On Persistence in Prayer

[[Hi Sister Laurel, I was reading the story of the "importunate widow" in Luke and I have to ask why we are told to persist in prayer? We can't change God's mind and I was taught we shouldn't bargain with him or try to change it. You recently wrote an article about that very thing and you said that the story of Abraham bargaining with God over finding righteous people present in the city was not really a matter of bargaining even though that's the way it's mostly interpreted. (cf. Moving From Fear to Love) The way you heard the story wasn't the way I was taught it either, but it agrees with what I was taught about bargaining with God. So, I guess my question  is why not just accept his will in the matter and move on? You know, it's the, "God always answers prayer, sometimes he says no!" kind of approach. God said no, accept it and move on. Don't stubbornly insist on your own way!!]]

Excellent and important questions. I have written about this before as well. Please see Hope, Shamelessly Persistent Trust. More recently, I am reminded of something Pope Francis said in his conversations with Rabbi Skorka in a section on prayer. Thus, in answering your questions I would like to take what Francis said a bit farther and perhaps also correct him a bit (I am not sure that I am actually doing the latter but I am sure I am doing the former.) What Francis said is this, [[  [In prayer] there are moments of profound silence, adoration, waiting to see what will happen. In prayer there coexists this reverent silence together with a sort of haggling, like when Abraham negotiated with God for the punished citizens of Sodom and Gomorra. Moses also bargains when he pleads for his people. He hopes to convince the Lord not to punish his people. This attitude of courage goes along with humility and adoration, which are essential for prayer.]] Rabbi Skorka responds by saying in part, [[The worst thing that can happen in our relationship with G_d is not that we fight with him, but that we become indifferent.]] I think this observation too figures into my response to your question.


In the article I wrote about the dialogue Abraham has with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorra I indicated that Abraham was the "Father of Faith" and that he personified the trust people of faith are supposed to have. I also noted that he personifies a journey the people of Israel themselves are called to make. It is a journey in which he and they come to know and trust the unfathomable depth of God's mercy. What I suggested was that it takes time to come to know God as one who acts according to a very different standard or notion of justice than the ones we ordinarily reason to ourselves. Over time Abraham and the People of Israel come more and more to know the God whose justice is his mercy, who sets things right in the world through his creative mercy and love, who is sovereign insofar as his mercy reigns, etc. Thus, story after story in the Old Testament recounts the faithlessness and sin of the People and the constant faithfulness, forgiveness, and mercy of God. What I want to call your attention to here is how, over time in continued encounters with God it is the people who change; they are brought to greater and greater faith but they are also brought to a sense of their own poverty, concupiscence, and recalcitrance when on their own.

I believe that we are charged with persistence in prayer not so we can change God's mind, but so that in that prayer and in our own encounters with God --- including his silence and refusal to give us what we think we want or believe is best for us --- we ourselves may be changed and our relationship with God grow and mature. Persistence in prayer allows us to meet the God of Jesus Christ with our needs and desires as well as with out attitudes of proprietariness, worthiness, competence, righteousness, selfishness, omniscience, etc, etc, and over time examine all of these in the face of a God who ONLY loves us and desires the very best for and from us. Most of our attitudes will change in such continued prayer; our perspective on any number of things will change: death, suffering, time, and so forth as God invites us to look beyond the immediate situation and find a greater hope and promise than we ourselves can even imagine. It is a bit like a person coming up  again and again against that which is unchanging and, over time, changing themselves.  In this case, however, they become more and more open to the actual answer for any prayer --- God's own presence and self --- and they come to know his faithfulness and presence no matter what else happens; their defining world becomes less merely that of time and space (though they will be made more capable of ministering within it) and more and more that of the Kingdom of God.

You see, in a real problem we especially don't want God as an added adversary or person we need to convince. We want him to journey with us and love and support us as only God can do, not be someone we are trying to convince and bargain with. Even so, in bargaining we will come, usually, to acceptance in ways we might not have otherwise. Bargaining is a part of grief, a piece of coming to terms with a reality which has us helpless and powerless and bargaining with God is an entirely legitimate way to come to terms with reality. But only if we are persistent in it AND, as you say in your question, not merely stubborn.

