A Book of Prayers
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Your Brother in Christ,
I’ll Pray for You
Why we keep bringing one another before God.
One of my absolute favorite things about this strange little online corner of the Church is the way we pray for each other. I love praying for you by name, remembering the intentions you have entrusted to me, and keeping our book of prayers close by when I pray the Rosary or celebrate the Eucharist. And I love and appreciate the way you guys pray for me and my intentions, too.
For several months, I have been praying for an acquaintance of mine who suddenly developed a rare blood infection and ended up in the ICU. If you are in the habit of praying for the intentions of this community, you have been praying for him, too.
I thought he was quite a bit younger than I am, but I found out the other day that I was older by just a month. He was 42, the same age as me. Clearly, God had blessed him genetically in ways He chose to withhold from me.
I prayed for him by name in St. Peter’s Basilica. I offered Mass for him. I prayed daily, especially when updates came.
The other day, God called him home, and the reason you did not receive an essay from me yesterday is that this reflection was half-finished on my desktop when I needed to turn my attention to making arrangements to go to Florida. I will be presiding at his Celebration of Life and Christian Committal.
By coincidence, this was the very subject I was working on when he died. I return to it now preparing to commend to God a man whose name I have been bringing before Him for months.
I don’t know why the recovery we prayed for did not come. I believe in providence and eternal life. But now there is a particular man, forty-two years old, whose name I will say in the prayers of committal, and an explanation of suffering in general cannot tell me why his life ended when it did.
We believe that God hears and answers every prayer. We can also feel as though we have not been heard at all. Having asked for something good, something as good as preserving another person’s life, we may struggle to recognize His answer in anything that has happened. I think we need to be able to admit that to one another without immediately trying to make it sound more faithful.
To pray for God’s will to be done is to entrust ourselves to the Most High, who knows and loves the people we bring before Him far beyond our own understanding. His answers may differ from what we hoped for; we may recognize them much later, or never understand them in this life. I believe that, and I still wish this man had recovered. When I commend him to God, I will be doing so with that wish still in me. I have no reason to imagine that God needs me to conceal it.
In Gethsemane, Jesus asks His Father to let the cup of suffering pass from Him. He also entrusts Himself to the Father’s will. Both are essential to the prayer, and both are spoken by the same Christ who has asked His friends to stay awake with Him. When He returns, they are sleeping. He goes back to pray, and Matthew tells us that the third time He says the same thing again.
We know that Easter Morning is coming. We still have to get through the night, when Jesus wants His friends nearby and asks His Father for that which will not happen in the way He has asked. I cannot read that and think that faith requires us to become indifferent to the outcome of our prayers. We love these people, and of course we want them to stay.
Long before Gethsemane, the psalmist was asking, “How long, LORD? Will you utterly forget me?” Perhaps we are still praying those words.
Why keep asking?
After praying for someone every day for months, we may begin to wonder what tomorrow’s prayer will add. God remembers the person. He remembers what we asked. Jesus tells us that the Father knows what we need before we ask, and warns against assuming that a great many words will secure the response we want. God has never required a minimum word count.
Yet tomorrow will be another day of loving this person and worrying about them. By the afternoon we may have received an update, or we may have heard nothing and become more anxious as the hours pass. We return to God because there is more to live through, even when there is very little new to say.
A friend can know what is worrying us and still stay on the phone while we tell the whole story again. We may even apologize for repeating ourselves. Nothing has changed since the last conversation, except that we have had another day to think about it, and hearing a familiar voice helps. I don’t think we find that especially mysterious. We would be hurt if someone we loved told us they had already listened yesterday.
With God, the difficulty is that we cannot hear a voice coming back over the telephone. We have to learn how to remain in a relationship whose movements are often difficult to recognize. We come asking for one thing and find ourselves talking about something we had not intended to bring up, or discovering how angry we are, or saying thank you before we have quite worked out what we are thankful for. A wish can be made and left alone. In prayer we keep addressing Someone, and sooner or later that may include telling Him that we are having trouble with the conversation.
