At root, our readings for this Sunday are about prayer. Listening, we learn about the importance not just of prayer in general but of petitionary prayer that is intercessory in its orientation. To be clear, by petitionary prayer, I refer to petitioning God for specific intentions. By intercessory prayer, I mean petitioning God on someone else's behalf.
In our day, there seems to be a loss of the belief in the efficacy of prayer. Why pray? It doesn't change anything. Even many genuinely pious people seem to focus merely on accepting whatever happens as God will, which they assume is predetermined. Why seek to cut against the grain of how reality seems to be working?
Now, don't get me wrong. We do need to learn how accept all things from God. This is no easy task. For many, it is crushing and understandably so. It's very important to grasp that not all outcomes are directly willed by God. God sometimes permits things without willing them to realize some some greater good. Let's never lose sight of the fact that God is in the resurrection business. God brings life from death and always seeks to do so, causality notwithstanding.
The question I always come away with after reading about Abraham's petition to God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah is, What if he had persisted with God down to one? I realize that this opens a can of theological worms. Let's bracket those concerns and persist with the question what if? Would the cities have been spared had Abraham been more persistent?
If we take the Gospels as we should, which is as God's revelation because these texts accurately hand-on Christ's teachings, it is clear that we should be persistent in our prayers not only those for others but those made on our own behalf. Jesus' teaching is clear: persist! Keep asking, keep petitioning, keep praying. How many years did Saint Monica pray for her son, Augustine? Don't let up. The Lord is telling us in very practical terms how to pray.
Lest you think our reading from Colossians has no bearing on our readings from Genesis and Luke (great effort being made during Ordinary Time to harmonize the Old Testament reading with the Gospel), it has a lot of bearing. To wit: we become children of the Father through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This happens in baptism when you were baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. You were reborn in baptism as a child of God. Not only were you reborn in baptism, you died, were buried, and rose with Christ to new life. Life, death, and love, as all of us seem to know intuitively, are intricately interwoven.
It pleases our Father to give you the Holy Spirit. It pleases Him to hear and answer the prayers of His children. So, don't pray by throwing up some half-digested desire. Recollect yourself, gather up all that is in your heart, consider the needs of people you know, pay special attention to those who have asked for your prayers. Then, pray to God, asking directly for what you want.
As the late Herbert McCabe, OP, wrote about prayer:
Our stance in prayer is not simply, or even primarily, that of the creature before the creator but that of the Son before the Father. At the most fundamental level, the level which defines prayer as prayer, we receive from the Father not as creatures receiving what they need to make up their deficiencies, but as the Son eternally receives his being from the Father1Summarizing McCabe's take on prayer, Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist, provides an important insight:
Fr. Herbert McCabe, O.P., used to say, that it is necessary to pray for what you really want— not to dissemble your desires. Distraction often comes, because we dissemble and do not recognize what we really want. And because at the beginning of spiritual life, our desires are often stupid and pointless, our prayers too will be stupid and (apparently) pointless. But those who persevere in prayer will find that God transforms their desires. And the more they are transformed, the more the stupidity and pointless will give way to a real communion with God2Nonetheless, returning to McCabe, it is important to recognize "All our prayer is, in a very precise sense, in Spirit and in truth. For us to pray is for us to be taken over, possessed by the Holy Spirit which is the life of love between Father and Son."3
One of two things: keep praying, pray and then pray some more or start praying and then keep praying. Trust that will transform you through prayer. Also trust that God hears and answers prayers. This is experiential, not systematic, not doing x number of repetitions of A will inevitably result in B. Such nonsense is, far from being scientific, is superstitious.
Maybe in your prayer life you need to clear the deck and begin again. It's okay, as Father M. Louis said of the spiritual life, "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners all our life!"4
1 Herbert McCabe, O.P., God Matters (London: Continuum, 2005), 220.↩
2 Ibid.↩
3 Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., "Prayer Begins in Pointlessness and Stupidity," Church Life Journal, 27 June 2018.↩
4 "Thomas Merton/Always Beginners"↩
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