Twisting God’s Arm?

The title of this blog may seem somewhat strange: what do I mean by “twisting God’s arm”?

What I am trying to get at here is simply that for many people, that is, people who believe in God, if they are honest then they have a concept of prayer as precisely that: trying somehow to persuade God to give them what they want. Prayer for them is a case of – attempting – to twist God’s arm. And perhaps behind this attitude is a belief that God is reluctant or too aloof to be bothered?

We might phrase this question slightly better: is God ever persuaded to change His mind about something or do something in response to our – sincere – pleas? And we’re not just talking about something relatively trivial like can I have a new bicycle. Sometimes our pleas are for something very very important: for example, a child you love is seriously ill, perhaps dying, and you “storm heaven” that the child might be cured. And even when what we ask for is borne of love and is something vital, even then, we often times do not appear to get it. Is God heedless?

Prayer has many aspects. Perhaps the greatest and ‘purest’ form of prayer is simply to praise God – not to ask for anything but just to adore His infinite perfection. But the aspect of prayer I’m alluding to here is called the prayer of intercession – when we ask God for something. And this aspect of prayer is valid because Jesus Himself refers to it and actually encourages us to ask, to knock, and to persevere in our petitions (Matthew 7: 7). We may qualify this by stating that Jesus is speaking about a loving Father who knows what His children need, and therefore Jesus is encouraging us to ask for the good things that God wants to bestow on us. But what about things that – possibly – are not in God’s plan for us? This could be the hard realities of life that God has never promised to shield us from – after all Jesus Himself earnestly prayed: “If this cup can pass me by” (Matthew 26: 42). And of course God did not save His own beloved Son from a cruel and unmerited death.

If God will not change His mind for Jesus, why should we ever think He would do so for us? In the example of a dying child, such a thing happens in life, and while such suffering is never ‘sent’ by God there can be no doubt that He ‘permits’ it. Do we then have the right to ask Him to change the situation and possibly work a miracle?

This is a hard question that I rarely ever hear addressed by ministers of religion: does God respond to heartfelt pleas to ‘fix’ something that we experience as bad or cruel? All too often we get fed pious platitudes, something like “this suffering now will gain you a shorter spell in Purgatory”? That don’t impress me much…

There is a maxim about prayer that I treasure as it seems to me to go to the heart of this mystery:

prayer does not change God, it changes us.

What this maxim is telling us is that when we pray, pray from the heart, we change – and then we tune in to God’s will and see the deeper meaning of His ‘way’ which is always so much better than our ‘way’. The power of sincere prayer is precisely that we “put on the mind of Christ” (Philippians 2: 5) and then we know what really is for the best, and we begin to see life from an eternal perspective – which is always God’s perspective. Then we can begin to trust Him and to know His peace, even in the midst of horrendous suffering.

This may be fair enough – hard but fair – but is it still worth asking: does God ever respond to our pleas by changing His plan in favour of what we ask? Is this what a ‘miracle’ is, and do miracles really happen?

I don’t think we can give a definitive answer to that, if only because we are always “looking through a dark glass” (1 Corinthians 13: 12) when it comes to discerning His will, and perhaps when something truly unexpected and wonderful happens, such as a child recovering from a terminal illness, who’s to say that wasn’t in God’s plan all the time? But I want to say that I like the idea of a Father God who is responsive while never compromising His better way. Jesus did indeed tell us that if we had faith we could ‘move mountains’ (Mark 11: 23), that is, work miracles in His name. Perhaps the challenge for all believers is just that: to take our God seriously and to so align our hearts with His love that we become open channels for His grace and He can then be prodigal with His blessings – through us!

We can never ‘twist God’s arm’ but we might become His arm and thereby allow Him to do mighty things here and now in this life. Otherwise He is truly Unmighty God in this life and we experience this as His absence.

God is with us! Martin

Prayer and Fasting is Spiritual Dynamite

In early 1985 I travelled with a friend to what was then Yugoslavia to see for myself what was happening in a small village called Medjugorje, where it was reported that a group of young children were seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the terrible Balkan wars, so we went ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ with some trepidation.

Whether one believes in apparitions or not – and I have to say that the whole Medjugorje story leaves many unanswered questions – I can honestly say that the week I spent there was one of great blessing for me. I saw no supernatural signs but I did meet many people who were impressive in their commitment to God, including Maria Pavlovic, one of the young visionaries. She certainly came across as a straightforward and humble soul who didn’t strike one as in any way trying to gain celebrity through faking a unique experience – indeed she seemed somewhat strained by her sudden fame.

