At one point in the Gospel Martha speaks to Christ, saying, “Lord, do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself?” (Lk 10:40). At another, during a storm on Lake Galilee, the disciples woke Our Lord, saying, “Master, do you not care? We are going down!” (Mk 4:39). If prayer is talking to God then these are both examples of prayer: Our Lord’s response can be instructive as to the purpose of prayer.
Firstly, it is reassuring that neither Martha nor the disciples are rebuked for questioning Our Lord’s care for them. Christ is seemingly quite happy to receive our raw and honest desires. It has been said of the incident in the boat that maybe Our Lord was sleeping with one eye open, implying that he was waiting for his disciples to express their concerns to him.
The paradox in prayer is this: how can our prayers change the immutable, unchangeable God? Through prayer, do we change God's mind, such that he intervenes in the world in a way that he otherwise would not have? The beginnings of an answer are found in one of the prefaces prayed before the Holy, Holy for weekday Mass. “For, although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation.” God is unchanging and we human beings are not. In fact as human beings we are body and soul and one of the properties of matter, the flesh and blood that makes up our body, is that it is constantly changing. Matter is constantly in movement, growing, decaying, constantly being acted upon by other matter.
So, if prayer is to have any influence it is best to look at how it first impacts us rather than God. This dynamic is further complicated by that fact that God is also omniscient, all-knowing. This raises the question as to the point of prayer, given that God already knows what is good for us and what he is going to do. From the pen of St Augustine comes a beautiful letter written to Proba, the widow of a very wealthy Roman. Proba asks Bishop Augustine how she should pray and he responds with a letter explaining the Lord’s Prayer. In it he says “Why does the Lord advise us to pray, when he knows what is needful for us before we ask him? … He wants our desire to be exercised in prayer, thus enabling us to grasp what he is preparing to give. That is something very great indeed, but we are small and limited vessels for the receiving of it. So we are told: ‘Widen your hearts’.”
The answer as to the why of prayer, is that Our Lord wants us to express our desires to him so that our hearts are opened to receive more and more from him. Meaning that in prayer we are changed and that change occurs firstly at the level of the heart. This heart change is spiritual, a grace, a gift from God. There remains another difficulty. If God knows what we need, knows better than we know ourselves, would it not be more efficient and holy to simply pray, “God, do whatever you want”? The answer is that if this were the case Christ would have given us an Our Father that would have been half the length and not extended past the first sentence. Clearly Our Lord wants us to express our own desires in prayer, an example we see with Christ himself in the garden of Gethsemane. “'Father,' he said, 'if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.' Then an angel appeared to him, coming from heaven to give him strength” (Lk 22:42-43). One gets the sense that if prayer was reduced to “your will be done” then the temptation would be that prayer becomes a purely an intellectual exercise, one that runs the risk of closing us off rather than opening us up to love. In #2558 of the Catechism St Thérèse of Lisieux is quoted as saying,“prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy”.
It remains then to make the connection between our desires in prayer and God’s desires for us. In St Augustine’s letter to Proba he says, “Thus he [God] makes the saints intercede with sighs too deep for words, inspiring in them the desire also of the great, still unknown reality, which we await with patience”. In this Augustine seems to give the goal of our prayer and maybe hint at how our prayers will deepen over time. Our desires offered in prayer will result in us becoming more aware of this “great, still unknown reality”, which is God, his desires for us and his very self, which is love. Through our prayers God’s desires and more specifically his personal desires for us as individuals become more known to us and we in turn receive the grace to be able to make those desires ours. Prayer is therefore that privileged dynamic where we not only get to know God’s will for us but are also given the strength so that our desires change and become like his, even if that means trials and suffering.
This dynamic has practical implications. For example, it is through prayer that we best discover the vocation that God desires for us. For then we receive not only the call, but also the desire for the vocation which becomes our heartfelt desire, such that we will be able to live it as well as God intends. It also means that God might choose or not choose to answer our prayers in the way we initially desire. He might choose or not choose to change the circumstances that we are praying about, depending on whether they will help us to desire his will or not. This extends even down to the more ordinary aspects of life. It is through prayer that we can become more capable of transcending some of the things that we find difficult in everyday life. What we are called to do might not change but when we allow God to slowly change our desires then we can come to desire even the difficult things in life. We can go from white knuckling it, to holy resignation. This dynamic can be seen in the two examples of prayer we began with. Martha lamented that her sister was not helping her in serving Our Lord. Christ answered her prayer not by changing the practical reality but rather by encouraging her to go further, encouraging her to discover the order in God’s desire, that God’s desire is for us to contemplate, that this is more important than our practical life. In the second example the disciples were at risk of being swamped on the lake and Christ responded by calming the storm, a practical intervention, but he then moves to immediately to encourage them to go deeper “How is it that you have no faith” (Mk 4:40). Christ used the difficult circumstance and their imperfect understanding - “Master, do you not care” - expressed in prayer, to help them discover more fully who he was.
As we enter the season of Lent, we are reminded of the necessity of prayer and in addition, of fasting and almsgiving. It is interesting that fasting and almsgiving are also about our desires, about reordering them in the light of more important desires. Fasting helps us to place our physical desire for food at the service of our spiritual desires. Our desire for matter - which as we said previously, is always changing - is given over for something spiritual, something much more stable. Similarly, in giving alms we choose to help others through forgoing the possibility of increased material comfort or security. Our desire for good things, for material goods, is suppressed to help others, the result being that we undergo a process of converting our desires in the light of something greater. In this light we see that fasting and almsgiving are the perfect training ground for prayer. They train us for retraining our desires, therefore disposing us for a deeper and more fruitful life of prayer.
