What Does It Mean to Ask God for Something?

How to Understand Prayers of Petition

Last week I offered some meditations on my own prayer life, in particular on how I have recently turned to the Liturgy of the Hours as a way to bring my focus back to God throughout the day. This week I also want to provide some musings on prayer, in this case not so much about my own prayer life, but rather about what we are actually doing when we pray.

In my earlier essay, I mentioned that the Church’s Tradition speaks of three types of prayer: vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplative prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church also speaks of different forms of prayer, that is, the different postures we take in our communication with God. The Psalms demonstrate the wide variety of forms of prayer: praise, lamentation, thanksgiving, and so on. Probably the most common form of prayer is the prayer of petition, in which we ask something from God. The Catechism lists several verbs used to express this form of prayer in the New Testament: “ask, beseech, plead, invoke, entreat, cry out, even ‘struggle in prayer’” (#2629). Any believer who has ever prayed has probably asked God for something: success in a new endeavor, healing from illness, safety on a journey, etc.

Prayers of petition pose challenging theological questions, however. At one point or another, any believer with an ounce of reflection has pondered the mystery of unanswered prayers, particularly in the face of suffering: the end of a relationship, the illness or death of a loved one, difficult financial circumstances. More joyous but equally mysterious, some may have been left in wonder when our prayers remain unanswered in the way we hoped for, but nevertheless a new door is opened that ends up being better than what we had asked for. And a prayer that seems to be answered poses its own theological questions, as well.

These are all important questions, but I want to consider something I think is even more fundamental: What are we actually doing when we ask God for something? I want to start with what we might call the “common-sense” view of what we are doing when we engage in prayers of petition. It would go something like this: When we pray, we ask God for something, and if our petition finds favor with God, then God, in a sense, changes His mind and alters the course of events so that what the petitioner asked for comes true. Some might go even further and suggest that we are more likely to find favor with God if we offer our petition with more fervent faith, or more frequent prayer, or when more people are praying for the same thing. I would imagine something like this is how a great many Christian believers think of prayer.

That being said, there are some serious theological problems with this way of thinking about prayer. I will focus on three, all of which focus on the notion of changing God’s mind. Theologians and philosophers debate whether it makes sense to speak of God changing at all, but I’m going to set aside that fairly abstract issue and focus on these three more down to earth problems:

1. The first could be called the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge. Although some contemporary theologians disagree, the scriptural witness and magisterial teaching suggest that God has foreknowledge of future events, although in a way that does not undermine creaturely free will. If so, that means that God already knows we are going to pray ahead of time; indeed, God has known from all eternity when we will pray and under what circumstances. Therefore, it doesn’t really make sense to say that prayer can change God’s mind, which suggests that our prayer is some new fact that God takes into consideration. God has always known that we would pray and has always taken our prayer into consideration when willing.

2. The second is the Problem of Divine Benevolence. Christians agree that God is perfectly good. But if so, what sense does it make to say, as the common-sense view of prayer seems to do, that God would not will what’s good for us until persuaded to do so? The common-sense view of prayer seems to suggest that God is indifferent to our plight and only responds to our needs in a reactive way. But that seems like the opposite of the God of Love we find in the Gospels. On the contrary, our starting point should be that God always desires what is best for us, and indeed knows better than we do what that is.

3. The third we could call the Problem of Grace. The common-sense view of prayer seems to suggest that it is we, through our actions, that put God into motion. But Scripture says otherwise. Most famously, in his Letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “[W]e do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (8:26). We are moved to prayer because God first moves us! This problem is connected to the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge but it’s also a relevant point in its own right. How could one say that our prayer changes God’s mind, if it was God who moved us to pray in the first place? If God wants us to pray, then God already wants to “answer” our prayers, even before we have prayed.

The common-sense view of prayers of petition doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny. It might even be tempting to give up on prayers of petition completely. At times, I’ve been tempted to let my prayers be as simple as Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane: “Not my will, but yours be done” (Lk. 22:42). And yet prayers of petition are entirely scriptural—we have not only the Psalms, but also the Our Father or Lord’s Prayer itself, which Jesus presents to us as the model of how to pray and which is a series of petitions. Prayers of petition are also an essential part of our Tradition. So, what are we doing when we “ask, beseech, plead, invoke, entreat, cry out” to God, if the common-sense view is unsatisfactory?

