Meditation on Petitionary Prayer, Goodness, God’s Essence, and Loss of Faith

   Many years ago, when my daughter was going through a bad time, and I had been a newly converted Catholic full of glorious faith, feeling the presence of grace, I prayed for God to be with her and protect her. I was doing all I could but had reached the limits of what I could do. I guess it could have gone worse for her but it’s not like my prayers were answered. This is a mild case.

   A more serious case I read about in C. S. Lewis’ autobiographical book Surprised by Joy. His mother died of cancer when he was a boy. His prayers were not answered either.

  In his case and mine, the failure of God to answer such pure and innocent prayers – prayers for the protection of the most innocent and vulnerable, children – led to a crisis of faith. I had as a child ceased to believe in God when my youthful prayers were not answered. After all, I knew the verse:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

My childish prayers were certainly ridiculous, and so they had ceased to count. But my prayers for my daughter were not ridiculous. They did count. And certainly, as I said, many more serious prayers have gone unanswered, not that my daughter’s situation wasn’t serious enough.

On reflection, my prayers seemed absurd. God does not protect our children. That has been entrusted to us, a decision on the part of God, the wisdom of which I completely fail to see. Think about all the cruelty and injustice towards children. The neglect and abuse from parents themselves victims of neglect and abuse. Look at the children of Gaza or Ukraine today as a write. At the children in the cities during the bombings of WWII. At the Holocaust. At all the many attempts at genocide. At the children during the plague. Look at the children sexually victimized in child pornography. At the ones sexually abused and strangled.

God does not protect children. God did not even protect himself. He died on the cross. The prayer of Christ was not answered. Christ was abandoned as we are. God shared most deeply in our humanity when he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

      Along with the unspeakable human cruelty to animals, and indeed the cruelty of animal nature – eat or be eaten (the young being the first to be devoured – (as well as the absurd: e.g. the need to shit), all this just makes it hard to believe in divine goodness. A line from a Led Zeppelin song has always struck me:

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move

Ivan Karamazov (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov) rejection at least of one possible Christian understanding of God seems to me irrefutable. I will quote at length.

These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say."

"Brother, what are you driving at?" asked Alyosha.

"I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."

. . .

"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. it's just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden -- the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.

 

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like."

"Never mind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.

 

And then Ivan draws his theological conclusion:

 

I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?

 

As I said, my daughter was a mild case – if God won’t or can’t do anything for the extreme cases (of which our history is full), was it not absurd that I expected divine protection for my daughter? God does not protect children. And if God does not protect even children, why should we wretched sinners be protected? Why should my beloved aunt, Alice Ann, a devout believer, suffering the agonies of a death from cancer be protected?

      Of course, there have been many attempts to apologize for that picture of God. Only He knows the big picture. Perhaps the tortured child would have grown up into an evil person, etc. Or: All the suffering that happens here on earth will be made good in the afterlife. Etc.

  Yet that picture of God – the powerful, all-conscious, all-knowing, all-Good being who knows when every leaf falls and parts the Red Sea – is a human fiction, an idolatrous image, something I (like Ivan) have had to let go.

I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

        "That's rebellion," murmered Alyosha, looking down.

"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that," said Ivan earnestly. "One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

      "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

"And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy forever?"

       "No, I can't admit it….”

 

The wall of unanswered prayer forces a radical rethinking of some religious pictures.

    As I have children, I cannot reject the world, as Ivan did (and Schopenhauer). I have found my way back to affirming life, somehow, and thus to God – a God that does not form any clear picture in my mind at all. I came again to God over the reality of goodness in the world. God seems to me like light. It leaks through only from somewhere when one person tries to help another, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, without any thought of their own ego. God shines through people who don’t lose their humanity even in the darkest of places (e.g. Auschwitz). God shines through the lives of the saints. God is a light that shines through some few souls. Yes, God is the light that shone through Christ. Or God shines through the world in the beauty that remains in it. Like a leak from another world that something in us – the capacity for love, compassion, self-sacrifice, beauty – reflects. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is on us to make this world a safe and good place for children, by adjusting our spiritual mirrors to that light.

    So what about the Biblical passage? What about prayer? First the whole passage:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? (from Luke, 11)

Apparently the one petition God does grant is for the gift of the Holy Spirit. And for me the Holy Spirit is what turns our inner mirror to the light that leaks from somewhere into the darkness of the world we humans have constructed for ourselves, into a nature that at least seems constructed by a devil in some of its aspects. Any power God has to affect the course of events, it seems to me, is given through this light, light of love.

 

 

Afterthought

The basic teaching about the efficacy of petitionary prayer opens up the Christian faith to the kind of mocking humor used by Woody Allen’s mouthpiece Boris in the movie Whatever Works (for example):

Marietta: Oh, Melody. I have a sad tale to tell you.

Melody: What happened, Mama?

Marietta: Your father left me. Aren't you shocked?

Melody: No.

Marietta: And with who, of all people?

Melody: Your best friend, Mandy.

Marietta: How did you know?

Melody: Oh, Mama. It was as plain as the nose on your face.

Cliché, sorry.

Marietta: At first I thought he was acting peculiar because things was going so bad for us, darling.

Boris: How often did you have intercourse?

Marietta: Are you going to close that insulting mouth? By bad, I mean he lost a lot of money in the stock market after you left and we were forced to sell the house. 

Melody: You sold the house?

Marietta: I'm sorry, yes. We took a beating because we were so desperate. And then he lost his job, the company went out of business. And then we spent all our savings on medical bills, 'cause I came down with a case of the shingles!

Melody: Oh, my God.

Boris: Christ, this is like Job. No locusts?

Marietta: Darling, I turned to Jesus in a deeper way than I had ever done in my life. I prayed and I prayed, every day and every night, asking God to help me.

Boris: Let me guess what happened, your shingles got worse. 

Marietta: I said, "Lord, just give me one sign that all my suffering is for a purpose." I said, "Please, God, just say something." "Break your silence.

I can't take any more misery!" 

Boris: Nothing, right? And all that money you put in the tin box every Sunday.

 

Now I laughed my head off over this scene. To laugh at something – in this case, an image of God and a theology of prayer – is a sure sign that it is dead for you.

Another afterthought.

My model prayer is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor, opponent of the Hitler regime, written from his cell in a Gestapo prison. No prayer to protect him, to get him out, to spare his life, to protect his family. Instead this:

God, I cry to you in the early morning, help me to pray and to gather my thoughts: I cannot do it alone. It is dark inside me, but you do not leave me. I am timid, but with you is my help. I am anxious, but with you is peace. There is bitterness inside me, but with you is patience. I do not understand your ways, but you know the right way for me. Lord Jesus Christ, you were poor and miserable, caught and abandoned like me. You know all the sorrow of humanity. You stay with me, when nobody stays with me. You never forget me, and you search for me. You want me to recognise you and turn to you. Lord, I hear your call and follow. Help me.

I pray for strength, for gratitude, for forgiveness - ways of trying to turn my soul-mirror in the direction of the light. I also - absurdly, perhaps pathetically - still pray that God at least be with my children.