Praying for courage. Beyond comfort.

If our prayers so often don’t get answered, why do we continue to pray?

Since most of us can cite those instances that seemed to indicate that prayers don’t get answered and those that convinced us that they do, is it just a numbers game?  Do we just toss up a high volume of pitches in hopes that God might bat about .300? Are “believers” just people conditioned to interpret the occasional fluky fielding error as a line drive to the gap?

The problem is that the question itself—“Do prayers get answered?”—limits our imagination for how God might be at work. Whatever the response (and there are only two choices), God can only come off as a ‘cosmic butler’ who can solve a few, but not all, of our problems with good-willed, if bumbling, incompetence or a disinterested sovereign who will occasionally deign to be our benefactor if it reflects well on the crown. The question assumes that requests often don’t get answered because God is either incompetent or indifferent but doesn’t question whether getting requests answered is the primary value of prayer.  

But in our better thinking, we know that the primary image of God does not come to us from a bellhop’s luggage rack or a sovereign’s crown but a convict’s cross. The cross represents God’s refusal to coerce events, for better or for worse, with a snap of the divine fingers.

The creator likely has the ability to micromanage the spin of particles and the dance of galaxies, but the cost of doing so would be that creation would no longer have independent existence so much as it would be an extension of God. And our God isn’t narcissistic like that. If God’s intention for creating in the first place was that there be an arena where spontaneous, reciprocal love of the other could exist, then it’s not that God simply can’t answer prayers that request such dictatorial intervention; it’s that God can’t. To concede even the smallest request—to take over the wheel and redirect a car or suspend an avalanche—would be to give up the project of creation altogether.

While this often makes creation a risky and unpredictable enterprise, we should think long and hard as to whether we would prefer the alternative. Hitler experimented with that, attempting to solve the problems of creation by much more expedient means, progressing us along by force and eliminating that which he believed shouldn’t be.

The cross evidences nothing if not God’s ultimate refusal to solve all potential problems with this sort of force. It’s the result of God’s fierce commitment to creation, all of it, without remainder. But also, it’s God’s insistence that no one should suffer the consequences of an unpredictable creation by themselves.

And this is where prayer comes in.

Completing creation nonviolently and non-coercively is by far the longer route. Jesus has the scars to prove that (resorting to a military legion of angels must be a constant temptation in the divine life).

We, on the other hand, are a power-hungry people with grand visions of how we would have it could we muster the power to ‘fix’ creation through forceful means.

Prayer is where we give up these visions and re-align ourselves with God’s chosen means.

Prayer is both saying to God and hearing back from God, “I recognize that we have chosen the more difficult path, so I trust that we are in this thing together whatever stones may be thrown our way by a world that doesn’t yet get it.”

We pray, then, because those who walk the harder path need to lean on each other. Beneath the cross, it makes no more sense to speak of whether a prayer was “answered” than to speak of whether a step or a breath was answered. Perhaps any decent response to this kind of question should be evaluated not in whether it is “right” or “satisfying” but in whether it gives one the courage to go on walking the path and praying.

This answer may sound unsatisfying at first blush because we humans don’t often thing to ask for courage. What we really want are answers. We don’t desire that our mettle be tested or that an unsettled world challenge us to act with more valor, more compassion, more life than we’d previously thought ourselves capable. We want settled stability and ease of mind. Unanswered questions imply that something is unsettled and unstable, that there are loose ends that haven’t been tied off, unspeakable entropies spiraling into oblivion.

So it’s true that aligning ourselves with God’s means of making creation fruitful is unlikely to result in a life that is comfortable and assured. But there is more at stake here. We’ll still certainly want to avoid suffering and won’t seek it out arbitrarily, but how differently we might be able to interpret the grief, and suffering and ultimately death that we face if we have spent a lifetime praying:

Lord, give me a lifetime not of assurance but of yearning,

not of ease in my mind but of fire in my bones,

not of comfort in myself but of joy in my neighbor

And if you will reassure me,

Reassure me that I’ve fought the good fight for something that matters.

If you will put me at ease,

Ease my fear of a lukewarm life devoid of passion and purpose.

If you will comfort me,

Comfort me that I will not find my repose while my neighbor still suffers.

Give me courage to live out the desire deeper than my desires—

the desire of my deepest self—

that would be with you on a cross before it would be alone in comfort…

until there are no more crosses.

- Pastor Jared Witt