Things to pray for in this season of Advent
This is the season of Advent: the time of prayer. Of course we should all pray all the time and not just in this season. I am not a prayerful person but I do pray daily and cannot imagine not doing so. Even King Claudius, whom Charles Lamb said was the least likable character in all Shakespeare, prayed, and had sufficient self-knowledge to know that his prayers were ineffectual:
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
All must pray to somebody or something. As Homer says (Odyssey 3: 48), ‘Everyone needs the gods.’ Darwinian fundamentalists pray to Holy Charles; Richard Dawkins, I suppose, to the primaeval polyp. The word comes from precari, to beg or entreat. Luis of Grenada (1504–88), the great Dominican authority on prayer, wrote:
Prayer, properly speaking, is a petition which we make to God for the things which pertain to our salvation. But it is also taken in another, broader sense to mean any raising of the heart to God.
The last point is the key. As Jeremy Taylor says, prayer is ‘the ascent of the mind to God’. Sursum corda.
I was taught by the nuns that prayer consisted of four essentials: praise of God, thanksgiving for His benefits, confession of sins, and petitions. Most of us concentrate on the last. But what are we allowed to pray for? Origen, following the Stoics, laid down that only spiritual benefits should be sought in prayer. Pelagius, following the Platonists, contradicted him: ‘You cannot pray for virtue.’ Surely St Augustine got it right: ‘It is proper to pray for anything which may be lawfully desired.’ The key here is ‘lawfully’. I pray for the souls of the departed, 15 in particular, and the welfare of the living, my current list containing 32 names. It is not lawful to pray for the destruction of enemies, though I long to do so, four in particular.
The question is often asked: why pray when God knows better than you what you need and whether you ought to have it and anyway has already made up His mind. To which St Thomas Aquinas replies (Summa Theologica, 2.2), ‘In prayer we are not trying to influence God’s will, merely submitting our desires to Him, and in order to co-operate with Him in bringing about the effects He has foredained, prayer being a secondary cause.’ One must pray circumspectly. Abraham Lincoln, at the height of the Civil War, prayed a good deal, poor distracted man. Asked if he prayed that God was on the Unionist side, he replied that it was the wrong question, ‘God is always in the right, and we must pray that we are on His side.’ An example of an unlawful prayer is provided by W. Ward MP, a successful pill-manufacturer: ‘O Lord, Thou knowest that I have nine houses in the City of London and that I have lately purchased an estate in Essex. I beseech Thee to preserve the counties of Essex and Middlesex from fires and earthquakes. And as I have also a mortgage in Hertfordshire, I beg Thee to have an eye of compassion on that county too, and for the rest of the counties Thou mayest deal with them as Thou art pleased.’ Another question is who should be prayed to. Jews and Muslims, of course, being strict monotheists, pray only to God. This was the Christian view in the early church, Christ being regarded merely as intercessionary. Later, majority opinion among the Fathers was that direct prayer to Christ was lawful and fruitful. I think I pray to Jesus more than to God, Jesus being more approachable, and it is possible to have a dialogue with Him. (Zoroaster, be it noted, defined prayer as ‘conversation with God’.) In the Catholic Church, saints and angels can be prayed to but only to request they lift their prayers to God on your behalf. This is a point that many Catholics, especially women, do not grasp.
Anyway, in my unregenerate days, when I was living in Paris, I had for a time a delightful Austrian girlfriend, a pious Catholic from the Tyrol but also amorous, like all Austrians of her age. When we had finished making love, she would jump out of bed, kneel down, and implore the Virgin Mary, in High German, for instant forgiveness, together with a solemn promise never to do it again. This annoyed my Jesuit-trained sense of decorum. Me: ‘You know you will do it again, Anna, so your prayer is without gravitas.’ Anna: ‘Don’t interrupt.’ Me: ‘Moreover, it is not in the power of the Blessed Virgin to forgive you. All she can do is ask her Son to do so.’ Anna: ‘Oh, go to Hell.’ Anna’s prayers were spoken, indeed noisy. I think all original prayers, of which we have a number in the Old Testament — by Moses, for instance, Hannah, Solomon and Hezekiah, as well as the Psalms — were designed to be said aloud, standing with arms outstretched. Jews still pray standing, of course, and the males with their hats on, which seems strange to Christians today, though not to the Puritans of Cromwell’s time who always kept their hats on in church. The chief statutory prayer in Judaism, the Amidah, means ‘standing’. The monks of Athos invented the Hesychasm (a Greek word meaning ‘quietness’) for the silent prayer, said from the heart but not spoken. This is the origin of all the prayers of the mystics, from St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila, down to Simone Weil.
In silent prayer, total concentration is vital, and some authorities argue that prayer should therefore be brief and intense. That implies endless repetition. Not a good idea, as Queen Victoria said to the fawning cleric, probably Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, who said, ‘We cannot pray too earnestly or too often for the royal family.’ She replied, ‘Earnestly, yes. Often, no.’ Distraction is the enemy of prayer. Luther said that Satan deliberately sent flies to annoy him when he was praying. John Donne wrote, in one of his sermons: ‘A memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer. So, certainly, is there nothing, nothing in spiritual things, perfect in this world.’ Concentration and dedication — these are essentials in prayer. Humility, too, in approaching God for benefits, and patience when He does not respond instantly to our prayers. Like many Catholics of my age group, I experienced a great lesson in the virtues of patience. When I was a child in the Thirties we always prayed, after Mass on Sundays, for the return of Russia to God, and the end of the atheist Soviet regime. The years went by and nothing happened. Indeed the Soviet Union appeared to go from strength to strength, and to continue to expand, right up to the 1970s. Remember the Brezhnev Doctrine? But still we prayed. And then, in 1989, the miracle happened.
So God answers prayers in the end, if they are earnest, worthy and just. I pray for the return of England to the Holy Mother Church, for the end of pop music and TV, for the destruction of Modern Art, Picassoism and all that rubbish, the demolition of Tate Modern (though I’m not sure that is lawful), the collapse of militant Islam, the freeing of China, North Korea and Cuba, and the rescue of England from vulgarity and the European Union. I am patient. We shall see.
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