Equally impressive for me was the core message which the visionaries were claiming they were receiving from Mary herself, a message of peace through rededication to God. And one particular aspect of this message struck me as hugely resonant with Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels. Mary was reported as calling all Christians back to a sincere practice of prayer and fasting. I emphasise those words because it is the combination of both prayer and fasting that is crucial here. Sincere heartfelt prayer, of whatever form, is always beneficial to the soul, and fasting on its own may have benefits for one’s health and general equilibrium. Combine the two together in a sincere and concerted practice and you have: spiritual dynamite.

Jesus Himself spoke of the unique power of this combination: talking with his disciples after He had healed a young boy of possession (a possible case of epilepsy?), Jesus stated that such matters are only healed by ‘prayer and fasting’ (Matthew 17: 21). This startling statement can be understood as Jesus saying that prayer – on its own – has its limits! I understand His point in this way: God is never limited, but He works through our humanity, and it is our limitation that has to be factored into the situation. We need the spiritual tools to overcome our own spiritual blindness and lethargy, and our lack of real faith. What a practice of prayer and fasting does therefore is radically attune our spirits to the will and ways of God, and we then become much more open to His grace and thereby much more effective in manifesting His power in our lives.

Perhaps the word ‘dynamite’ is somewhat inappropriate here, but I do want to emphasise that we are talking here about raw power that can transform our ordinary discipleship and witness with explosive possibility. Can I sincerely suggest to you that if you have a difficult situation in your life, perhaps a chronic stress, long standing trauma or a loved one who you are very worried about, and perhaps you have been calling on God with a feeling of no response, then seriously take up a practice of prayer and fasting in recognition of Jesus’ advice? Arising from my week in Medjugorje, I wrote a poem called “Penny’s Nephew”, which may throw some light on what I mean here:

Penny’s Nephew – Poems for Pilgrims

I don’t know about you but I love my food, and I have to be honest, I have always struggled with the very concept of fasting! The teaching on fasting coming out of Medjugorje is quite interesting and encouraging here. According to the visionaries – and we are talking about a message delivered by young village children – fasting is not going without food! We all need food and drink, especially as busy, caring folk. There is no great benefit in starving oneself to the point of weakness and illness. Rather the teaching on fasting focusses on eating very simple food, and thereby denying ourselves the range and variety of tasty foods that we can eat. For example, to spend a day on bread and water, taking as much bread as you need to get through your day. The point here is not to experience hunger so much as to choose to deny an available pleasure, and this choice is a spiritual discipline which, combined with heartfelt prayer, radically attunes our spirit with God’s Holy Spirit. And then the miracles can begin!

If the great mantra is:

“Prayer does not change God, it changes us”,

then we might say:

“Prayer and fasting does not change God, it radically transforms us”.

Go for it!

Martin

Original Sin or Original Blessing?

Being in my sixties now, I can remember when Holy Mass was celebrated in Latin and the priest had his back to the congregation and was busy doing ‘holy things’ while the rest of us quietly watched on from a distance or just fingered our rosary beads. I was certainly brought up in a pre Vatican II milieu where religion was taught in a dogmatic and fundamentally ‘black and white’ moralistic way. As Catholic school children, we were drilled – religiously – every week with Mass, Benediction, rote-learning of catechism and of course frequent confession.

I have to say I was never aware of, nor a victim of, any sexual abuse by priests and nuns – and there were plenty of them around me – but clearly it was going on. If I suffered any abuse from these ministers of religion I would have to say that it was a theological and spiritual oppression, based on a scary view of human nature and – crucially – a scary view of God. It may be strange to say that I then went on to become a priest myself, but one factor in that was certainly that Vatican II had made some impact on the local Church by the time that I was old enough to discern my way in life. But while the ‘fresh air’ generated by Vatican II was liberating for me as a young person, it was also clearly destabilising and threatening to many others, particularly the older folk.

At the heart of the Church’s traditional understanding of the Gospel and therefore how it presented the ‘things of God’ and humanity’s role, was the centrality of sin. It might be overstating the point but when I was young sin was everywhere. Sin had its precise gradings, into venial (minor) and mortal (serious) sin. Many folk, good decent folk, lived in constant terror of the possibility of committing a mortal sin and suddenly dying before managing to get to confession and receive absolution: thereby going straight to hell, which was eternal damnation and the everlasting loss of God and His heaven. And mortal sin was certainly doable in those days! Not surprisingly confession was widely frequented and especially before Mass, because receiving Jesus in Communion while being in a state of serious sin was anathema, a kind of mega-mortal sin, if that were possible.