The difference here is at least twofold: first any haggling is really one-sided; it is not meant to change God but to come to know his will over time. Secondly, it is marked by a correlative openness to really hearing and accepting the will of God in whatever the situation is. In persistence we pour out our hearts to God and we do so again and again. In persistence we know that God is part of the answer but we do not know precisely what shape that will take; as we continue to pray we allow ourselves to become more and more determined to accept and even to aid God in that. Persistence is open to learning --- and to letting ourselves be shaped by the answer we will always receive. It is humble in its honesty, its openness, and in its naivete. Stubbornness, on the other hand, pretends to know what is best and how God should respond; it is closed to a deeper and higher wisdom, a more expansive vision of reality, or to the need to trust a God who is really mysterious in the best theological sense of that term.


While it is true God often does not answer our prayers with a "yes" in our precise terms, the problem with the "Sometimes God says no" answer is that it also presumes to know what God's answer is even as it does not allow us to continue importuning him. It short circuits the growth and maturation of the relationship that allows God to truly be God-with-us. It is an invitation to indifference and dismissal. The God who says no is not one we are usually open to walking with intimately on a daily basis or in difficult times. He is not one we can pour our hearts out to in all of our needs, weaknesses, distortions and darkness nor continue doing so until we ourselves eventually see the light or come to acceptance. Further, it continues to make of God someone who answers our prayers on our own level of understanding and expectation. It diminishes God and ourselves as well. My own experience is that God never says no. Whether we are at the beginning of a long bargaining process or months or years into it, God always "says," "Here I am. Let me give you myself in this situation; let me live it with you. Let me transform it with my compassionate presence. Let me deal with it and your own needs in ways you will one day realize are truly awesome. I promise, nothing whatsoever that you entrust to me will EVER be lost; all will be brought to life and completion in and with me!"

Moving from Fear to Love: Ours is not a God Who Punishes Evil!

Today's readings speak to us in profound and very challenging ways I think. The first, which I am going to focus on here, is from Genesis 18 and recounts a dialogue between Abraham (the Father of Faith and one whose faith is counted as righteousness) and God over whether God will indeed destroy Sodom if a number of righteous people can be found there. You remember it no doubt: God has heard rumors of the tremendous evil of this city and determines he will find out for himself. If things are as bad as he has heard, then he will destroy the city and everyone therein.

Abraham, the representative of true faith, in a remarkably frank conversation with God, asks a series of questions: What if you find fifty righteous persons, will you destroy everyone? "Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?" (Remember that when God destroys evil innocence is also destroyed; the world, after all, is ambiguous and that is true of each and all of us as well.) How about 45? What about 30? 20? and so forth. In each case, God answers that he would not destroy the whole city if x or y righteous men were found therein, and even only 10 righteous persons are found there. But what is the author of Genesis really trying to say here? Is he revealing a God of vengeance whose justice is retributive and who punishes us for our evil? Is he revealing a God with whom we are called to bargain or remonstrate, a God who will be swayed by our superior reason,  or who may be cajoled into changing his mind if the case made is eloquent enough? Is he revealing a fickle and capricious God who is moved hither and yon like a reed blowing in the wind?

I think reading the text in this way would be a profound mistake. It would then become a variation on the idea that the God of Israel revealed in the OT is essentially different than the God of Christians, that, in fact, he is a God of vengeance where the God revealed by Jesus Christ is a God of mercy. But this story is not an attempt to paint a picture of a God of vengeance or retributive justice being reminded by a reasonable and faithful human being of “the bigger picture”! Instead I think the author is recounting the history of Israel and her own coming to know and reveal the real God; this history is captured or personified in Abraham's dialogue with God as more and more clearly he establishes that Yahweh is not the God who punishes evil (evil is its own punishment and carries its own consequences) nor the one who is wed to an abstract notion of justice which he upholds at the expense of the innocent. Instead Abraham's dialogue gradually reveals to us a God Israel herself slowly comes to know more fully only through her repeated experiences of God's faithfulness, mercy, and compassion. In this dialogue it is not God’s mind that is changed, but Abraham’s (Israel's) as, with questions of increasing wonder and disbelief, he tries to establish and plumb the depths of God’s mercy. It is a God for whom the concrete life of the least and the lost is more important than the most common and convincing principle of justice while the presence of the slightest bit of good is more compelling than a world full of evil. It is the God we come to know in authentic faith.

