BEST WISHES?

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.”

Huck Finn’s predicament is both more general and more subtle than Twain makes it seem. Most prayer is beseeching. We ask for something. Usually, we are grown-up enough not to ask for fish hooks, or a video game, or a Corvette. But we have no problem asking to be allowed to get the job we are applying for, or a better grade on the exam, or for the person we are in love with to agree to have dinner. More importantly, we feel encouraged to pray for others: for our best friend’s mother to be healed of her cancer, for a 40-year-old acquaintance to recover mentally from being raped at 16, for an elderly lady’s arthritis to cease torturing her, for a friend’s husband in the last stages of Parkinson’s to be allowed a swift and not too painful end. Beyond that, moreover, we are encouraged to pray for peace in the Middle East, for reconciliation in the Ukraine, and for the end of murderous civil wars in a number of faraway countries.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Really? The answer to all of the above prayers seems utterly arbitrary. Sometimes it’s yes, more often it’s no. Why? No one can tell us. Those who say that it is God’s Will are not only wrong, they are obscenely wrong. It is not God’s will that men torture and slaughter one another. But then, what is the answer to the enigma? It is difficult not to conclude that all those prayers are for fish hooks. That we are all Huck Finns, in church or out. As the French would say, our problem remains entire.

Thanksgiving – the impulse, not the festival – complicates matters. Most of us feel the need to give thanks when good things happen to us. But if the good things come from God, does that not mean that the bad ones do, too? Which would lead us to either a micro-managing but arbitrary Deity or to a kind of theistic fatalism that says that whatever is, is God’s will and therefore good, whatever we think it is.

After many years of pondering this, my provisional conclusion is that the answer was given by Jesus on that serenely beautiful hill above the Sea of Galilee which I had the privilege of visiting when my daughter was married in Nazareth. Having told people to stop worrying all the time about what will happen tomorrow, about having enough to eat, about having decent clothes, so forth, He said “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

If we apply this to prayer, it will show us – as, alas, it did not show Huck – what Miss Watson meant. “Ask, and you shall receive” is not a test to see if you know the password. It is the description of a law of God that works like a law of nature: a law of God’s nature, if you will. If we seek first the Kingdom of God; if we ask to know and love Him better; if we yearn to be filled with the Holy Spirit, whatever the cost; if we do that constantly, and go on doing so; then we shall  receive what we ask for, because the receiving is always already inherent in the constant asking.

And if we want to pray for others, once again we should ask for the same thing: that they may come to know and love Him better. For there is no good that we can ask for that is better or more important than that.

I cannot believe that God micromanages Creation. Microbes do their work just as mosquitoes do. Things live, things die. We live, we die. The difference is that we have a consciousness of love, which means that we have free will, which means that we are free to refuse love, i.e. to sin. So we have the capacity to add sin to death, which is horrible. On the other hand, if we seek the Kingdom of God – His reign, in us and elsewhere – and his righteousness, the integrity that is its hallmark, then all kinds of good attend us, because we will have become a certain kind of person, the kind that attracts good things like a magnet. It’s not a reward, it’s a consequence.

All the rest is fish hooks.