In those days of my youth, the nineteen fifties and sixties, churches were packed and Catholic practice was impressive in terms of numbers. Numbers… But did we ever really evaluate the quality of our personal and collective faith? Was it perhaps that folk attended their religious duties out of fear, sometimes fear of societal pressure, sometimes naked fear of damnation? What levels of neurosis and stress did people carry in their psyches? And what picture of God did we all hold in our hearts?

When I ministered as a priest in the nineteen eighties, the emphasis had shifted in the main from Crucifixion to Resurrection; from sin to grace; from our attempts to love God to His freely given love for us; from God as stern Judge to God as loving Father; from Original Sin to Original Blessing. I say ‘in the main’, because there were many who never really accepted the renewed theology of Vatican II: often these were older people but by no means always older people.

I was – thankfully – formed as a priest in the spirit of Vatican II, and sought as best I could to preach its values. For such as me, Original Blessing trumped Original Sin: God and His love were primary, the absolute starting point for any journey of faith. As a parish missioner I frequently met people who were profoundly alienated from the Church, either by a traumatic experience at the hands of a priest or nun, or through a failed marriage and an unsympathetic and unforgiving Church, or indeed by being thoroughly sickened by the sin-soaked mentality of those earlier days. I met folk who were terribly constricted by scrupulosity: religious scrupulosity is a terrifying and immensely difficult psychological neurosis, akin to paranoia, and easily induced by an over-sensitivity to the sin-obsession of that time. It would be hard to over-emphasise how debilitating and literally soul-destroying religious scrupulosity can be.

Ultimately, the pre Vatican II mentality centred on ‘going through the motions’, a surface religious practice, regimented by fear and authority. This of course also reflected a wider societal milieu. There was no emphasis on inner spiritual experience, and not that much on emotional fellowship either. In contrast, the message of Vatican II is broad, fundamentally positive and in direct opposition to the earlier sin-centric mentality. But many of us ask, has the spirit and the practice of Vatican II been diluted or even reneged on in the years since the nineteen sixties?

Is the Catholic Church of today thoroughly convinced of the veracity and relevance of Original Blessing, or is it still clinging on to many aspects of the Original Sin mentality?

Catholics, love the Church, because we are the Church!

Martin

Should We Pray For the Dead?

My dear old dad, dead these past four years, would have just turned ninety-nine. I pray for him and mum, who pre-deceased him by some ten years, every day as part of my morning and evening spiritual routines. I am sure that even now they enjoy the very face of God and live in the bliss of His eternal kingdom of love. I base this belief on the simple fact that they were decent and loving folk who cherished their Catholic faith.

Assuming there is an afterlife, it might well be asked: if you are confident that they are in heaven, why bother to pray for them? And if by some terrible happenstance they had actually ended up in hell, then surely no prayers would help them at all? Why indeed should we believers ever pray for the dead?

The Catholic Church teaches that there is a state after death called Purgatory. This can be understood as a kind of staging post for heaven, where those who are not perfect at the point of their death – and what good soul is perfect – await entry into heaven. As such it is a conveyor belt to heaven, and is therefore a cleansing and healing realm. Although not directly mentioned in the Bible, it is partly based on the affirmation in scripture that: “nothing defiled can enter heaven” Revelation 21: 27. In a strict sense, not even the greatest saint is fit to enter straight into heaven.

I find Purgatory is actually a very consoling doctrine in that it seems to respect the reality of human nature, that we are never completely good or completely bad. It avoids the error that some more extreme Protestant sects fell into that a person was either saved or damned, that is, that there was no middle ground at death or room for God’s mercy to intervene. That can lead to a very stern and intolerant spirituality.

It follows from belief in Purgatory that there is a real purpose in praying for the dead: to express our love (as the living) by in some way assisting the deceased’s passage through Purgatory and onwards into heaven. Sadly this long established belief also gave rise to some awful abuses in the history of the Church. As if we could ever calculate time in Purgatory… Abuses of course do not automatically invalidate the doctrine.

