We pray to know we are not alone

Twenty Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

Some of you may remember the movie Shadowlands, a moving tale of the great Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, and his wife Joy. At one point in the film, after finding out that Joy’s cancer had gone into remission, one of Lewis’ friends says to him, “I know how hard you have been praying, and now God is answering your prayer.” Lewis, brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins, replies, “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”

As much as some of us can understand the truth of this claim in a limited sort of way, most people would rather wish to believe that their prayers can change the mind of God. The readings we’ve heard today seem to lend support to this expectation that prayer can and will change the mind of God. For if prayer didn’t have this effect, if prayer is incapable of changing anything, then it would make little difference whether we choose to pray or not. Why bother praying?

In the first reading we have the strange but interesting tale of Moses interceding for the Israelites as they fought a battle with their enemies, the Amalekites. Whenever Moses held his hands up while holding the staff, the Israelites were winning the battle over the Amalekites. But whenever he lowered his hands, they lost the battle. This seems to give the impression that Moses was actually controlling the Israelites like a puppeteer would control his marionette with invisible strings.  Modern folks would find it incredulous and superstitious that we should even attempt to make a connexion between Moses’ hand- positions and the fate of the army. But rather than seeing Moses as the main protagonist, his raised hands actually point to the power of divine intervention. Holding up our hands to heaven, or the orans position, is actually an ancient symbol of a praying Christian asking for God's divine intervention.

This story is a reminder of how prayer is connected to action. This is how a Christian community is constructed: some fight on the outside, do all the work of the apostolate, carry out the mission of the Church; whilst others pray on the inside – in our monasteries, intercessory prayer groups, “private chambers” of our homes – for those who are fighting on the outside. For without prayer, the Church’s mission cannot succeed, its battle with evil, sin and the world cannot be victorious. If the Church, and every single one of her members, is to avoid being routed in the difficult battles of our day, all of us must pray, persist in prayer, storm heaven for assistance and grace, instead of everyone just being lost in busyness and activism.

In the gospel, we are given the example of a widow as a person of prayer. Nothing unusual about this. But what often confounds many Catholics is the analogy drawn between the unjust judge and God. It seems to reinforce a popular image of God of being a harsh despot who requires appeasement from His subjects. As He often does, our Lord takes the immoral and imperfect realities of our world as His point of departure. Here it is the corrupt judge, elsewhere it was the dishonest steward who defrauds His master, the exasperated and self-centred neighbour. Certainly, we can see that it was not our Lord’s intention to associate the faults of these characters with the nature of God. It’s not meant to be an “apple to apple” comparison. Rather, beginning with what is familiar, our world with all its imperfections and faults, our Lord wants to move up to the supremely higher and purer values of the Kingdom of God. The point of comparison is the persistence of a request – if even the wicked will do it out of selfish reasons, then all the more God who is good would do it out of unconditional love for us.

What is clear from this parable is that our Lord wants us to ask God with persistence and determination, even to the point of risking sounding like an annoying pest. But then someone can raise this further objection, if God is omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful, and thus require no further assistance from His creatures, including us), and if we acknowledge that God’s plan is always perfect, then wouldn’t it be logical to argue that our prayers shouldn’t do anything. After all, we’re not going to tell God anything that he doesn’t already know, and we’re not going to have a better plan than the one He already has, right?

This objection can only be answered when we see that human prayer is actually part of the plan of God. If prayers are answered, it is because God wills it. But then again, God will never force us to ask Him for what we truly need. God’s greatest gift to man is his freedom and it is in prayer, that we see how that same freedom is exercised. Human freedom is never negated by God’s omniscience or omnipotence, for if that was true, we would be merely mindless puppets in the hands of God. But because we possess human freedom, prayer is necessary to salvation, and without it no one having the use of reason can be saved.

Prayer isn’t about persuading God to do what we want, however noble that may be; it is about inviting God to mould us in faith into what He wants for us. Prayer can’t change God; it should change us. Through our prayer our faith is nourished and deepened, we learn to die to ourselves in order that we may conform ourselves more closely and intimately to the will of God. It teaches us fidelity and how to be faithful friends of God, and not just fair-weathered ones.

Returning to the character of C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands, he says, later in the movie, “We pray to know we are not alone.” Yes, prayer is about not being alone, we pray because we believe that God is with us even in our darkest and hardest moments. Prayer is about Jesus crying out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” God is with us even in the most trying moments which feel like abandonment.

So let us continue to pray, even when we know that God knows what is best for us. Let’s persist in prayer, even when we believe that God has heard our prayer even before we have uttered it. The old Baltimore Catechism tells us that “we should pray: with attention; with a sense of our own helplessness and dependence upon God; with a great desire for the graces we beg of God; with trust in God's goodness; (and finally) with perseverance.”

Christ Himself is our model of prayer: He was a man of insistent prayer during His life, and ultimately on the cross, pleading for us and alongside us for our redemption. And this very same prayer on the cross is perpetuated at every Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It was the early father of the Church, St Justin Martyr who saw Moses’ prayer with arms extended as prefiguring the cross. The self-emptying of the cross is the point around which all the scriptures and all history turn, and it must be the focus of our prayer as we seek to answer Christ’s call to follow him. So, why do we pray? As C.S. Lewis would have put it, “we pray because we can’t help ourselves. We pray because we’re helpless. We pray because the need flows out of us all the time, waking and sleeping.”  But finally, we pray because it changes and transforms us. We pray because we want to be like Christ and to be with Christ, now and forever. Amen.