The Catholic Standard and Times

The potent power of prayer

By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent

Can prayer really change things?

That is a good question, especially if we consider what Scripture tells us about God: He knows all things and the decrees of His providence are unchangeable. “I am the Lord and I change not” (Mal. 3:15).

If He has foreseen and decreed all things down to the wisp of hair that falls from our heads, what good is prayer? Can it really change His mind?

If you’re among the many people who wonder about questions like those, read on. You’re about to discover an answer to that question that may surprise you.

First, the short answer: Prayer is not our idea.

“Before we ever decided to have recourse to prayer, it was willed by God,” writes the Dominican theologian, Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. “To conceive of God as not foreseeing and intending from all eternity the prayers we address to Him in time is just as childish as the notion of a God subjecting His will to ours and so altering His designs.”

As long as we are praying properly, with humility, confidence and perseverance, and are asking for the things necessary for our salvation (winning the lottery may not fall into this category), we are actually doing what God has willed for all eternity.

“Prayer is not in opposition to the designs of Providence and does not seek to alter them,” Father Lagrange writes, “but actually cooperates in the divine governance, for when we pray we begin to wish in time what God wills for us from all eternity.”

Although it might seem as if we’re asking God to bend His will according to our desires, it’s really just the opposite. The inspiration to pray is actually our will that is being lifted into the higher purpose of the divine will.

“Instead of one, there are now two who desire these things,” Father Lagrange explains. “It is God of course who converted the sinner for whom we have so long been praying; nevertheless we have been God’s partners in the conversion … From all eternity He decided to produce this salutary effect only with our co-operation and as the result of our intercession.”

The consequences of that principal are enormous.

True prayer, when offered with the proper disposition, cannot possibly fail because, as Father Lagrange explains, “God has decreed that it shall be so, and God cannot revoke what He has once decreed.”

Not only does this apply to what we’re asking for — say, Uncle Bob’s conversion — but it also applies to the manner in which it will come to pass: our prayer.

“Prayer, in the spiritual order, is as much a cause destined from all eternity by Providence to produce a certain effect … as heat and electricity in the physical order are causes that from all eternity are destined to produce the effects of our everyday experience.”

For instance, God determined from all eternity that there can be no harvest without the sowing of seeds. There can be no orderly society without certain authority and the required obedience. There can be no knowledge without some mental effort. There can be no interior life without prayer.

In other words, the offering of prayer follows the same order as everything else God created. “Far from being opposed to the effectiveness of prayer,” Father Lagrange writes, “the unchangeableness of God is the ultimate guaranty of that effectiveness.”

When it comes to prayer, it is better to think of God as a Father who has already decided to grant some favor to His children and prompts them to ask Him for it.

But what about the prayers that have gone so long unanswered? Is this because it is not what God wills?

Lagrange gives two possible answers to these questions.

First, God may sometimes turn a deaf ear to our prayer “when it is not sufficiently free from self-interest, seeking temporal blessings for their own sake rather than as useful for salvation. Then gradually grace invites us to pray better, reminding us of the Gospel words: ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His justice; and all these things shall be added unto you’” (Matt: 6:33).

A second reason may be that God is testing us to see if we will persevere in prayer. There are innumerable examples of this throughout Scripture, most notably the Canaanite woman who asked Jesus to deliver her daughter from a tormenting demon. “I was not sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel. … It is not good to take the bread of the children and to cast it to the dogs,” Jesus said as if in rebuke.

As Lagrange points out, the woman’s enlightened response was “inspired undoubtedly by grace that came to her from Christ” when she replied, “The whelps also eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters.”

Even in prayer, God is at the helm, directing our little boats according to His eternal plan. Once we absorb the truth of this intimate connection between prayer and the providence of God, we will realize that no force on earth is more capable of changing things than prayer.

“Prayer is undoubtedly a more potent force than either wealth or science,” Father Lagrange writes.

In spite of all the marvelous things science can accomplish, those wonders are acquired by human means and are confined to human limits. Prayer, on the other hand, has no such limitations because it belongs to the realm of a limitless God.

As Father Lagrange says, “It is a spiritual energy more potent than all the forces of nature together because it can obtain for us what God alone can bestow.”

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615