Because we have not learned to appreciate prayer, we often question the act of prayer itself. What it is that we are doing? Why, exactly, are we doing it? Even if we do it out of faithful obedience, we still want to know the point of our activity. In a world desiring action, prayer seems inactive. More often than not, it at least seems as if it accomplishes nothing. We are told to pray, but it doesn’t seem our prayer helps anyone or anything — or if it does, it’s hard to predict when it will and where it has done so. We wonder as to the precise relationship between our prayer and what happened after we prayed. And even if we pray, we often do it without much focus; our minds are distracted, our desire is to be doing something else other than prayer.
C.S. Lewis shared the frustration so many of us have about prayer. He admitted that he didn’t entirely understand why God seems to demand we pray in certitude, that we believe, merely because we pray, God will accomplish what we ask, when it is clear that we will not always be given what was ask. Indeed, we are also told to pray that God’s will be done, and not our own.[1]
Unlike Lewis, I think there is a kind of answer which we can find, but it is not an easy one to find, and it is not easy to attain to the holiness needed in order for the answer to be realized beyond theory. It is in part the issue which I want to address in my exploration of prayer. My presentation, however, will have to come about in a systematic way, which I hope, in the end, will hopefully make the answer known. But I do think Lewis is right in pointing out the complexity of the question, and that he is also right in saying both sides of the apparent paradox is found in Scripture. I also think that it is true that the difficulty will be present before us until we reach a certain stage in our prayer life, and we must recognize the difficulty while not being stumped by it. We must not use the paradox to create an excuse so as not to pray. Lewis, of course, also believed that we should pray, and that stating the problem is itself not a reason for us to excuse ourselves from the act of praying itself.
Moreover, Lewis seems to accept, and I think rightfully so, that the “thy will be done” aspect of prayer remains central to the act of prayer itself. Many people find this to be a problem, because it suggests prayer is pointless. God is omnipotent, so wouldn’t his will always be done? This has been a constant question people have asked about prayer. Origen, in the earliest age of Christian theological discussion, just like C.S. Lewis in the modern era, had to deal with it, showing how long it has been asked. Why do we pray if God will do as God will do? Lewis turned this question around, and asked why we only address prayer this way, and not everything we do:
In every action, just as in every prayer, you are trying to bring about a certain result; and this result must be good or bad. Why, then, do we not argue as the opponents of prayer argue, and say that if the intended result is good God will bring it to pass without your interference, and that if it is bad He will prevent it happening whatever you do? Why wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they’ll come clean without your washing them. If He doesn’t, they’ll remain dirty (as Lady Macbeth found) however much soap you use. Why ask for the salt? Why put on your boots? Why do anything?[2]
The answer, of course, must relate to the relationship between God’s eternity and time, between God’s action toward us and our actions toward God. The complexity is the complexity of the relationship between eternity and time, between unchangeable eternity and malleable temporality. God’s actions toward us are eternal actions, but our experiences of them are in time: they will appear to be as flexible and changeable as anything else in time. God acts to us according to how we act toward him, and our experience of God’s action toward us in one point of time will create a response which will then lead to a new experience of God’s action toward us; for God it is all one eternal present in the realm of being, but for us, it is broken in bits in the realm of becoming. As such, one can say God’s reaction to us includes our prayers to him; he has given us free will to respond to him, and prayer is one kind of response. He acts according to that response, and the result of prayer is contained in God’s eternal response to our temporal act. But there is more to it than we ask God to do something and he does it. He responds, not only according to our request, but also according to our spiritual state. This is how Origen responds to the question:
If, therefore, our individual freedom is known to Him and consequently foreseen by Him, then what is reasonable in accordance with each person’s merit is ordered from providence, as it what he prays and what character a certain man has who believes this way. And what He wills him to have is decided beforehand.[3]
This, however, is only the beginning of an answer to the question which lies before us. Petitionary prayer, even if it is the most rudimentary kind of prayer, is the most difficult kind to explain. A part of the response has to include the notion that God has granted us at least some element of freedom: he willingly lets aside his control in order to let us act as we see fit. It is an act of love on his part, where he gives up his own authority so we can have such freedom.[4] Petitionary prayer relies upon the hope that God will grace us with his aid if we ask him to do so, if he sees what we ask is indeed something which is proper for us, both according to our level of holiness and according to his overall plan for creation.
