Petitionary Prayer: Begging for Stuff?

"Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

My friends all drive Porsches. I must make amends."

Janis Joplin's blues song satirizes the worst aspects of petitionary prayer. A Christian remotely in the ballpark of loving neighbor as herself wouldn't be ashamed that her friends had pricier cars. Of all the types of prayers--prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of repentance, prayers of praise, and prayers of intercession--prayers of petition are the most instinctive and (except for prayers of imprecation, i.e. curses) the least reputable. They border on impiety, a hair's breadth away from prayers of protest: "Lord, I see what you're doing now, and I wish you'd stop it."

     My last post (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/intercessory-prayer-how-can-that-even.html) points out the contradiction in presuming to tell an all-knowing and benevolent God his business--asking him to revise the blueprint of the universe for your private convenience. In a story retold last week, Meister Eckhart asserts that, as creatures of an all-good and all-loving God, we shouldn't pray for relief from sufferings, but rather for the vision to celebrate them. If we experience either joy or despair because of small stuff in the world ("It's all small stuff"), that is our problem, not the small stuff that our weak wills are driven to pray against. In this light, petitionary prayers are not only futile. They're blasphemous denial of God's goodness.

     So why are petitionary prayers all over Christianity, even in the Lord's Prayer? Obviously, it's complicated. We might reconfigure them, not as demands, but as reconciliations, as gestures of laying down our needs and stepping back--taking Paul McCartney's Mother-Mary advice to "Let it be." It's a cliche that prayers are often "answered" with the something unexpected. If believers in answered prayer aren't delusional, they have to allow this. A child who blames God because her sick dog died after she prayed over it is just being childish. We sometimes see this childishness in adults after great losses. There's no accounting for trauma, but a little history should immunize us against the idea that prayer bends the universe to our wills. How many residents of Dresden prayed as the Allied bombs began to pound the city and still died in the firestorm? And similar examples extend through the Holocaust down a historical parade of horrors to the Black Death and beyond. History is so littered with the corpses of petitioners that, unless I'm hubristic enough to imagine myself creation's darling--a privileged son of the Almighty--I can't begin to imagine that I deserve the fulfillment of my personal prayers. 

     Even the trinitarian namesake of Christianity seems have been open to unfulfilled prayer. The first petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread," is preceded by words of surrender to the divine will: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus petitions the Father to spare him from the crucifixion, but this is bracketed in words of surrender: "My Father, if it is possible . . . . Yet not as I will, but as you will" (Matthew 26:39). Apparently, even from a co-equal person of the trinity, petitions to a father-king-God should open with something like if it is your will and close with your will be done.

     But, even if petitionary prayer can be detoxed by qualifiers, it still takes the verbal form of meddling in providence. Given that God is all-good and all-knowing, why pester him with ignorant, impertinent, and self-centered suggestions? What's the point? Jesus taught that there was one. For instance, in the parable of the widow and the unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8), he promises that the Father will give "justice" if we beg for it. And Luke 11:11-13 seems even more explicitly to promise that petitions will be granted: "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

      This might be read naively as saying that God answers prayers with eggs and fish (maybe Mercedes Benzes) until the final clause, which suddenly shifts the register into the immaterial. When prayers are fulfilled, the fulfillment agent is the Holy Spirit, so the benefits are presumably spiritual. Jesus, as we'd expect from his mendicant lifestyle, advises us in the Sermon on the Mount not to worry about food or clothing because God will supply splendor greater than a king's, but this is not to be taken literally as we can see in his comparison between the beauty of wildflowers--ornamented naturally by God--and the beauty of Solomon's robes (Matthew 6:25-34). Any beauties displayed by a mendicant rabbi must be spiritual, not material--not colorful textiles, but manifestations of the spirit, beauties of character and more. A literal reading misses the point. Even if prayers for physical health--but prioritizing spiritual health (Matthew 9:2-6)--are staples of the gospels, prayers for fame, power, and prosperity (even food) are the stuff of satanic temptation (Matthew 4:1-11).

     Still, petitionary prayer is a gut response. What else is there to do when we feel out of control? Maybe it's not true that there are no atheists in foxholes, but there's a trend. Petitions in desperate circumstances may be grounded in the "feeling of absolute dependence" that Friedrich Schleiermacher calls the basis of religion. Rather than "my will be done," petitionary prayers may be like prostrating before the omnipotent--openings of the spirit, not demands. These aren't the prayers of a successful person for greater success, but (even from a successful person) admissions that a pit of non-being underlies everything we are, and that, if there is a Source-of-All-Being, we owe it absolutely everything. Prayers that rise above the level of spooky spells and magical thinking require laying our desperate needs out like cards on a table and letting powers beyond our understanding (even if we remain agnostically uncertain what those powers are) play the hand.

