How to Pray

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Do we know how to pray?  Maybe that seems like an odd question as we are gathered here in the greatest prayer of the Church.  But I think it’s one we need to ask: do we know how to pray?

            Now, probably all of us know prayers.  Hopefully we can recite the trifecta of Catholic prayers—the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be—from memory.  But the question was not if we know prayers, but if we know how to pray.  Simply knowing how to recite prayers is not the same as knowing how to pray. 

            Jesus in our Gospel teaches us how to pray.  Yes, He teaches us a prayer as well (we get St. Luke’s version of the Our Father today), but He also teaches us how to pray.  First and foremost, we are taught to pray to God our Father.  While God the Father is neither male nor female, and Jesus Himself, having male gender, even uses the image of a hen to describe His own care for Jerusalem, Father is not just an image of God, it is the way we are taught to address God, the Name we are to use in calling upon Him.  Whenever we pray, we should address our prayers to the Father, in the same way that Jesus always did.

            We also see that first we are to praise and thank God.  So often, and this is certainly true in my own life, we skip immediately to asking God for something.  But, if we are to follow Jesus’ model of prayer, then first we give God glory; not because it adds anything to Him by being praised, but because it is proper for the creature to praise and thank God for what has already been given.  Then, and only then, are we to ask God for what we need—daily needs, forgiveness, and the grace to persevere in living a Christian life. 

            This should be the format of our prayer: calling upon God as our Father, praising and thanking Him for his goodness, and then asking God for what we need.  We do the same thing in the Eucharistic Prayer, the high point of our prayer of the Mass: we call upon God, we praise and thank Him, and then we ask for what we need.

            Jesus also tells us to pray with confidence, because our loving Father will never deprive us of any good gift.  When we ask for what we need, we will receive it.  Of course, this has to be read in the light of the line from the Our Father: “thy will be done.”  Just because we think we need something, does not mean we truly do.  While some of us may think it at times, none of us is omniscient.  But God is, and so gives us exactly what we need to further our pilgrimage that hopefully ends in eternal salvation. 

            All too often, we approach prayer to God like making a list for Santa: Dear God, I’ve been very good this year (which may or may not be true), so please give me this, that, and the other thing.  But God is not Santa.  We cannot force His hand, nor do the answers to our prayers come because of any good thing we’ve done.  The answer comes not from our goodness, but from God’s.  And when we try to justify ourselves, to prove to God that we deserve something because we’ve been so good, we end up like the Pharisee in one of Jesus’ parables, who, when he prayed, extolled himself, while the Tax Collector, who stood at the back of the temple and beat his breast in sorrow for sins, and only asked God for mercy for his many sins.  Remember that Jesus said that the Tax Collector went home justified, while the Pharisee did not.

            Our Gospel, as well as our first reading, also reminds us to have confidence in prayer.  “‘Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.’”  When we ask that God’s will be done, and when we are united to God by conforming our lives to that of Jesus, then what we ask the Father in the name of Jesus will be granted to us.  We see it in the first reading when Abraham pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah.  God truly would have spared those cities if there would have been 50, or 45, or 40, or 30, or 20, or even just 10 innocent people.  Abraham had confidence in his relationship with God, not viewing God as an equal, but knowing that he could make his desires known to God, and that God would listen.  God even saves Lot and his family from destruction, though he does destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their sinfulness.

            I have seen the results of confidence in prayer in my own prayer life.  In the past year, I have had two experiences of prayers being heard.  Addressing God as Father, praising Him for his goodness and His love, I poured out my soul to God for a young man who had recently buried his father and then had been robbed.  I prayed that what had been stolen would be returned, since this young man had already lost so precious a gift as a loving father.  The stolen goods were returned the next day.  Calling upon God as Father, thanking Him for His generosity, I prayed for an MSU student who had been robbed of his moped.  I called upon God to be faithful, in the Name of Jesus, and through the intercession of St. Anthony, and have the moped returned, and it was on the next day.  Were either of the stolen items precious?  Not really.  Either could have been replaced.  But God, as a loving Father, looked with mercy upon me, and upon these two persons who had been robbed, and granted them back what they wanted.  For whatever reason, that was part of His will.  Maybe, the only reason was to allow me to tell this story to you, to inspire you in faith to have confidence when you pray. 

Will God always give us what we want?  As the Brad Paisley songs goes, “sometimes the answer is no.”  But prayer, true prayer, always brings us closer to God, and that is a gift that is more precious than all the gold in the world.  Whether we are praying using a prayer that we have memorized, or we our speaking with our own words, may our prayer always be like the prayer of Jesus, and so draw us closer to our heavenly Father.