The Economy of Prayer
Why the most basic kind of prayer is the one I've struggled with most.
To me, prayer may still be a greater mystery than many of the dogmas people claim to have trouble getting their heads around. In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus explains how to pray, citing what we know today as the Lord’s Prayer — but what matters is the context in which the prayer is introduced. In Matthew 6, Jesus explains that God the Father knows better than we do what we need, and that we should therefore not be like the pagans, who pray overtly and demonstratively, thinking they will be heard for the sheer number of their words. In Luke 11, He says we should be persistent, and that we will be heard for our sheer insistence.
These two passages may even sound somewhat contradictory. But the part about trying to tell God what He should do — when He knows far better than I do what my neighbors and I need — long built a barrier between me and petitionary prayer. So more often I prayed for guidance, which, surprisingly, is a kind of prayer that in my experience almost always gets answered; or I prayed to give thanks; or I simply prayed the rosary and hoped to figure out what God wanted of me in a given situation. Yet petitionary prayer, the most basic kind of prayer, is the one I’ve struggled with — at least when it isn’t the Lord’s Prayer, which perfectly satisfies whatever concerns one could have.
Quite recently, the obvious started to dawn on me. If nobody can assume the position of God’s counselor, as the Lord Jesus himself suggests, then the whole purpose of petitionary prayer must be quite different. And if it isn’t about asking Him to get aligned with me, then it must be — as with all the other types of prayer — for me to align myself better with Him. I found this view pretty consistent, and I resolved to pray frequently for what surely must be God’s will: for instance, for the war in Ukraine to end. For even if God doesn’t always work a miracle, or doesn’t bring things about in the way I might expect, He still must long for the war to end. If He holds back and doesn’t set in motion one of those strange strings of accidental events that lead to an unexpected outcome, it must be because He understands what I don’t. Therefore I should show that I stand on His side and sympathize with Him.
So I resolved to pray frequently for the war in Ukraine to end. And soon after, I failed utterly. Then I realized that although I want the war to end, I’m not quite aligned with God on it. Deep down, the truth is that I don’t care enough even to remember to pray for it, or to make a note to do so. And so I’ve uncovered an instance of the self-deception I live in — the gap between what I want and what I actually long for — and that’s no small thing. Having realized how valuable petitionary prayer can be, I decided to give it a much larger share of my prayer time.
Now the two contexts in which the Lord Jesus framed the prayer collapse into one and the same. A fulfilled prayer certainly isn’t a kind of reward for praying forcefully enough and giving a cinematic performance, the way the pagans do, imagining they can find anything transactional in God. By the same token, if the insistent prayer of someone aligned with God were to go unanswered, it would mean this world is not one where Christ has already defeated evil. And this is consistent with my personal experience. It was exactly in those cases where I felt strongly that I was aligned with God that, in the end, the familiarly weird string of accidental events leading to an unexpected outcome actually happened. The outcome wasn’t always what I had in mind; sometimes what happened was even better.
In many cases, it may even look counter-intuitive from the outside: an old woman prays for her grandchild to be healthy, only to see him fall seriously ill — and through that illness, the boy finds faith. Or a man prays that, if only he were given more money, he would help his neighbors — only to lose all he has, and end up devoting his life to serving the poor.
Do you find my view of prayer strange, unexpected, or plainly wrong? I’m not surprised. The truth is, I’m not even sure that what I’m formulating here is Catholic teaching. In my case, this article is itself a form of petitionary prayer. It is me praying that the bishops would find the courage to formulate, in precise terms, what Catholic prayer really is — to tell the truth clearly, even if it is hard for many to stomach and provokes backlash. Because it is a terribly serious thing when an apostle of Christ fails to give truthful testimony, and many are then repelled by its implausibility — turned away not only from petitionary prayer but from all intentional prayer, and even from church attendance.
Prayer is too fundamental to Christianity to be left muddled while we pretend all is well. It is of the utmost seriousness to scatter the people of good will — those accustomed to weighing things in self-reflecting sincerity — and drive them off into deserts of atheism, while encouraging those who wish to be soothed to settle into a comfortable self-deception, and to proclaim you a man of wisdom most high. What this does to the salvation of souls is not quite clear; but let's observe the impact it has on the economy, which can be seen in plain sight.
I believe we know it under the guise of “People don’t want this; there’s no demand.”
In my country, for instance, almost everyone wants a quality education for their kids. There is enough money — people drive around in cars, many of which could pay several times over for writing a book like mine, with plenty left for a perfectly decent car on top. Yet teachers are paid so poorly they can’t support a family. By a kind of natural selection, this produces a situation where people become teachers out of charity, once they are wealthy enough to afford it — not for their skill in the work — or else because they decide to have no children of their own. Over the last twenty years, education has turned into state-sponsored babysitting: every child is more comfortable than ever, yet many can barely read a longer piece of writing by the time they leave, and few have acquired even basic self-discipline or the habit of carrying out duties of any kind.
How can this be, one might ask, when everyone wants a quality education for their kids? The answer is close at hand: perhaps they all long for it with about the same abundance of care in their hearts that I have when I pray for the war in Ukraine to end. This is how everyone can want it, how every government keeps it at the very top of its priority list, and yet there is no demand for it in the economy.
It may be precisely this gap — between what we want and what registers as economic demand — that the Catholic bishops could actually help to close, if their theology clearly taught that one can school the heart’s longings by praying for them (even if it feels mechanical at first). That it is not enough merely to assent to the right values; that the initial gap between what you believe and what you long for is natural; and that petitionary prayer may in fact be the means by which, over time, what you verbally assent to comes to be written on your heart as something you truly long for.
If this is the right teaching, people don’t know it — not even believers. Not even me. People don’t know that, just as gravity keeps you from floating off, prayer is the equally fundamental force meant to carry you from what your reason finds true to what you truly long for.
People don't know that this is the real difference between pagan and Christian worship. That God is not a vending machine that loves you more than the Coca-Cola corporation does. That He is the only person who can fulfill your life, as long as you strive to align your will with His — something Christ Jesus and the Virgin Mary prove possible: the former by showing that God can become human, the latter that a human can submit to God in perfect obedience. Or, put another way: the one showing that God can come down to man, the other that man can rise to meet God.
In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV recapitulates Catholic social teaching — principles such as solidarity, subsidiarity, and the universal destination of goods — and calls for it to be applied to a society undergoing transformation in the age of AI. In my view, we are nowhere near even assenting to the most basic goals that would move us toward a reasonably good outcome. We are nowhere close to acknowledging that our busy schedules, filled with constant non-material gluttony, keep us from showing solidarity with others, as I describe here; we still rejoice in, rather than resist, delegating our agency to automated models; and there is no conversation about the urgent need to design and build a serious public infrastructure of truth — the greatest common good of all. But even if we do one day agree on the shared goals, we may never reach them without a Church hierarchy in place that can proclaim the truth of how basic things work, and set that assent alight so that it burns with a real economic demand.
I don't understand why some societies prosper economically while others decline, regardless of what they profess. But I am sure that what people long for en masse is one of the contributing factors. In this light, I believe prayer can truly, practically, and materially stop wars and transform societies.