I spend a lot of time thinking about how prayers of petition work. Truth be told, one of my first thoughts after discovering that God exists was, "SO HOW DO I GET HIM TO GIVE ME WHAT I WANT?!" (Which is why the title of my book will not be Adventures in Spiritual Maturity.)
On the one hand, I know that we are supposed to ask God for what we want, and that he does "answer" prayers in the sense of granting our requests. On the other hand, it couldn't possibly work that way all the time. After all, if God were to give each of us every single thing we ever asked for, he wouldn't be an omnipotent God; we'd be gods, and he'd be a wish-granting genie.
For a long while after my conversion, I devoted a lot of time in reading and chats with spiritual directors simply learning how to pray. Specifically: I want a certain thing, should I ask for it? Or should I just throw out a general "Thy will be done" prayer?
What I learned was the importance of hitting the right level of granularity for my prayers of petition; I now use the first part of my prayer time simply focusing on how much to "zoom in" or "zoom out" on my requests.
Here's what I mean by that:
Let's say our car breaks down. It will cost $684 to fix it, but I don't have the money, and I don't have any way to get the money. My husband needs the car to get to work, so we must come up with the money immediately. Let's think about the different levels of granularity at which I could pray about this. Here's one extreme:
Lord, please send a man wearing a blue hat to arrive at my front door on Monday morning at 9:15 carrying $684 in cash, mostly in $20 bills.
That is an extremely specific prayer! Now, let's move up a level:
Lord, please send me $684 on Monday.
Up a couple more levels:
Lord, please send enough money to cover the car repair, sometime before it negatively impacts my husband's job.
Now, let's move up so high that the car isn't even necessarily part of the picture, and neither is my husband's current job:
Lord, please let us continue to have the resources to meet our basic physical needs.
And so on. Especially when I feel like I've been begging God for something and my prayers are going nowhere, it's helpful to ask myself: "Am I praying at the right level of granularity?" To use the car example again, if I'm praying that first, extremely specific prayer, maybe I need to "zoom out" a bit. Perhaps I was right that I'm supposed to pray about this issue, but the problem has been that level of detail I'm focusing on: instead of asking for $684 at 9:15 on Monday, the Lord is drawing me to turn to him with the request that my husband simply has some way to get to work this week.
What I've found particularly interesting about this sort of exercise is that it forces me to ask myself a critical question: "What do I really, ultimately want?" Is my deepest desire really for $684 per se? Or to just get the car fixed? Or that my husband just has a way to get to work? Or we just have our basic needs met? Or...?
It occurs to me that at the far end of the spectrum, when you zoom all the way out to the least specificity in prayer, you end up praying:
Lord, I just want you.
I know that it's always good to turn to God with our simplest needs; he is our Father, after all, and delights in hearing from us about even the littlest concerns. But I think that far too often my own prayers for very specific things have been motivated less by childlike trust and more by a desire for control. For me, the path to holiness might involve "zooming out" for a while; because I notice that, as I move from more-specific to less-specific prayers, I feel within me a change from wanting to be God, to simply wanting God.
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Thanks for the insights, Jennifer. I wonder if we ever need that granularity—doesn’t God know the exact thing we need or are asking for without our having to give Him specifics? He knows its $684; He knows it’s 9:15 Monday; He knows it’s about transportation to work. Those things will happen as they need to, sort of “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it in My way which will be the best for you.” Who are we to try to instruct God on how to do things? I’d rather make it like most prayers really are—to change hearts. “Dear Lord, help me to see Your way through this crisis in my life, because I’m scared about how I see it working out (or not).”
Good post. I always sense there’s some kind of temptation for me though to just not bother praying for things and saying, “thy will be done.” I’d mean it, but I think God does want us to ask with some kind of specificity, albeit probably more often in a “zoomed-out” manner than hyperfocusing on details.
It’s always helpful to me to think of how I respond to my own children’s request. I may not throw chocolate chip cookies at them at will, but if they ask, there’s a reasonable chance they might be given one.