When we compare the OT and NT side by side what we really see are not two essentially different Gods, but many stories of the movement in history from distorted, inadequate, or partial images and faith to more adequate and fuller images of God and forms of faith; it is the movement from fragmentary, distorted, and partial revelations of a punitive God to the exhaustive revelation of the God of mercy in the Christ Event. The OT is the record of a People coming to be from members of many different cultures and religions --- and doing so as its members outgrow their original theologies and related anthropologies under the influence of repeated experiences of Yahweh's faithfulness, mercy, and compassion. The OT is a history of the progressive (and often inconsistent) purification of Israel's minds and hearts regarding who God is and what constitutes true religion. It is through this purification that they mature as God's own People and persons of true faith. In today's story especially we are listening to Israel slowly relinquish belief in the God who punishes evil and evil doers, the God whose justice is at war with (his) mercy and whose compassion conflicts with his need for retribution or vindication; she does this only in so far as she affirms her own deepest experiences of God and, in an attempt to resolve it, pushes the tension between these two "theological worlds" to the limits of her imagination and narrative capacity.

She has done this in other stories too. There is the story of the flood where retributive justice wars with compassion and eventually in an act of radical humility and self-emptying God "repents" and promises never to destroy the world in this way again. There is the story of the sacrifice of Isaac where Abraham's hand is stayed by God just as he is ready to plunge the knife into Isaac's chest, and where a different and acceptable sacrifice is provided by God. While this story foreshadows God's own gift of Jesus and Jesus' own sacrifice, it also originally served to proclaim an end to human sacrifice because the God of Israel was NOT a God who required retribution for evil. The God of Israel was different and had a different way of doing justice. He called for Israel to embrace a different religious practice so that they could know and serve him intimately as a light to the Nations. It is no wonder that idolatry looms so large in the failures outlined by Israel. The struggle between false gods and ideas of god and Israel's most profound experience of God's own actions in her life characterized her on every level of her existence --- personal, historical, individual, corporate.

In many ways this struggle and story reprises our own as well. After getting his disciples in touch with who OTHERS say that he is, it is not surprising that Jesus' most critical question to them is, "And you, who do YOU say that I am?" This tension and movement between what we have been told of God and who we actually know in light of our own experiences of his faithfulness, compassion, and mercy is a dominant thread in our own spiritual journeys as well.

In particular, letting go of our belief in the God who punishes evil (or sends evil to punish us!!!), our belief in the God who is the focus of a theology of fear in order to exhaustively embrace the God revealed on the Cross, the God who asserts his rights (i.e., does justice) by loving unconditionally, who sets everything right and fulfills it through forgiveness and mercy, is not an easy task. Everything militates against this; whether it is family history, grade school catechetics, punitive nuns, theologically unsophisticated preaching and writing on hell, judgment, or our own super egos, this is one bit of idolatry, one bit of "worldliness" or pagan theology that is hard to shake.

Our inability to really believe in the power of the love of God may be the real face of unbelief in our own lives and in our Church today. Like Israel however (and, through the exhaustive revelation of God in Christ) we can do it only by allowing  the non-punitive God who is Love-in-Act to truly be our Lord and Master. Each day we are called on to discern both who others say that God is, and who we ourselves say that he is. Each day we are called on to allow our own hearts and minds to be purified by the God of Jesus Christ as we experience him. Each day we are called on to become Christians who believe more and more firmly and completely in the loving God he reveals and no other --- not the God who punishes evil but the One who submits entirely to it himself, transforms and redeems it with his presence, and thus (in time) loves the world into wholeness.