There is however another scripture text that directly affirms the practice of praying for the dead. In the second book of Maccabees 12: 46 we read: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.” This text actually suggests that we can have an affect on their path into heaven, and this also fits in with a theology where God is delighted to respond to human agency, and is therefore not an aloof and unheeding deity.

Whether we believe in a state of Purgatory or not I think there is another fundamental grace in praying for the dead, a grace that isn’t connected to their eternal destination. This grace is simply that whenever we pray – we receive grace, and strength and renewal of our souls. And specifically in praying for the dead, we are convicted and reminded of our own death. As Psalm 90: 12 says: “Make us know the shortness of our life, that we may gain wisdom of heart.” Our dead, as it were, give us this grace whenever we remember them with love and pray for them – they remind us of our own death, of the fragility and brevity of this life, and therefore encourage us to think about the things that really matter. While there is always a danger in becoming too morbid, on balance it is a healthy and sensible attitude to be aware of the certainty of our own death and to live today with that awareness. Jesus himself taught that we should be ready and awake, for we know not the hour! (Matthew 24: 42; Mark 13: 33–37; Luke 21: 36)

Ultimately, when we pray in humility and from the heart, we can never demand that God change His course, but we can be absolutely certain that we change – for the better. Praying for the dead, at the very least, brings us benefit. It is an avowal of our love for them, a love which did not cease at their death, and of our hope that our loved ones are with God, or even God-bound. As such, it is love expressed.

In His love,

Martin

God versus Democracy?

In our world today, democracy seems to be everywhere under threat. Democracy is predicated on the will of the enfranchised majority, in contrast to other systems of governance which may rely on the will of a few, usually powerful males – sometimes even just one leader.

And while it may be a simple truth that even if the majority of people were to assert that the Earth is flat, it would not make it so, it is generally acknowledged that in a democratic system the majority determines what is normative. Properly legislated laws rarely suit everyone but they are there for the coherence of society, and it follows that it is reasonable for all members of a society to respect laws that are carefully and legitimately promulgated.

It is however a sad fact that the Christian churches were very slow to accept democracy, preferring instead to hold on to systems of rule such as monarchy and male dominated oligarchies. One reason for this resistance stems from religion itself: ultimately all moral norms come from God, and are not as such open to human debate such as we may find in democratic systems. In this regard some have even argued for rule by the ‘holy’ – those who are supposedly close to God and know His will and can therefore best guide and govern the rest of us. The problem with this system, known as a theocracy, is precisely in the assumption that there are people who can effectively mediate the divine will. The fact that someone is regarded as holy, perhaps living a life of great spiritual sacrifice and wisdom, doesn’t actually mean that they are equipped to govern a society.

I think we can reject any form of theocracy as being simply too far a stretch for any small group or individual to safely interpret God’s will for the rest of us. While it might be sometimes beneficial, such as certain historical examples of saintly kings who ruled with justice and integrity, it is also highly possible for it to become corrupt and essentially just another form of dictatorship: in other words, an autocracy.

I think it also follows that any system which gives undue or even supreme power to a small group of clerics is extremely dangerous. This gives leverage for fundamentalists and for those who have a cause which is often little more than a perceived anger at foreigners or those who don’t follow their faith. Such groups can and do subvert religion to their own needs. Moreover they, as we all do, make God in their own image, which can all too often be an angry and bloodthirsty one. This allows some so-called religious groups to legitimise killing and maiming in the name of God. Their God is simply an angrier and scarier extension of their own prejudice and malice. Sadly today we see suicide bombings and other atrocities being perpetrated in God’s name, and the indoctrinated individuals actually longing for death so as to become martyrs and enter into some sort of paradise. What a surprise they will get when they come before the throne of God… Yet the greater blame will fall on those who set them up by preaching their vicious ideologies.

To come back to democracy – it isn’t perfect, and any democracy at any one time will only be as healthy as the mindset of the people. If a country’s population are angry for any reason, such as the German people were in the years after the First World War when their country had been punished and humiliated by the victorious powers, and thereby actually voted in Hitler’s Nazis, then the consequences can be horrendous. Democracies can be and are hoodwinked by populist demagogues who give the people simple answers to complex questions, often aided and abetted by partisan media.

Maybe at some point in the far future there will be a benign one world government which respects diversity, and wars and oppression will be no more, but until that far off time, I think God understands that democracies are the only practical forms of national government that have the potential to both empower the majority and also, importantly, respect minorities.

If you have a vote, cherish it and use it for the greater good,

Martin