I believe that God does not simply “grant” things, like your genie, but that He opens paths for you to find what you need. He may open the path, and he may give you a nudge in the right direction, but your spiritual growth depends on you making the trek, yourself.
My husband feels that the Lord’s Prayer covers everything, especially in the “give us this day our daily bread” phrase, for material and physical needs.
The guideline is that for spiritual requests, one can safely ask without qualification—e.g., “My Lord, please grant your servant an increase in the virtue of patience” (which is followed by an unplanned 3-hour wait in the DMV line).
Requests for temporal benefits, however, are made in a qualified way—e.g., “Lord, if it be for you honor and glory, please help me come up with the money to pay this bill; yet not my will, but Thine be done.”
I find myself most often saying petition prayers, for a family member in a health crisis for example, as follows:
God please take away X’s pain, cancer, etc. if it be your will. If it’s not your will to remove it, please help X and all of us to trust that you have X in your loving hands and we may all be at peace with what happens. Help me to know what to say or what to do to best help X.
I believe God wants us to ask for specific things as shown by the example of Christ in Gethsemane, but to always follow it up with “not my will but thine be done”.
This article well summarizes the praying person’s “adventures in spiritual maturity,” as you refer to them, the common yet tailor-made journey that one must either take, or die (not necessarily in a cataclysmic way, as a tire is slashed, but often incrementally, as with a slow leak). I have always appreciated Gaudium et Spes 37, which the CCC cites somewhere: “…man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.” This sort of sturm und drang, I believe, is best navigated through surrender—admission to the fact of our frailty and selfishness, which is purified only by walking through experiences such as you have described.
I would recommend Fr Jerome Bertram’s book, “Jesus, Teach us to Pray”.
It’s an incredibly rich resource on prayer, but at the same time, an apologetic for Catholic forms of prayer.
Dear Jennifer. Pray tell. Did you get the $684 to repair your car? God Bless
this hits to the core of it all - very effective post. Great one!
@Rich - I think there is power in asking for VERY specific things, at the right time in the right context. It is a mistake to categorically omit the most specific level of granularity (save, perhaps, the prayer that seeks to control God or tell the future…that’s not really prayer in that it’s intrinsically closed to who God is!). I think the very specific prayer is quite powerful, because it’s almost like we often don’t dare to believe that God cares THAT much about our every need to respond in SUCH a specific way, or deep down, in an unarticulated way perhaps we fear that maybe He can’t or won’t. I have found it amazing to be nudged to pray - to ASK (Mt 7:7) - very specifically and to realize what a leap of faith it required. It is heroic and daring to have learned that His Will will always be done, yet still ask, “Lord, I know you are God and I believe you are the Lord of body and soul and all of creation. We pray right now that in your mercy you would do “x” (heal Joey’s throat, help me find a driver for this ministry, hold off the rain for this event) and that you would be glorified in this prayer. I thank you for hearing me and for answering.” Great saints/blesseds like Solanus Casey and Mother Teresa were famous for praying for very specific needs with great faith - yet of COURSE this is likely only after having learned deeply the lesson of “Thy Will Be Done” and acquiring a depth of spiritual maturity.
A life of prayer that is integrated with growth in virtue, and seeks the able guidance of a good spiritual director, is bound to naturally move through many different experiences of God in one’s life. It’s so amazing to see it unfold in lives of the people of God in such a varied way!
God is our loving Father, who like an earthly Dad, knows his children’s deepest needs but also personalities and hearts’ desires, and delights in giving us everything that is for our good. Sometimes He lavishes blessings in abundance that bring great joy and delight, sometimes He asks us to walk a very hard road that completely transforms us and opens us to see Him more clearly.
“Adventures in Spiritual Maturity” - Awesome! Great post, Jennifer. And I’m with Carolyn A on this one. The longer I’m a parent the more I realize that sometimes it’s OK to ask God, our Father, for specific things, as long as I’m ready to accept that the answer might be “No, that’s not what you need right now.”
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