Mysterious Tools

An experience from a few months ago gave me a deeper appreciation and understanding of prayer. It was late at night, and my eight-year-old son was very sick in bed. He lay there moaning and crying because of terrible pain in his ears. While my wife was on the phone trying to reach a doctor, I tried to do what I could to comfort him.  We tried the usual things, but nothing worked. The choices seemed to be either waiting in an ER for hours late at night, or trying to wait it out at home; neither option seemed like a good choice.

We couldn't let him go on like that, so something told me to pray over him. I took the holy water we were given at recent Church event. As a new Catholic, it felt a little strange, but I proceeded to make the sign of the cross over my son with the holy water. Then, I prayed for his healing. I framed my prayer along the lines that we know that children hold a special place in God's heart, and that it can't be His will that my son was in pain. Something seemed different about the prayer, but I couldn’t immediately identify what it was. Since nothing dramatic took place after I finished the prayer, I returned to our room.

Half an hour, or so, later that night I noticed that he had fallen into a deep sleep. I made a passing comment to my wife that I had prayed over him earlier, but it didn’t seem to accomplish anything. She pointed out what should have been obvious: he was indeed sleeping, and this fact did resemble an answered prayer. For some reason, I had not connected the prayer to his falling asleep; they were two distinct events in my mind. The next morning, my wife took him to the doctor. He was found to have a serious ear infection, but my son insisted, to the doctor’s confusion, that it didn’t really hurt.

Prayer often seems like something we are simply comfortable with, a routine. When something actually happens in response to our prayer, many of us find ourselves a bit incredulous as we search for other explanations. While that’s fine to a point, it may also suggest why more of our prayers aren’t answered in precisely the ways we hoped. In thinking back over this experience, I realized that there was a different quality to my prayer. That difference seems to have been faith.

Who doesn’t remember praying for snow in one’s youth? I remember sitting in my bed as a child and praying fervently for a heavy snowfall late one night. There was not really any doubt in my mind that the snow was going to come down in piles, and I remember falling asleep as I prayed with the blinds cracked open, so I could watch the falling snow. The next morning, everyone seemed so surprised at the record snowfall, everyone except me. I had faith.

Fast forward several decades, though, and it is harder to draw upon the child-like faith described in Mark 10:15. Why is it so difficult to imagine that God would extend His finger into our reality and perform a miracle on our behalf? The miracle, like ripples on a pond, is one of God’s ways of reminding us that we worship a living and real God, one who seeks to help us in our daily walk with Him. How often do we forget to thank God for answered prayers?

I recently was made aware of an Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday, which appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Below is a brief except from this beautiful prayer of old.

Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who ever slept ever since the world began… He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him—He who is both their God and the son of Eve…

The prayer poignantly reminds us that God is continually searching for us and desires the best for our lives. While He cares and loves us individually, this doesn’t mean that we as individuals should put ourselves before others, or neglect the larger Christian community. In fact, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Weight of Glory, we shouldn’t say that Christ died for us because we were so important. On the contrary, it is entirely through Christ’s sacrifice that we are endowed with our spiritual importance. Otherwise, any potential value of the person would be eclipsed by sin. Of course, the best for us is not necessarily what we might imagine it to be. That’s why our prayers don’t always result in the kinds of answers for which we might have hoped. After all, God is not a genie, waiting to grant us our three wishes. In fact, some of us have learned that we need to take care what we ask for—especially patience, for instance.

One should also not forget what the holy water represents. While obviously not required, it is a powerful sacramental, a physical sign of a particular sacrament—as holy water reminds us of the spiritual re-birth of baptism. In the case described earlier involving my son, it seemed to play no small part. When I think of holy water, I am also struck with a couple of observations. First, as a new Catholic, there is a sense in which it represents the larger community of believers and the associated traditions of the Church. If we pause and think about the cycle of a drop of water as it endlessly changes its form and location, we catch a glimpse of this Christian community—past, present, and future. Perhaps this drop of water on our outstretched finger once dropped as rain on the head of Christ himself. Second, there is also a sense in which it creates a powerful means for the dispensation of God’s grace to man. Like how the Catholic writer J.R.R. Tolkien uses Lady Galadriel’s vial given to Frodo as a symbol for holy water, we are all in need of a light in the darkness.

If your prayer life is anything like mine, there is a lot we can improve. One particular preacher is a model for praying without ceasing. Billy Graham, always a friend of the Catholic Church, is an example of a Christian who takes prayer very seriously. Some years ago I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by a close friend of Rev. Graham. The speaker recalled asking the Reverend on one occasion what it meant to pray without ceasing, as described in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. The presenter reportedly expressed doubt as to how this could be done. He pointed out to Rev. Graham the daily distractions of things such as phone calls and meetings. A surprised Rev Graham disagreed. Praying without ceasing was precisely what he did. He gestured towards an open Bible in his office and explained that every time he passed the Bible, he paused a moment to read the passage, reflect, and pray. Rev. Graham makes the following observations in his book entitled Journey. “Nothing can replace a daily time spent alone with God in prayer. But we also can be in an attitude of prayer throughout the day – sitting in a car or at our desks, working in the kitchen, even talking with someone on the phone.” This also emphasizes the importance of preparation in prayer to ensure that our minds are calm and focused. A friend who serves nearby as a Carmelite brother recently drew my attention to this need for spiritual preparation before deep prayer when he shared the contemplative writings of Saint Teresa of Avila.

Catholic tradition, of course, is brimming full of wonderful examples of devout men and women of prayer. It is by the study of these lives lived for Christ that we begin to catch a glimpse of what it means to be “created in the image of God”. If we read works such as G.K. Chesterton’s biography of Saint Francis or Saint Augustine’s Confessions, we realize that saints were just as human as we are today, but they learned to do more for God than their human capabilities alone should have been able to accomplish. They achieved this through prayer, devotion, and love. Through the act of prayer, then, we move closer to child-like faith as we become the men and women God intends us to be, co-workers with God in the building of His kingdom. As we read in John 14:3, when we invoke the saving name of Christ in sincere prayer, we become instruments of peace in the hands of God, tools mysteriously necessary to fulfill and reveal His will.

* “Mysterious Tools” was originally published in the July 3, 2006 issue of America, the National Catholic Weekly.