done to me." Had she not acquiesced to the invitation, the Event would not have happened -- at least not exactly as it did. A parallel can be drawn to petitionary prayer. God foreordains the grace to say each prayer and knows the outcome of the prayer, and yet the outcome requires our freely having made the prayer. Prayer is regarded in traditional theology as one of the many instruments by which God governs the world. He has ordained that we be implicated in the operation of the world by our outward actions, including our prayers. Still St. Paul says in chapter 8 of Romans, the Holy Spirit comes to our help in order that we may pray properly -- in accordance with God's will.

Our Lord taught His disciples to pray, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." Does this mean God's will and His Kingdom are not already assured? No. God's glory is achieved even if we choose not to pray or even if we neglect to do good works. But God foresees when we choose not to pray. To neglect prayer of petition is, in effect, to realize by omission the plans of God, but it also means that (1) we fail to pray as Christ instructed us, (2) we decline participation in God's work, and (3) we deprive ourselves of having a positive heavenly effect on the worthy outcomes we seek.

If God already knows what we need, why does He expect us to tell Him what we need? Because prayer of petition is good for attaining its object. Petitionary prayer is our participation in God's own providential action. To be able to ask God for things is an honor and a privilege. Paradoxically, it bestows upon us immense dignity and requires profound humility -- that we abjure our pride and, yes, even plead and cry out. It is a response to God's invitation to be among His instruments in the cosmic economy.

Now, if it rains on my picnic despite my prayers for clear skies, that means only that other causes prevailed within that same Providence. Someone may have prayed for that rain, and that rain may be serving a greater good. When Christ was working miracles, there were many sick and lame who were not cured, even though they may have prayed earnestly for a cure. What the prayers of the infirm often accomplish, even if a cure does not come, is of vital importance -- the growth in moral character that comes from an utterly candid encounter with God. Prayer of genuine, heartfelt petition is a unique opportunity to encounter God in a most intimate manner, where we are most exposed and helpless, like the publican in the temple, who had no notion of "raising his spiritual status" but simply begged God for mercy. To beseech God for something is always to risk a "No." How can any of us claim to truly be facing God if we are not willing to face God's "No"? Prayers answered with "No" should prompt us to persevere bravely. My prayers of petition may not bring an end to my trials but may constitute real protection for me in my trials; they may keep me from dealing disastrously with my disasters or tragically with life's tragedies.

Petitionary prayer, while it must be used, must not be misused. We must not simply throw our needs onto God and lie back waiting for Him to do our work for us. A genuine prayer of petition springs from a felt urgency of purpose that engages all of my resources including prayer. Praying does not excuse me from effort. In fact, the answer to my prayer may be an increase of energy and insight that God sends to help me solve my problem in some unforeseen way. In petitionary prayer we offer ourselves to God as instruments of His will, not merely as beneficiaries of His services.

Nor should petitionary prayer crowd out the other forms of prayer that are essential to our spiritual health. Prayers of adoration, thanksgiving, and contrition generally have a different emotional content from prayers of petition, and it is necessary to bring our whole selves before God. These other types of prayer involve what we might call our nobler qualities, and the exercise of these qualities in God's presence gives Him glory.

Of course, a petitioner is liable to ask for something that is not good for him or for others, or even for something that is harmful or sinful. The proviso from the Catechism that our petitionary prayer is proper "when we share in God's saving love" always governs. We must always ask in a spirit of Christian love, the kind of love that extends not only to God and ourselves but to everyone.

One might say that the real problem with petitionary prayer is not that it is ineffective, useless, or misguided; the problem is that it is so effective that we may find ourselves unprepared to deal with getting what we've asked for.

St. Augustine understood the consequentiality of petitionary prayer quite well. As he recounts in his Confessions, he used to pray earnestly to God to save him from his unchastity, and he always ended his prayer by saying "but not just yet." For a commentator on prayer with a sense of humor that sharp, shouldn't there be a spot on some Sunday evening television program?