Nonetheless, if God responds to our petitions, and grants us our request, sometimes it seems his response must therefore force people to act, because it means he is directing people to do those things which result in our prayer being accomplished. If we want to say prayer is an issue of free will, and God, out of love, gives up his absolute control and authority over creation so we can have some authority over it as well, how then can he influence and direct others so as to make sure they have free will and yet will help us? This is indeed a difficult question, but I think Hans Urs von Balthasar is onto something with his understanding of providence. To him, providence is a part of God’s gracious gift to us. But it is not one of control, but of guidance, of making room for further opportunities and choices which can be for our benefit. In this way, providence is actually where he provides us greater and greater freedom, more and more liberty. We must open ourselves up to it so as to receive its benefit. “For finite freedom, essentially, cannot control absolute freedom: it is the latter that is free, in grace, to speak to every being that, sent forth into the realm of finite freedom, tries to suffice unto itself.”[5] When we open ourselves up to God, we are illuminated by him, by the light of his love, so as to see the possibilities which lie before us. “The human person’s freedom is only fully illuminated when it is seen to be bound up with a divine and personal freedom that is at pains to promote man’s freedom.”[6] It is a spiritual thing, and therefore, a gift of the Spirit through Christ. The great paradox between providence and free will, known to Plato, is resolved through the Spirit. “The Christian answer to the Neoplatonic paradox (which is already found in Plato’s Parmenides) is the New Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit, who, as the love of God poured into the hearts of believers, brings about two things at the same time: he liberate finite freedom so that it may embrace its own, ultimate freedom; and he does so by initiating it into a participation in infinite freedom.”[7]
We all have free will, but we also have limits to that freedom; our existence is at once capable of many possibilities, but those possibilities are limited; God’s gracious providence opens up more and more possibilities as he frees us from the determinism of sin. Sin is entrapment, grace is freedom, sin is hate, grace comes out of love. The contours of our freedom develop out of our relationship with grace; prayer is a means by which we encounter grace and open up the realms of possibility — not just for ourselves, but for others. But this means, in what appears to be a contradiction, we must give up our demands as to who and what we want to be in order to receive this freedom:
If we leave aside those manifestations of a certain rigidity that becomes apparent in his last works, what we glean from the classical Augustine is this wholly balanced doctrine: the Spirit, with his grace, frees man so that he can grasp his genuine human freedom, which, however, he only attains by consenting to that freedom of the divine love that indwells.[8]
It is because love is self-giving that it can open itself up and be united to the love of God; when we do this, we find the space created in that union the space of our personal freedom. We must overcome ourselves to unite with love. In this way, God does not force the conclusion of the possibility, but rather, gives the chance for improvement. What happens is a result, in part, of one’s reaction to the grace God is offering to them.
“Having given freedom to the creature, God as Creator, is always ‘involved’ in the world, and this means that there is always a divine-human dramatic tension.”[9] Each person has their own trajectory of freedom. We must understand that they are not independent trajectories, rather, because we share the world and time together, our personal trajectories intersect with the trajectories of everyone else. We all have different levels of freedom in these trajectories; the intersection we find between these different personal freedoms provide the form in which future potentialities develop; the more grace involved in a given intersection, the more providence we have engaged, the greater those possibilities, not just on an individual scale, but as a community as well. Our interdependence means our trajectories can only exist in communion with others, not independent from them; if we are open to it, such communion creates greater freedom. This is why interaction with the saints, and the communion of the saints, is important: the potentiality of the saint is infinite, because they have already joined themselves with God’s energia, God’s perfect freedom.
In all of this, we must remember that our freedom exists in God’s infinite freedom which provides the stage in which we can act, the foundation by which we can be free; however, this offer creates the possibility to reject God’s offer, to hinder the flow of possibility, until at last we have entrapped ourselves in a deterministic end. “Infinite freedom, because it is by nature infinite, simply cannot fail to be present wherever finite freedom is. It operates through the latter yet in a latent manner which allows finite freedom to realize its genuine decision (for or against its being-in-God).”[10] Prayer, in this way, is seen as a way in which we open ourselves to God and find our way to put ourselves into contact with his infinite freedom; our goal is God who will free us from the deterministic end of sin. This should serve as a foundation for our understanding of prayer, as a way by which we can engage the questions that can be asked about prayer itself.
