The truth is our encounters with God can be worse than the widow’s experience of the shameful judge. At least, the fear of disgrace moved the judge to respond. Whereas our God is often savagely silent. It begs the question: “Really? There is an honourable God who hears and answers our prayers”? Many can relate their negative rather than positive history with God.
The 1st Reading is very much an encouragement to never stop praying. Moses prayed unceasingly and in his ceaseless prayers, we catch a glimpse of what true prayer is. Clearly, the context was a war to be won but prayer represents more than a request for victory. As Pope Francis remarked, “Prayer is not a magic wand; it is a dialogue with God”.
If to pray is to enter into a conversation with God, then whenever we pray, time and space become holy. Like Moses meeting God at the burning bush. To facilitate this encounter, the Church proposes the liturgy of the hour, a rhythmic praying of the Divine Office so that our days and our lives can be sanctified and offered for the greater glory of God. In dialogue, we are also seeking God’s will. In other words, our lives should fit into this schema of sanctification. We do not just engage in holy rites. Rather, we are holy, which is why we perform the rites. But somehow, we have lost the idea that holiness should pervade or permeate our entire existence. Instead, we have reduced holiness to merely a feature of life, that is to say, we try not to let holiness get in the way of living.
Contrast the vision of sanctification proposed by the liturgy of the hour with our pragmatic notion of prayer. Having a Sunday Mass that fits our hectic schedule is practical. But it also betrays a utilitarian mentality that separates life from holiness and treat sanctification almost in a functional manner. For example, take a look at the way we pray the Angelus, never mind that it is merely a Marian prayer. In the light of the Protestant critique that Catholics overemphasise their devotion to Mary, we have downplayed the devotion to barely existent. The regularity of the recitation at 6 am, 12 noon, 6 pm belongs to the same rhythm of the liturgy of the hours because the prayer reminds us that nothing is more important that the sanctification of time and space. We stop whatever mundane activities we have so that we can raise my minds to God, albeit, using a Marian prayer.
However, more often than not, the business of life comes first and the Angelus is recited at our convenience just to get it out of the way.[1] This same diktat or tyranny of convenience flows into our Sunday Masses too. Granted that this state labours under an Islamic weekend that makes liturgical life on a larger scale challenging. This lack of convenience should actually spur us even to want to pray more, to sanctify more. Instead, to “get Sunday Mass out of the way”, we celebrate it on a Friday. The same goes for transferring our holy days of obligation to Sunday so that we can “kill two birds with one stone”.
When the tyranny convenience dictates the sanctification of our day, it might just contribute to a restriction of prayer to mostly asking from God. To be fair, God is Provident, and as such, asking is not inappropriate. The Gospel commends us to “ask, seek and knock”. The challenge is that in asking, we expect God to bend to our will, rather than we bending to His.
To infuse holiness into time and space, our praying should move beyond a transactional model of “I scratch your back, you scratch my back” meaning that “I pray and God, you answer”. The example of St Monica teaches us what it means to pray consistently. She begged God for the conversion of her son Augustine and it was only after 16 years that her prayers were answered. It might feel like a one-way street but it is certainly far from the model of God as a dispenser machine. To pray without losing hope is faith that wants to conform our minds, convert our hearts and bend our knees to God’s will. “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.
Sadly, no matter how noble our prayers may be, sometimes God cannot answer our prayers. To illustrate. A pal calls you every day. The conversation may be rubbish. But he calls daily without fail. Sometimes even twice or three times a day. The trashy banters are premised on the fact that there exists a relationship between two friends. Whereas another chum of yours calls only when there is a problem. Which one are you keener to respond to? Everyone know how it feels that we are called upon only when our services or expertise are needed. We often treat God that way.
But God is beyond this. The analogy of the fair-weather friend can only go that far because God does not engage in the pettiness of “tit for tat”. To better understand God’s seeming silence in the face of prayer, we may have to take a look at our behaviour.
You contact a plumber to unclog your sewage pipe. He finds a lot of tissue stuffed and stuck in the drainage. This simply illustrates that our behaviour has consequences. Extend this example to the way the environment is treated. People who used to frequent Cameron Highlands can attest to the fact that temperature is rising. It is not as cold as before. When we mow down our forests, we cannot expect the environment to be unaffected.
God cannot answer our prayers like the plumber when we keep throwing rubbish into the toilet. Same too for the indiscriminate logging that changes the climate of the highlands. Rather than thinking that God does not answer our prayers, it is more likely that God is helpless. What can He do in the face of our blatant irresponsibility?
The point is even if God should never be reduced to a Mr Fixit, it does not mean that we stop praying. If anything, prayer is to change us. St John Paul II, in writing about the Rosary quoted a Satanist priest turned a Saint (Blessed Bartolo Longo) that “Just as two friends, frequently in each other’s company, tend to develop similar habits, so too, by holding conversation with Jesus and Mary, by meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary and by living the same life in Holy Communion, (that is, in friendship with them) we can become, to the extent of our openness, similar to them and can learn from these supreme models a life of humility, poverty, hiddenness, patience and perfection” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae 15). The purpose of prayer is to transform us more and more into the image of the God who created us. But if prayer does not make us grasp the necessity of changing our behaviour, then perhaps prayer can reorient our sense of salvation.
Prayer belongs to the scheme of a faith that saves and serves. However, if our vision of heaven is dim, then our prayers will often be made in the context of staving off death. Thus, we are invited to look at prayer and its relationship to eternal salvation. If faith saves, then our persistent and prolong prayers must always be for our salvation. We pray always to be saved for eternal life and it is in the context of redemption that God will answer our prayers. God might not answer your prayers for a long time. He will definitely grant your prayers if you ask for eternal life.
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[1] The whole idea of the Angelus recitation is to stop time and space so as to be conscious of the supernatural reality sacred time and space.
