Unanswered prayer

 

In her best selling novel ‘Just My Luck’ Adele Parks weaves a tale about winning the lottery. It has the sub-title ‘What if winning means losing everything’ and chronicles the impact on Lexi and Jake and their circle of winning £18 million. For fifteen years they have played the same six numbers with two other couples. Just prior to drawing the winning ticket there had been a rift in the group so their friends are seemingly ineligible to gain part of the bounty. It is a gripping tale playing on what many see as the biggest answer to prayer and how unsatisfactory that answer can be. Prayer to God is set forth by Christ as analogous to children’s requests to their parents. I am aware as a parent how difficult it can be answering requests for money from your children. Sometimes they ask you with fingers crossed, like the symbol of the National Lottery, hoping luck will prevail. Though crossed fingers go back to pre-Christian times they are resonant of an essential of Christian prayer, that it be in the name of Jesus i.e. a generous prayer. Is praying to win the Lottery such a prayer? Many who buy their tickets with crossed fingers and aspiration to heaven think of what they would give to others if they won. They are ready to live with unanswered prayer week by week content at the small proportion of their purchase that goes to charity. Others see any form of giving in hope of a return as against the grain of Christianity and look more directly to God to resource them including their service of the needy in their circle.

Is unanswered prayer unsurprising or challenging? Just as millions pray unsuccessfully every week to win the Lottery others pray the Our Father day by day but look rather in vain for the establishing of God’s kingdom of justice and peace. Something like a Lottery win is surprising when it happens but so can be the establishing of justice and peace in the world. The difference in the prayers is the challenge to personal investment in the two. One is primarily about being a one-off consumer - buying a ticket in hope of gain - the other is about building a generous attitude as a citizen of God’s kingdom. Living with unanswered prayer as a Christian is a struggle linked less to lack of fortune in personal life and more to disappointment about progress in ‘the kingdom of the world becom[ing] the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah’ (Revelation 11:15). Christian prayer flows in gratitude for being part of creation, sorrow for our shortcomings which ruin the world, praise to Jesus sent to remedy these as our redeemer and petition for God to fill our needs. It is a relationship established in ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ (Dante in picture) and seeks to gather us with all things to itself for kindling. ‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled’ (Luke 12:49). Frustration at unanswered prayer is at this highest level disappointment that human beings are as yet not fully aflame with love for God and one another with sad consequences evidenced in lack of justice and peace and disrespect for our environment.

The Christian eucharist has an impatience about it, a yearning for God’s kingdom which is building up but sometimes little evident. In the action bread and wine are taken alongside worshippers to be offered as a living prayer in anticipation of fulfilment at Christ’s return. ‘As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11:26). In recent years involvement in the eucharist has been recapturing this future aspiration, a proclamation of God’s love reaching into the future, looking to fulfilment of so many unanswered prayers for humanity to be put into its right mind in preparation for Christ’s return. ‘Christ in an all-inclusive, cosmic sense gathers all things within him. The open arms of Christ on the cross and his open heart pierced by the wounds of the world can be seen as an immense, cosmic outflowing and gathering in, open to all realities, to all peoples, to all faiths in the embrace of love and the act of feeding. For Christians, this is the centre’. In those words Ursula King summarises the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin whose writings make explicit the unfulfilled yearning of the prayer of the eucharist. In his ‘Mass on the World’ the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the eucharist is seen as an echo of Christ's desire to 'cast fire upon the earth' and the stellar fires and molten lava that energise the earth's development. In the elevation of the Host at mass Teilhard sees in anticipation the raising up of Jesus as the 'Omega Point' on his return to gather all things to himself.

The term ‘unanswered prayer’ betrays a transactional view of prayer even if the aspect of God supplying our needs is clearly portrayed in scripture. The petitionary aspect of prayer stands alongside praise, confession and thanksgiving which by renaming can form the mnemonic ACTS. This prioritises in descending order: adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. The descent links to decreasing God centeredness of aspects. Adoration centres purely on God himself, confession of sin on our unworthiness to face God in his holiness, thanksgiving on what God has given us and supplication centres on our own needs. All these aspects are found in the corporate prayer of worship as at the eucharist. They flow together so that ingratitude and lack of penitence subtract from praise which in turn has impact upon appropriate supplication. Over my life I have found unanswered prayer more surprising as I have learned more about what to ask for. When something I take to God regularly remains unfulfilled after a long time I am now surprised. God as God of all has insight into where a human petition, thought and spoken with readiness to act if needs be, can impact things. Through regular centring upon God at the eucharist and in personal prayer I get schooled in the people and things to bring him at a particular season. The fact that names come onto and then off my prayer list show my prayers are answered. Even then there is no exact science in my relationship with God just as there is no scientific explanation of my marriage and friendships.

Sometimes our relationship with God, like our human relationships, blows cold even if the one to one commitment remains and good things keep flowing one to another.  This is described as a ‘dark night of the soul’ in the sense of losing the sense of God’s presence in your life. Spiritual guides can help us interpret this loss as a gift from God’s left hand sent to help us love and work for him without spiritual consolation because it is right to do so without immediate gratification. In my book ‘Pointers to Heaven’ I describe an incident linked to a contemporary saint who wrote about how little they felt God’s love in their spirit. ‘I read ‘Come Be My Light’ by Mother Teresa in which the saint writes of the obscuring of her faith. It equipped me to witness heaven to an agnostic gentleman, like me a writer, languishing in hospital with a brain tumour. I was visiting his ward when he engaged me in a conversation which touched on his envy of someone like myself who seemingly could not entertain doubt about heaven. Having listened carefully I said I was not without questions and I’d just read about Mother Teresa’s questioning. As I talked a doctor striding through the ward stopped abruptly and turned to us. ‘Did I hear you mention Mother Teresa? I trained with her. She gave me this medallion.’ He bent down, unbuttoned his shirt and pulled out a holy medal. I was astonished and instinctively touched it, as did my agnostic friend. It was as if the saint was good enough to reach down from heaven to kindle faith in an unbeliever through an extraordinary coincidence’.