I had always struggled with prayer. Not about what to say, but why I still bother. I like to think that my struggles were reasonable.
I often asked myself this, if God bothers about the trivia, why didn’t He care about the trauma? If He answers my prayers for a carpark lot or heal a common cold, why didn’t He save the children from the gas chambers or intervene when a girl is sold into sexual slavery and praying for help in the inhumane cage she was kept in?
When I come across prosperity preachers who tell me that if you believe, anything is possible, my mind usually goes into a tailspin wondering, are you sure?
Why do they think that they serve a God who readily signs off blank cheques to everything they ask for? Is God the saviour of their soul or the genie in the lamp, granting endless wishes of their heart’s desires?
Many Christians have a bias for prayer, claiming that God has answered theirs with promptness and completeness. They pray for health, and thus far, they said they are healthy. They pray for promotion, and they boast that their bosses were equally agreeable to it. And they pray for academic well-being of their children, and it came to pass with flying colours.
However I have to confess that I am wary about such prayers because they hide the many requests for prayers that fell upon deaf ears.
I once attended a meeting where one mother shared a testimony of how God saved her son from a road accident. A car just missed her son because the driver was somehow alert and keeping a proper lookout.
But having represented numerous victims in their accident claims for the last 20 years, I have seen young kids seriously injured, some even paralysed, in an accident; notwithstanding prayers offered before and after the accident for their well-being and safety in general.
Where is God for those kids?
I admit that at this point my point is not about a glowing report on prayers. And admittedly, many Christians reading this have every reasons to just walk away, dismissing my doubts and struggles as evidence of a misguided belief.
But, am I? That is, am I misguided? Are not my struggles and doubts reasonable in the face of this broken world, a world where God is often silent for many?
I know some may say that I have started this post on a wrong footing. I ought to have dialled down on unanswered prayers and dialled up on the many that were however answered to much publicity.
But, I wouldn’t be honest to myself if I just airbrush my thoughts and doubts with what have been possible with God when he answered prayers while leaving the many unanswered ones to melt away in the solvent of exuberant faith.
When it comes to prayer, that is, asking omnipotence to make a way for me in the face of a crisis, the last thing I want to do is to tell those I care about that you just need to pray, believe and then receive. The cause and effect is that simple: pray (petitioning the cause) and believe/receive (realising the effect). But is that how prayer work?
Now, I do not dismiss miracles happening in our lifetime, but miracles at one’s command or order? Even Jesus encountered limitation in his hometown.
What then can we expect when we pray?Or am I trying to defend something that is clearly indefensible? Am I putting another spin to what is wishful thinking of a deluded believer?
Seriously, as a believer, not one day goes by without me being tempted to equate prayer with wishful thinking, but what arrested that thought for me was how I never gave up seeking after an authentic faith, and with that, an authentic prayer life.
The atheist may consider me as a man living in the comfort of his own delusion, but I rather see it as a man embarking on a journey to discover the hidden divine wonders that are beyond science and empirical proof.
And in this journey, it is not those prayers that are answered that challenge my faith, but those that are left unanswered.
In other words, it is those prayers that did not come to pass the way I want it to come to pass that I believe many out there are quietly struggling with. I would like to think that their struggles are no different from mine.
So, let me start with this encounter in my lifetime quest for authenticity.
In a Sunday school, a six-grade girl once asked Einstein this, “Do scientists pray?”
To which, Einstein replied: “A scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer.”
He was right you know. I can’t argue with Einstein on this. I can’t expect the one who discovered that space could be bent by mass and time could slow down when we speed up to believe that a prayer offered can suspend time, reverse fates or grant immunity.
But while events could not be influenced by a prayer (so said the Nobel Prize laureate), other things can. I always believe that events are not limited by what happens outside of us, it also includes what happens inside. And while I believe that we have to believe what we pray for, to hold on to our petition with anticipating faith, our hearts have also to prepare for what we did not pray for.
This is another way of saying that prayer is not a magic incantation (susceptible to human abuses or ego-distortions) but an earnest travailing by a believer whose heart is always open to how events will unfold even in a way that does not always go his or her way.
Theologian Ray Anderson said: “Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.”
Are we then prepared for that? That is, a faith that is robust enough to see not just the working of our own will (or desires) when we pray, but the “outworking of the grace of God in our lives,” even if it means a result that we do not fully understand.
This I believe is the hardest part of prayer. At times, I still struggle with this. This is the part that invites doubts, skepticism and even ridicule. And it is only human nature for one to question prayers when it doesn’t deliver the result.
But, that is the issue with us when it comes to prayer. It just doesn’t work that way, and insisting that it does is the source of most of our frustration, disappointments and resignation.
In Philip Yancey’s book “Prayer”, he cited what Thomas Merton said when he was asked to diagnose the leading spiritual disease of our time. He gave a curious one-word answer: efficiency. “From the monastery to the Pentagon, the plant has to run...and there is little time or energy left over after that to do anything else,” Thomas said.
By the same token, we often professionalize the faith to expect prayer to be efficient. Efficiency means cause must equal effect; ask and it must happen the way we ask of it.
Efficiency also means that the answer must be prompt. We thus expect God to work on our clock, setting anticipated deadlines that puts as little strain on our patience as possible.
If we apply the mentality of efficiency to the travails of Jesus in Gethsemane, we would have skipped the part about “not my will but yours be done” and go straight to the part about “take this cup away from us” - period. That is how prayer works for us, a bending of God’s will to ours.
But that was not how Jesus prayed. He knew some events are not to be removed, in particular, the road of grief to the Cross that He was destined to walk.
For him, it was not about walking away from the Cross, but to face it. You can say that his prayer is a prayer for the miracle of character and not the miracle of circumstances. In other words, it is a prayer for strength to complete his Father’s will.
And if you examine the seven cries of Jesus at the Cross, three of them are essentially framed as prayers, with one asking for forgiveness ("Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do"), the other agonising over his Father’s absence ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), and the third was the fulfilment of His Will ("Father, unto your hands, I commend my spirit"). Alas, none of them were pleas for the cup to be removed.
That is why Jesus reminded us of this: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
When it comes to prayer, the late Eugene Peterson said: “I do not control the action; that is a pagan concept of prayer, putting the gods to work by my incantations or rituals. I am not controlled by the action; that is a Hindu concept of prayer in which I slump passively into the impersonal and fated will of god’s and goddesses. (Instead) I enter into the action begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of the action. I neither do it, nor it done to me; I will participate in what is willed.”
And what is willed may sometimes demand that we as believer lament, travail and even engage God in arguments. If you take a leaf off the prophets of old, great men of faith in the Bible, everyone of them did not have it easy.
For them, their prayers were an intense exercise, largely argumentative, challenging, clamoring, pleading, crying and full of doubts.
Moses wanted out when he confronted God in the burning bush. Job nearly abandoned prayers with a wounded heart. David lamented, “I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.” Jacob wrestled for his life. Jeremiah doubted and Isaiah asked why God had hidden His face from His people.
That is why a Bible scholar, Walter Wink, said: “Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like a haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the church.”
Let me leave you a Franciscan Benediction which may not completely answer your persistent question about unanswered prayers, but it does (at least for me) offer another perspective about prayer that is beyond the world’s concept of efficiency, promptness and professionalism.
“May God bless you with discomfort.
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships.
So that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger.
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.”
Amen. Have a Blessed Sunday mornimg.
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