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(Photo: Jack Sharp, Unsplash)

I think the first step to understanding prayers of petition is to see them in the proper context. For one, as has often been said, our prayers of petition need to be paired with prayers of thanksgiving. This is one lesson of the story of Jesus and the ten lepers—Jesus heals ten lepers, but only one (a Samaritan, no less) returns to give Jesus thanks. Probably most of us ask God for things and give thanks for what we’re given in similar proportions. But gratitude doesn’t just mean giving thanks when we receive what we ask for; gratitude for all the things we’ve been given, even our existence itself, should be the starting point for our petitions. Our petitions should, at heart, be an expression of gratitude.

But our petitions themselves shouldn’t be limited to asking God for things, whether they be “needs” or “wants.” Consider the Our Father itself. Before we ask for our “daily bread,” we ask that “your kingdom come, your will be done.” Our prayers shouldn’t begin with what we want and a hope that God will grant it, let alone with the belief that we can bend God’s will to our own. They should begin with seeking out God’s will, and with seeking to make the Kingdom present in the world.

Similarly, the petition for our daily bread is paired with that in which we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Asking God for forgiveness is a kind of petition, a prayer we find, for example, in Psalm 51. This pairing in the Our Father suggests that when we express our wants and needs to God, we should also purify our wills. We should recognize the many ways our desires fall short of God’s will.

So, a prayer of petition is not an attempt to change God’s mind and satisfy our wishes—it involves humbly seeking out God’s will and purifying our own wills of the desires that distance us from God. Nevertheless, in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus speaks of prayer, He seems to offer support for the common-sense view of prayers of petition:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. (Mt. 7:7-8)

The following lines complicate things, however:

Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asks for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asks for a fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him. (Mt. 7:9-11)

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t say what would happen if the son asks for a stone or a snake. He does make clear, however, that the Father gives good things (which is not the same thing as saying everything we ask of the Father is good!), again suggesting that when we pray, we should first seek out what is good. The Letter of James likewise states: “You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (Jm. 4:3). In a sense, then, there is a kernel of truth in the common-sense view that more fervent or faithful prayer is more effective—“The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful” (Jm. 5:16)—but this shouldn’t be understood to mean the righteous person has more power to get what they want from God, that is, power over God. Rather, it means that the righteous person’s prayer is more powerful because their will is more aligned with God’s will.

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That last point leads naturally back to my initial question: What are we doing when we ask God for something? What does it mean for God to “answer” a prayer, if not that God changes the course of events in response to our request? As Jesus teaches in a passage I cited earlier, “[Y[our heavenly Father [will] give good things to those who ask him” (Mt. 7:11), so how does that work?

Here is what I would propose. Often in life, things don’t happen until we’re ready for them to happen. What I mean is, possibilities and opportunities don’t appear until we’ve prepared ourselves to look for and see them. It’s not that we somehow will these opportunities into being (through “the power of positive thinking” or whatever), just that opening ourselves in a new way can help us see different paths that may have been there all along but that previously weren’t clear. For example, I had this experience in my own recent job search, which I’ve chronicled here; potential opportunities repeatedly turned into dead ends until I made some adjustments to my mindset and how I went about the job application and interview process, and very soon after, I found my current job. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything supernatural about this (although then again, grace suffuses everything), but I would suggest this is a helpful analogy for what happens when we offer prayers of petition in the manner outlined in the previous section, not just asking for what we want and need, but seeking to align our wills to God’s.

Prayer is a recognition of our dependence on God and an expression of gratitude for everything we have received, and when we petition God, we are opening ourselves to cooperating with God’s will. And when we look at the world with humble gratitude and in search of God’s will, then it is more likely that the path will open making possible what we desire, and in that sense our prayers are “answered.” One can see this in a radical way in the life of Mother Teresa and the early Missionaries of Charity, for example, who lived with such humility and openness to God’s will that their prayers for donations, supplies, or other means of achieving their mission were regularly answered without much foresight or planning. One might also consider the first meeting between Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, an encounter Day considered an answer to prayer, but one that easily could have been dismissed if Day had not been open to it.

