Petition
Petition is asking God something for ourselves. This may seem to be the lowest form of prayer, just as seeking something for ourselves is the lowest level of friendship. Doesn’t petitionary prayer arise from self-love? Yes, and because self-love is a reality, petitionary prayer is important.
We all have bundles of desires, some of them good, others not so good. Our desires, some of them good, others not so good. Our desires can, in fact, rule our lives without our knowing it. But if we bring our desires to God in prayer, and let him sort them out, we gain some freedom from these desires. God gives us a handle to make freer choices as to what we really want. Maybe we think a VCR will make us happier, but if we ask God for one in prayer we may find ourselves asking: Will it solve all our problems in life? So without forgetting about the VCR, we find ourselves becoming aware of deeper needs to share with God as well. After asking God to make a younger brother easier to live with we end up praying for more patience with him.
Avoiding petitionary prayer for fear of being greedy may prove a greater danger than asking for the wrong things. It could mean we give less importance to ourselves that God does. If we think we are beyond caring about what we get in life, it is all the more important to search our hearts. Chances are we are hoping for many things, but are denying these very hopes and then congratulating ourselves on our detachment. More serious, we may be depending on ourselves for getting things in life, and not depending on God.
There is a petition that moves us beyond our self-centered desires and the pride that makes us deny them. It is asking God for guidance in asking for the right things. We can ask God what he would have us do. This kind of petition brings us into the mystery of self-love and God’s love for us. The more we allow God to show us what we really want and what he wants for us, the more our will and his agree.
Intercession
Intercession is petitionary prayer for another person. I’m asking God to give somebody else a loaf of bread or act of healing. Since intercessory prayer can still be selfish insofar as we confuse another’s needs with our own, we need God’s guidance in moving beyond our own conceptions of others to a glimpse of how God sees them. Even more important, we must not use intercessory prayer as a means of self-righteous judgments of others. That would be praying against rather than for them. The point of intercessory prayer is to hold up another person before God. When we do this, we often gain insight as to what we can do for the one we pray for, and we find that both of us are in God’s hands.
What about unanswered prayers? First, we forget “no” might be an answer. We don’t always know why this happens. Our Lord tells us that no earthly father will give a stone when we ask for bread, and neither will God. But what if we foolishly ask for a stone? We may be upset if we receive bread instead, but how do we feel when God lets us gnaw on a stone to find out for ourselves what we had asked for? There is a deeper riddle yet. We may well have asked for the right thing and still not gotten it. What happened? We have to remember that God does not answer prayers with mechanical efficiency. Just as God gives us the freedom to approach him or not, to act rightly or not, he gives the same freedom to others. Because of this freedom, many things will go wrong in spite of God’s will for us all. Even the cells of our body seem to have a freedom to grow wrongly without being controlled by a Divine Computer. Yet, when we make requests of God, he leads us into a deeper knowledge of how he holds a disordered world together so that, in the end, nothing is lost.
Penitence
Penitence is not just moaning and groaning in sackcloth and ashes. It is seeking the truth about ourselves before God. We often say that the truth hurts, but the truth can heal as well. It is when we forget the element of healing that penitence deserves its bad name for causing guilt complexes.
Coming to terms with our faults is no easy task. No matter how nicely a person corrects us about anything, it hurts, and it hurts a lot more when correction is not expressed kindly. In fact, all of us carry some hurt feelings on this account, and some of us feel devastated. We may think we cannot bear the pain that goes with facing what is wrong about ourselves. However, the more we spare ourselves the pain of self-knowledge, the more pain we inevitably inflict on others. Worse, when we refuse to look at our faults, we lose sight of our ability to be good to others. It seems that we can’t rest secure in anything good about ourselves except through the insecurity of knowing we are in the wrong many times as well. In short, either we approach the whole truth bout ourselves, or we become blind to everything.
We can trust God to be both relentlessly fair and relentlessly forgiving. We cannot trust ourselves on either count. In our pride, we tend to be either overly indulgent or overly severe when we judge ourselves. Only if we bring our sins to God in prayer can we deepen our experience of his judging and loving presence. More important, it is God who remakes our hearts with the strength to resist sin, be patient with ourselves in our struggles, and be more loving to others with God’s love. This strength we do not and cannot have of ourselves. Since we prefer to bring God nice offerings of ourselves, it is humiliating to bring him such shoddy offerings instead. But one of God’s miracles - one of his little jokes on us - is that he can turn these poor offerings into blessings for ourselves and others.
Thanksgiving
Gratitude seems to be an easy virtue to develop until we think about how grateful we are and how often we express it to anybody, even God. Perhaps the reason for this difficulty is because gratitude is so humiliating. Receiving a free gift from another puts us in an inferior position. We would rather think that we earned any good thing that came our way than be dependent on somebody else.
That we should feel inferior to God does not always make it easier for us to accept that fact. It may help to meditate on how deeply God humiliated himself for our sakes. He entered humanity as a helpless child and grew up to die for us on the cross. This is not the image of the condescending person who wants us in his power. This is the image of God who gives to us so we can give to others. When we are humble enough to be grateful to God for what he has done for us, we are raised up by God to do more for others as a free gift and increase their gratitude. The more we receive from God, the more we can give of ourselves to others. Gratitude itself, then, is an act of generosity.
Sometimes, though, we just don’t feel thankful. We prayed for something and didn’t get it. We carry scars of painful experiences that we wouldn’t wish on anybody. It is one thing to accept prayers that God does not answer as we wished; at least we shouldn’t have to thank him for any suffering we must endure. Let us not be flippant about how suffering makes saints. Many people are broken by suffering, at least for this life. But when our painful experiences are brought to God in prayer, God can lift us out of the circle of embittered memories and show us how Divine Providence uses that pain for our own good and the good of others. Not that God wants us to suffer, but when we do God uses that suffering as the raw material for our salvation. Joseph did not like being sold by his brothers to the Egyptians, but in the end he saw God make good out of what had happened. Many recovering alcoholics express gratitude for all the ravages of the disease they went through before recovery, because they can use that experience in order to minister to others.
Adoration
Adoration is the one form of prayer that is not concerned with ourselves. It is concerned with God alone. When we praise another person just for being that person, we are expressing an appreciation which transcends any tangible benefits we may have received. Likewise, the highest praise we can offer God is to praise him just for being God. Praise is ecstatic, a liberation from all self-preoccupation.
We do not rely on ourselves altogether in praising God. We open ourselves up to a flow of praise that comes from without. Praise is a gift from God; it is the water welling up within us unto eternal life.
Praise may be as exciting as blaring trumpets, but praise may also be quiet, like the still small voice the prophet Elijah heard. In fact, we praise God most deeply in silence. When we are silently directing our attention to the Lord himself, we can gently lay our preoccupations to one side and simply enjoy God’s presence. In silence, we come to appreciate more deeply the person God is.
Praise is the light of God on earth. In heaven God is praised continuously, so when we offer praise we are anticipating life in heaven. Praise is not an escape from earthly life but an enrichment of it. Praise gives us the strength to face life with the conviction that God will bring all creation within his eternal glory. No matter how much we fear the ways we can destroy God’s world, the praise we allow to flow through our hearts and our bodies remains a light that no darkness can overcome.
Dom Andrew Marr, OSB
The Five Ways of Prayer
