Many people on the path of contemplation wonder about other forms of prayer such as petitionary or intercessory prayer. The question is not simply theoretical; for when we go deeply into our practice all other forms of prayer are often integrated into the simple silence of just being. Yet many contemplatives also incorporate other forms of prayer such as going to church, praying the psalms, praying for other people’s needs and the world’s needs. There is solid scriptural foundation for all these forms of prayer. While Jesus routinely went off to some deserted place to commune with the one he called Abba, Jesus also asked for things and interceded on behalf of others. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find any authoritative teaching on prayer that would advocate the practice of contemplation to the exclusion of other forms of prayer.
Huck Finn does not spend much time in prayer of any sort, yet he wrestles nonetheless with the efficacy of petitionary prayer in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in these boyish musings we are reminded of something important about petitionary prayer. Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in my name, it will be given you” (Jn 14:13). Huck wrestles with this very passage from Scripture and recalls a number of occasions when people simply do not get what they ask for:
“I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself, there ain’t nothing in it.” 1 Huck is put straight by the widow. He has got to pray for ‘”spiritual gifts.’ . . . I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn’t see no advantage about it except for other people-so at last I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it anymore, but just let it go.” When Huck later realizes that he, too, can be on the receiving end of petitionary prayer, he alters his views. “And then something struck me. I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it. So there ain’t no doubt but that there is something in that thing. That is, there’s something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don’t work for me, and I reckon it don’t work for only just the right kind.”
Twain’s characters are each one of them flawed, the widow and Miss Watson not least among them, but they are part of a community in which prayer means something. And when Huck stops to consider that he, too, is a part of their prayer, he is drawn, if but for a moment, into a wider circle of community.
The widow was not entirely off her rocker when she said that when we pray to God for things, they are supposed to be spiritual. Not being high church, she did not know that St. Anthony, Saint Joseph, and an army of other saints were delegated for such material requests and even some virtues. Nevertheless, this does not interest Huck, who only wants to be on the receiving end of prayer. But when we petition God for anything over a long period of time, something else begins to happen; we are brought into the depths of God and are joined with God’s will. The fourth-century Syrian monk Denys the Areopagite explains how this works. He tells us to “picture ourselves aboard a boat. There are ropes joining it to some rock. We take hold of the rope and pull on it as if we were trying to drag the rock to us when in fact we are hauling ourselves and our boat toward that rock.” Denys provides a useful metaphor. We think we know what we need and attempt to bend God to our will, but the more we pull, the closer we are drawn into God’s will. Denys continues, “We will not pull down to ourselves that power which is both everywhere and yet nowhere, but by divine reminders and invocations we may commend ourselves to it and be joined to it.” We pray to God for this and that. Often these things are important, but gradually we are united to God through our many requests and even in spite of them.
Intercessory prayer poses a similar problem for some people. Are not intercessory prayers and petitions distractions that take us away from the practice of contemplation? In theory they do not rival contemplative practice, but like a prayer word, they can serve to draw our intention as well as our attention to God. In practice, however, most people handle requests to pray for others (intercessory prayer) in one or a combination of two ways. For some, they set aside part of their prayer time explicitly for remembering people who have asked to be remembered in prayer and then they later move into silent prayer. For others it is enough for them to call to mind a need or a request and take it with them into the silence of the heart, without gunning the engines of “now-I’d-like-to-pray-for-so-and-so.” There is an intercessory dimension intrinsic to interior silence; for interior silence and compassionate solidarity are of a piece, like spokes leading into the hub of a wheel. Denys likewise perceives this connection between interior silence and interpersonal solidarity as he tries to explain how each part shares the same wholeness. “It is rather like the case of a circle,” he says. “The center point of the circle is shared by the surrounding radii.” Only on the rim of the wheel of daily life do we appear to be separated from each other, but if we follow each spoke from the rim to the hub, all the spokes of the wheel are one in the center. We each share the same Center. When we are closest to the Creator, we are closest to all creation.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