Some petitions have been with us for years. The relationship we hoped would be repaired is still broken; we may have stopped telling other people that we continue to pray about it. There is no news to share. The person’s name still comes to mind.
I do mean to ask God to act when I pray. I am asking for recovery, for help that a person needs, for something to happen that may not happen without His help. Christian tradition gives our petitions a real place within providence: God can choose to accomplish something through our asking. Knowing what we need does not prevent Him from wanting us to ask, any more than His ability to care for someone prevents Him from involving us in that care.
For some inconvenient but wonderful reason
Christ became human, called disciples, lived among them, and sent them out to preach and heal. In theory, He could have sat down cross-legged, closed his eyes, and healed every injury, ended every war, mended every division, filled every belly, and dried every tear. For some inconvenient but wonderful reason, He wants us to minister to one another.
He knows what people are like. This arrangement was His idea anyway.
When the disciples see that the crowd listening to Jesus will need food and somewhere to stay the night, they suggest sending everyone away to find it. Luke tells us that the day is drawing to a close. The disciple’s proposal seems sensible enough, especially since they have only five loaves and two fish, but Jesus tells them, “Give them some food yourselves.” He has the people sit down, blesses the food, and gives it to the disciples. Even in this great miracle, they have to take it from His hands and carry it to the hungry people in front of them.
There is a mystery here about the Church itself, about ecclesia, the people Christ gathers. The word means an assembly, and we ought to take seriously the fact that He wanted one. He called people into a life they would have to share, with all the inconvenience of needing one another and being needed in return. We sometimes describe the Great Commission as though the work were finished once someone had been converted and baptized. Yet Jesus goes on to speak of teaching people to live according to His commands, and promises His continuing presence with them.
Baptism is where the story begins. From there forward, we are supposed to belong to one another. It takes a lifetime to learn what that asks of us, especially when we discover that being loved also means allowing someone else to help.
Paul describes us as members of one body, where the suffering of one member concerns the others and those who seem weaker deserve particular care. The person who needs help has a claim on us before they have done anything useful for the parish. And if the community itself is hurting them, that same obligation requires us to protect them. Belonging to the Church cannot mean remaining available to be mistreated by it.
I will go to Florida as the same priest who prayed for this man’s recovery. I will have prayers to offer and people to be with, and I will not know any more than I do now about why he died. I am trying to take seriously the work I can do while admitting how much I cannot explain. My role as a disciple of Jesus Christ now takes the form of providing him a dignified committal and to offer comfort to the loved ones he leaves behind, fortunately neither requires my full understanding of the nature of life and death.
Suppose someone mentions an appointment on Thursday when they ask for prayer, and afterward we find ourselves wondering how it went. Perhaps we ask. The answer may be longer than expected, and suddenly we are talking about how things have been at home, or why this particular appointment was so frightening. Many of us will never meet in person, but we can remember to ask again the following week.
When help comes through someone who has learned what we need, I am quite willing to call that part of God’s answer. I also know that a person can be deeply grateful for the food, the calls, and the company, and still want to get well.
When someone is seriously ill, we may want everyone we know to pray. Our friends ask their friends, a name travels from one church to another, and people who have never met begin remembering the same person before God. Does it make a difference that so many are praying? Would fifty people accomplish something that five could not?
Jesus speaks about two or three gathered in His name and about the Father granting what they ask in agreement. Those are demanding words to read when we have prayed together and the thing we asked for has not happened. They come in a passage about the life of the Church, about addressing harm and learning to forgive; He is speaking to people who have responsibilities toward one another. I believe His promise. I cannot turn it into a formula that tells us how many prayers will secure a recovery.
I think, too, of the person who is alone and has nobody to ask. God knows that person as fully as He knows someone whose request has been shared thousands of times. We will keep asking others to join us in prayer because we believe God works through it and because we need one another. I would hate for any of us to spend the night wondering whether someone we loved might have lived if only we had found a few more people.
The company we pray in
I carried the names from our community to Rome and asked the saints to pray for us. There I was, near their relics, bringing the troubles of people living now to people who had died. It is a curious thing to do, unless we mean what we say about the communion of saints.
