Prayer Accompaniment

I often hear from others that they, too, are restless to pray or to pray better. These concerns sent me back through the stacks of books and quotes that Chris Hall and I once  used in our Seattle University retreats course. Here are just a few:

In her book, PRAYING IN COLOR, Sybil MacBeth addresses the attitude that we bring to prayer for others and the difficulty that sometimes accompanies that:

"There's also the risk that instead of praying for (people), I'll just worry about them. And worry is not a substitute for prayer...So when people ask for my prayers, I take a deep breath, put the choke chain on worry, and walk, leash in hand, into that place called prayer. When I ask people to pray for me, I hope they will do the same. I don't want them to worry about the details of my request. Obsessing about my sorrow, "tsking" about my wayward children, peeping through the keyhole of my confessions, fantasizing my diagnosis and prognoses, or writing my obituary is not their task. Their task is to fill the universe with good thoughts, to wrap me in God's love, to give me hope, and to intercede for my healing. I want them to reconnect my hands and heart to God's when I am too fraught with fear or sadness to do it by myself." (pp.12-13)

But just exactly how does intercessory prayer work? It hardly seems necessary to beg God to help when we believe that God is a loving God. Is it really our place to persuade God to act? Or even to suggest how God should act? Martin L. Smith elevates our thinking on this troubling conundrum in his book, THE WORD IS VERY NEAR YOU. He changes our starting point, reminding us that God is the initiator of all that is good and he gives us a helpful insight into how such prayer works:

"God is already in the situation of need, present and active with those who are in want as their upholder and fellow-sufferer. God has reached out to us from that place and touched off a spark of response to that need. Having stimulated our caring, God then recruits our love and concern by stirring us from within to offer that love and concern in intercession. God then receives the love we offer and weaves it into the combined influences which together can bring about the good that God desires." (p. 22)

So the idea that we should pray is God's, not ours, even if it comes through the request of another. Remembering that is a healthy adjustment to recall. We are part of a larger whole, a whole that is in God's loving hands.

Even so, we can be overwhelmed at times. The mystery of prayer is such that we are not meant to comprehend it. As St. Paul said long ago, "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." (Romans 8:26-27)

I like how Rumi phrases this in his poetry, "If you can't pray a real prayer, pray hypocritically, full of doubt and dry-mouthed. God accepts counterfeit money as if it were real."

I do not know why it is so that God seeks out our involvement. But I do believe that such is the case, and I find my closest thing to an answer in the stories we shared throughout this Advent/Christmas season. I look back over the ponderings offered and find among my own writings:

"The invitation that came to Mary is ours as well. The God of the Universe who spun the moon and stars into being, for reasons of God's own, has chosen for Incarnation to be an act of mutuality. We are agents of Christ's Incarnation, a coming which is, of itself, redemptive. How utterly amazing is that?"