      In Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Soren Kierkegaard describes as corrupt, not only prayers, but all "good" actions that are done for reasons other than love of the Good. It's no good being charitable if you want to be known as a philanthropist or forgiving your enemies so they'll stop hitting you. Any action performed out of "two wills," for the self as well as for the whole is corrupt. (This recalls Calvin's Total Depravity--I can't be good in myself, only Christ in me--but I won't go there.) I will observe that the Psalms of David ignore Kierkegaard's purity law. The slayer of tens of thousands never heard of turning the other cheek or loving his enemies. Look at Psalm 35:26:

May all who gloat over my distress

    be put to shame and confusion;

may all who exalt themselves over me

    be clothed with shame and disgrace.

Of course, David's personal enemies are, by definition, wicked enemies of the Lord because he's the anointed leader of the Chosen People. Nice work if you can get it!

Christians trying to love their enemies (Matthew 5:44) obviously should avoid cursing them, but, apparently, Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart sets too high a bar for most churches. They regularly urge people to pray for personal needs, even material ones, and dooming of enemies is tolerated if they are costumed as "Satan and his forces" (an quotation from the ministry of Kenneth Copeland, who preached in 2016 that anyone who failed to vote Republican was guilty of murder). I did an Internet search for prayer etiquette. It's the Wild West out there.

On the one hand, we have Reverend Copeland and other proponents of what he calls supernatural prosperity, who embrace selfish materialism. His program for petitionary prayer reads like the Onion. After quoting cherry-picked verses that promise that all prayers will be fulfilled and ignoring elements that affirm providence (such "according to his will" in 1 John 5:14), Copeland reads the term petition in the King James translation of 1 John 5:15 in its modern English sense as "a formal written request." Therefore, a printed document is called for. If your prayer isn't worded legalistically like, "Be it known this, ____, at ____ (am/pm) that I receive healing from _____ in my body," you're obviously doing it wrong. No wonder your prayers weren't answered. There's a legal form to fill in so it's all proper.

This ignores the fact that 1 John is written in Greek, and the the word rendered petition in the King James Bible is aitemata, translated request in other English versions. Moreover, it's the word for a postulate in Euclid's geometry, explained as request or demand in English. So Copeland would be on firmer ground suggesting that we postulate what we want in prayer rather than petition it. One obvious advantage of petition writing is that, if you believe the bogus legalism and invest hours (as Copeland suggests) looking up verses and typing out a "binding" document, you are deeply invested in the process. You are more open to a placebo cure, the kind of faith healing that need not imply a God, but merely belief that an efficacious treatment has been applied. Obviously, as I observed earlier (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/12/can-got-religion.html), strong belief, as opposed to its absence, can indeed work apparent miracles--breaking cycles of addiction, depression, or other negativity. We answer our own prayers by faith--improving our health, finances, or family life--so I don't doubt that thousands of viewers have had their lives turned around by Reverend Copeland's motivational televangelism. 

The downsides are that prosperity prayers are magical spells, earthbound, and that viewers have been suckered into bankrolling a showman (he had a top-40 hit) with private jets, lavish mansions, and a $300 million net worth. If the Lord should happen to answer your petition with the cash to buy that Mercedes Benz, the good reverend wants a cut. He ended the Covid-19 pandemic way back in March, 2020, by executing "judgement" on it, so you can trust him. For every dollar you send the TV ministry, God will give you a hundred. Of course, "it isn't always instantaneous, so let your patience have its perfect work, and keep standing in faith" (https://www.kcm.org/real-help/prayer/learn/how-pray-the-prayer-petition). If you believe that, I have a bridge for sale.

After this, John Wijngaards' take on prayers of petition is refreshing. A Dutch Catholic ex-priest who resigned when the Pope prohibited even discussing the ordination of women, he begins by rejecting "making-God-do-a-miracle" prayers that reduce the creator to the oversized human builder of broken world who needs our advice to patch it up. Prayers should begin by accepting "ourselves with all our possibilities and limitations," such as having two hands, suffering, aging, and dying. Petitions won't change this. If Copeland were right and all well-formatted petitions were fulfilled, then a faith-filled attorney could accumulate a fortune and live for centuries, which is absurd. The kind of Christian prayer that is reliably fulfilled, Wijngaards says, is "the tuning of the divine and human wills to mutual resonance through the collaboration of prayer," not prayer for the Suffering Servant to give us painless prosperity. "But accepting our human condition and realizing God's love whatever may happen, we express our dependence on God in the form of such a petition" (https://www.johnwijngaards.com/courses/sense/love55.shtml). Prayers of petition, like Christ's in Gethsemane, should be moments of self-realized surrender, not requests for special favors, even if, in our weakness, we tend to forget.