Prayer is dialogical, but it is not just mere dialogue, it is a dialogue of love. It allows us to present ourselves to God, to reveal ourselves, our wishes, our desires, our fears, our hopes to God and to unburden ourselves of them by placing them before God. Once we no longer let them limit us, we look for God’s response, to see what he does about them, to see what he provides to us when we find ourselves uniting to him and his infinite freedom. Because it is such a dialogue, it is one which takes time to engage, and one which we will find contains many stages. It is not over in a mere instant. In our journey toward God, in the beginning stage of our dialogue with him, we will find prayer difficult and possibly even more difficult to understand God’s response, to see what it is he is giving to us because of our prayer. As we move closer to God, we begin to understand his ways more. Moreover, the closer we get to God, the more we realize the different ways we can be engaging God, and we begin to see how our very life can be, in all that we do, a part of our prayer to him. Even before then, we can begin to understand how our way of life, as a life of service, is a life in prayer, even if our individual actions are not so integrated. Indeed, it is only because of the grace of Christ that the parts can become integrated as one; as Adrienne von Speyr points out, this can be said because Jesus, in his life, is not only the exemplar of this kind of prayer, but its initiator:
The experience that the whole of daily life — being, talking, and acting — pertains to prayer. Just as the Lord conceived everything he did as part of his conversation with the Father. In this way he inaugurated for us a new manner of praying. It goes without saying that this prayer cannot remain the only kind: one must set apart alongside it time for quiet prayer and meditation. But the point is that both, express prayer and lived prayer, form together the whole of prayer.[11]
In this way, we begin to understand what prayer is: it is our dialogue with God, where we open ourselves up to God, and where God responds to us according to the way we have developed our relationship with him. Jesus points out the foundation of this, why we can engage God in this way, lies with the fact that God is to be seen by us as a father.[12] While we have become accustomed to the idea that we are “children of the most high,” I do not think we really appreciate what it should mean in our prayer life. Prayer is our talk with God, and God is to be seen to us as our father. Our conversation with God develops in a similar way to our conversation with our parents. But what, exactly, is the process by which we have learned to talk? We came to know ourselves and our speech through those around us, especially our parents. We do not remember the process by which we learned to speak, but if we watch children, we see how difficult it is; surely they must be frustrated as they try to express something to their parents, and their parents do not understand them; but even more frustrating, their parents seem to be reacting and saying things back which they do not understand. They slowly open themselves up to what their parents are doing and learn to speak in such a way that both sides can and do end up understanding each other. In our relationship with God, we start out as infants, learning to speak; God is speaking to us, but we have to learn how to understand his response. Obviously, this is but an analogy. God can understand us, even if we cannot understand God. God could respond to us in such a way we understand, and sometimes he does, while parents cannot. But he also works for our improvement, to make us understand something more, greater, and so responds to us, like parents do to their infants — he wants to help raise us up to be united with him, and to do that, he must not only engage us on a level beneath his desire for us: he must communicate with us on that level, so that we can strive for and eventually achieve it. Thus, part of the frustration of prayer is not that God is not responding, but we have to learn how to open ourselves to that understanding. In this way, Christ telling us to be like a child is important: a child is inquisitive and open; often, we are not. Sin closes us off. Uniting ourselves to grace, so that we can be purified and overcome those bad habits of speech which prevent us from understanding God means we must indeed become like a child – something which we might not like, but once we do, we know we can grow and reach a far greater level of being, a far greater level of happiness; but this is only if we are willing accept that we are, for now, like children. “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Luke 18:17 RSV).
Footnotes
[1] This is the conflict behind his essay, “Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer” pages 142 – 151 in Christian Reflections. ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1992).
[2] C.S. Lewis, “Work and Prayer” in Undeceptions. ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 78.
[3] Origen, “On Prayer” in Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer and Selected Works. trans. Rowan A Greer (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 94-5.
[4] While I will be dealing with the relationship between God’s love, providence, and freedom here, see my, “The Potter and the Clay” in Henry C. Antony Karlson III, Theological Contemplations I (Silver Spring, MD: CreateSpace, 2010), esp. pgs 32 – 44 for a different discussion on God as love and how this love leads to God’s creating the space for our freedom as an act of his love.
[5] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV: The Action. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 371.
[6] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II: Dramatis Personae: Man in God. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 198.
[7] ibid., 231.
[8] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic III: The Spirit of Truth. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 240.
[9] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I: Prolegomena. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 125.
[10] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II, 316.
[11] Adrienne von Speyr, With God and With Men: Prayers. trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 128.
[12] Thus, in his explanation of prayer and how we should pray, he says: “Pray then like this: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9 RSV).
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