Prayer is a Surge of the Heart Towards Heaven GUEST EDITORIAL
At one point in the Gospel Martha speaks to Christ, saying, “Lord, do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself?” (Lk 10:40). At another, during a storm on Lake Galilee, the disciples woke Our Lord, saying, “Master, do you not care? We are going down!” (Mk 4:39). If prayer is talking to God then these are both examples of prayer: Our Lord’s response can be instructive as to the purpose of prayer. Firstly, it is reassuring that neither Martha nor the disciples are rebuked for questioning Our Lord’s care for them. Christ is seemingly quite happy to receive our raw and honest desires. It has been said of the incident in the boat that maybe Our Lord was sleeping with one eye open, implying that he was waiting for his disciples to express their concerns to him. The paradox in prayer is this: how can our prayers change the immutable, unchangeable God? Through prayer, do we change God’s mind, such that he intervenes in the world in a way that he otherwise would not have? The beginnings of an answer are found in one of the prefaces prayed before the Holy, Holy for weekday Mass. “For, although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation.” God is unchanging and we human beings are not. In fact as human beings we are body and soul and one of the 13
GUEST EDITORIAL
properties of matter, the flesh and blood that makes up our body, is that it is constantly changing. Matter is constantly in movement, growing, decaying, constantly being acted upon by other matter. So, if prayer is to have any influence it is best to look at how it first impacts us rather than God. This dynamic is further complicated by that fact that God is also omniscient, all knowing. This raises the question as to the point of prayer, given that God already knows what is good for us and what he is going to do. From the pen of St Augustine comes a beautiful letter written to Proba, the widow of a very wealthy Roman. Proba asks Bishop Augustine how she should pray and he responds with a letter explaining the Lord’s Prayer. In it he says “Why does the Lord advise us to pray, when he knows what is needful for us before we ask him? … He wants our desire to be exercised in prayer, thus enabling us to grasp what he is preparing to give. That is something very great indeed, but we are small and limited vessels for the receiving of it. So we are told: ‘Widen your hearts’.” The answer as to the why of prayer, is that Our Lord wants us to express our desires to him so that our hearts are opened to receive more and more from him. Meaning that in prayer we are changed and that change occurs firstly at the level of the heart. This heart change is spiritual, a grace, a gift from God. There remains another difficulty.