These people once knew what it was to need help. They lived in bodies that became tired, among people whose suffering concerned them. We believe they are alive in Christ now. I find it hard to imagine that becoming closer to Him would make them less interested in the people they loved, or less capable of loving people they never had the chance to meet.
Christians differ about asking for their intercession. My Catholic understanding is that I can ask Mary or one of the saints to remember someone before God much as people here ask me to do. I am relying on the love we believe continues in them. There is much about life in God that I cannot describe, but a heaven in which the saints had ceased to care about us would be a very strange fulfillment of the Gospel.
All of us are praying through Christ, who, as Hebrews tells us, lives to intercede for us. When I speak a name, I am bringing before Him someone He already knows and loves. I do not have to awaken His concern. The Father who sent Him already loves us, too; our prayer begins within that love, however uncertain we may feel when we begin it.
And when we cannot begin, Paul writes of the Spirit interceding in our weakness, with groanings beyond words. I wonder how much prayer we fail to recognize because we expect it to sound like a flourished sentence. We are quick to suppose that an infant is too young to pray. We may be just as quick to suppose that a person who has lost the words of a familiar prayer has lost something of their nearness to God. Paul gives me reason to hesitate. There are days when the most articulate among us cannot get much further than a sigh.
“I’m praying for you”
Sometimes we hear “I’m praying for you” and find ourselves wondering what, exactly, the person is asking God to do. Many LGBTQ people have heard those words from someone who would like God to turn them into somebody else. Or we remember being in the middle of explaining something painful when the other person offered to pray, and realizing from their tone that the conversation was over. We had more to say.
I would like to know what a person wants remembered in prayer before assuming I know what they need. We may be thinking about the procedure while they are wondering how to tell their children, or who will be with them when they get home. That takes a little listening. It also means allowing them to stop where they need to stop, without treating the promise of prayer as a reason to ask for details they would rather keep private.
Sometimes, though, the person offering prayer has done nothing to make us wary. We trust them. We are simply much more comfortable being the one who checks in, remembers the appointment, and asks how everyone else is doing. When the concern turns toward us, we hear ourselves saying that we are fine before the other person discovers how much we would like to be remembered.
It can take a while to say thank you and leave it there. We want to explain that we are managing, or offer to do something for them, or find some small way to become the helpful one again. Meanwhile, they are offering to think of us when they speak to God. There is very little for us to arrange about that. We have to let ourselves be loved by someone whose prayer we will never hear.
I am grateful that you guys do this for me. Some of us have very little strength left for the more visible work of caring for people; getting through our own day may be difficult enough. We may never be able to drive someone to an appointment or bring a meal. I would not want the connection between prayer and practical care to make us dismiss the prayers of a person whose body can no longer do what it once did. I need those prayers, too.
When Saturday comes, we will gather the intentions again. I will write them in the book and keep it close when I pray the Rosary or celebrate the Eucharist. There will be names whose stories I know, and names about which I know almost nothing. Our own belong among them.
Eventually I will close the book and go to bed, or visit with friends, or put on the Hockey game, or play Nintendo for a while. Every person named in it will still be known to Christ, whose intercession continues when I have run out of words and attention. I can leave them with Him, knowing that other people are remembering my name, too.
The God to whom we bring one another already loves us. And I’ll keep praying for you.
And Let Us Pray…
Lord Jesus,
We bring before You the people we love and those who have asked for our prayers. Be near to the sick; grant healing and wise, compassionate care. Receive the departed into Your mercy, and stay close to those learning to live with an absence they never wanted.
Help us notice what we can do for one another, and give us the humility to accept care ourselves. When we cannot recognize Your answer, help us keep speaking honestly to You. Let Your Spirit pray within us when words fail.
We entrust these names to You, including our own. Keep us faithful to one another as we wait, and teach us to trust the love with which You already hold us.
Amen.
And Now It’s Your Turn…
What has it been like to let someone else pray for us? I would love to hear what has made that easier, or what has made it difficult. And if there is a name for our prayer book, we can remember them together. A first name or a brief intention is enough.
If a friend has been struggling with prayer, please send this reflection along with a few words of your own.
A Word Before We Part…
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