This understanding of prayers of petition still raises important questions. Does this mean, for example, that God does not hear the prayers of people who have not yet purified their own wills, those who “ask wrongly,” according to James? No, I don’t think so. Even when someone prays to God regarding their needs or wants absent the broader context of gratitude, forgiveness, and the longing that God’s will be done, this is still the movement of grace, and God can use this moment to draw us closer.

I also think this understanding of prayers of petition is consistent with both God’s foreknowledge of our actions and human freedom in a way the common-sense view is not. God moves us to prayer because God wants us to experience the possibilities it opens up for us if we cooperate. God knows how we will respond to these movements, even though we freely work out our response in the flow of time (the question of divine foreknowledge and human freedom is extremely complex, but hopefully this is good enough for now!). This view of prayer also better expresses God’s perfect goodness than the common-sense view; rather than being indifferent to what’s good for us until being moved by our prayers, God, who is Love, always wills what is best for us, but as an expression of that love, God likewise wills that we should freely cooperate in seeking out and humbly cooperating with that will, even though this creates the possibility that we will instead close ourselves off to God. As I’ve written before, our heart is a window, we only need to remove the obstacles to let the light shine through.

I’m curious to know what you think about my criticisms of the common-sense view of prayers of petition and my proposal for a better way of thinking about prayer. Does it match your experience of prayer? Do you see any problems, or does it raise any questions for you? Let me know in the comments!

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Of Interest…

• At America, James T. Keane has an interesting profile of the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and his transition from being persona non grata condemned by the Vatican to becoming an influence on the pope’s teaching (Keane also wrote the profile of Congar I highlighted in an earlier article). As a professor, I regularly used the opening chapters of Introducing Liberation Theology, co-written by Boff and his brother Clodovis in 1987, as a text in class, but Boff’s work has never been my cup of tea, especially compared to other liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and Ignacio Ellacuría, for example. The transformation of Clodovis Boff into an opponent of his brother’s theological work is also one of the more interesting, but little-known, stories of recent Catholic theology. Still, Keane offers insights into why Pope Francis may have looked for inspiration in Leonardo Boff’s works when writing his encyclical Laudato Si’, and why we should continue to take Boff’s work seriously.

• Earlier this month, I commented on Pope Francis’s World Day of Peace message focusing on the ethical perils, as well as the possibilities, raised by artificial intelligence (AI). I noted that, appropriately for the context, he discusses the ethical problems of using AI in warfare. This threat is most clearly expressed in the potential use of lethal autonomous weapons, that is, weapon systems that are programmed to target and kill without human intervention. In a recent commentary on Francis’s address, also in America, theologian Laurie Johnston offers some further reflections on the use of AI in warfare. Although she raises some familiar points, she draws attention to the problematic ways AI can be used in warfare even when humans still pull the trigger. For example, she highlights the Israeli AI system that analyzes intelligence data to rapidly identify potential targets, which are then communicated to commanders in the field via an app. This system is being used to devastating effect in the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Johnston then brilliantly links the longstanding concerns with bias and the lack of transparency in AI design to the traditional just-war criteria, concluding that AI, and particularly its use in warfare, needs to be regulated in a way consistent with ethical principles and the international laws of war.

• In the lead-up to last October’s Synod on Synodality, I highlighted many of the participants attending the gathering, including Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, O.F.M.Cap., the Archbishop of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the President of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), the umbrella group of bishops’ conferences in Africa, and in many ways an ally of Pope Francis, Cardinal Ambongo is a rising star in the Church who was nevertheless, until recently, little known outside of Africa. At Crux, John L. Allen, Jr. has an interesting argument that Ambongo’s more recent opposition to the Vatican’s recent document permitting the blessing of same-sex unions, Fiducia Supplicans, may have made him a leading contender among those seeking a successor to Francis who will take the Church in a somewhat different direction. I’m not so sure that rallying those seeking discontinuity with Francis’s papacy is a winning strategy; perhaps Ambongo’s real strength would be the fact that his bona fides on many issues dear to Francis like the environment and synodality might draw support from some of the more progressive cardinals while also pulling votes from some conservative cardinals due to his opposition to Fiducia Supplicans. Of course, this is all premature speculation!