Praying For Earthly Blessings

A reader writes:

My question for you is something that struck me as I was walking down the street today; I’m relatively new to Christianity, so it’s a pretty basic question.  Essentially it’s this:  why do we bother to pray to God for earthly blessings, i.e. curing illness, ending abortions, etc?  Firstly, God as an omniscient being already knows our general wishes as humans to end illness etc, and he even knows our specific wishes, i.e. ‘please cure Grandma Ruth’s cancer,’ so the goal cannot be to inform God of our desire.  Secondly, I don’t see how being plaintive about our problems would motivate God to do anything to help us–after all, there’s nothing we have to offer Him.  Finally, it might not be in our interest to end our sufferings, for out of suffering often comes the greatest growth of faith.

I can understand that the purpose of prayer is to bring us closer to God;  as we meditate on Him we grow closer to Him.  But why do we pray for earthly blessings?  I just don’t get it.

While this question is basic in the sense that it applies to one of the most basic elements of religious life–prayer–it is actually a very sophisticated on that many people wonder about, and from that perspective, it is very high-end!

What you’ve written also contains the seed of the answer: drawing closer to God.

The basic reason that God wants us to pray to him is that doing so builds virtue. In fact, prayer builds several virtues, and this applies even when we are praying for the needs of this life.

Let’s take an obvious example first: Praying for an end to abortion. This is indeed an earthly good. But whose good is it? Cui bono? Who benefits? First and foremost, the babies who would be aborted if the horrible practice isn’t ended. By praying for an end to abortion we are led to recognize the needs of these babies (their need to live!) and thus praying for and end to abortion ends up drawing us out of ourselves and causing us to care for others–even others we will never meet. It builds the virtues of love and compassion in us.

And this does not stop with the babies, for anyone who prays regularly about pro-life matters eventually ends up praying for the mothers who have abortions, the fathers who push them into it, the doctors and nurses who perform them, the legislators and Supreme Court justices who enable the practice, the American public who needs to become more strongly against it, and the conversion of the people in evil organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

All of this helps us grow in love and charity and it helps us to re-orient our values to recognize what is and is not important as we wrestle with this issue in prayer and think through it.

We thus come to more closely model our values to God’s values as we pray about the issue and its different aspects.

Prayer also helps motivate us to take practical steps to help others. Pro-lifers who pray regularly for and end to abortion–because of their increased care and concern that is grown by prayer–are more likely to take practical steps to help end the problem and to help blunt its deadly force in the meantime (volunteering at pregnancy centers, donating to pro-life charities, supporting pro-life legislation, voting for pro-life politicians). Certainly, they are more likely to do so than those who never think to pray for unborn babies.

The same is true whenever we pray for someone else–including people who we do know, whether they are living or dead. By praying for them, the Christian community–and the human community–is built up in love. In prayer, we come to mirror the love for others that God has for them.

We also purify our values as we think about what we should pray for, using the intellects God gave us to think about whether something is really a fitting object of prayer or whether it is a selfish desire that we should learn to either subordinate to some other, more pressing concern or even become willing to do without entirely.

Even when we are praying for ourselves and our needs, this happens, and we also learn another virtue: a willingness to trust and depend on God to give us what we truly need and to help us recognize and live without what we don’t.

If a Christian prays for freedom from suffering and that is the best thing for him and God grants it then the Christian, if nothing else, has learned to turn to and depend on God as the ultimate source of goodness. If a removal of the suffering is not in his best interests and God does not grant the prayer–at least immediately (for all suffering is temporary; there will be none of it in heaven)–then the Christian learns the virtue of patience, as well as whatever other virtues may be built up through the suffering.

Prayer has never been about giving God information he didn’t already have. Jesus made that quite clear in Matthew 6. Prayer has always been about more closely modeling ourselves after God by re-orienting our values to become his and thus buliding virtue and being more godly. To encourage us along this path, God has made our obtaining certain blessings conditional on our willingness to ask him for them–and it happens whether the blessing in question is a spiritual or an earthly one. Virtue and a greater sharing in God’s values is built up, regardless.

This is not to say that there are no missteps in prayer. We certain pray for some things that are not in accord with God’s will, that are not good for us, but we learn through time as the process of prayer gradually purifies us and we learn to subordinate our wills and our values to God’s. We always start with where we are–which in the beginning is quite self-centered–but as we pray we are drawn out of ourselves, to respect and love God and the other immortal beings he has created.

All of this is also in accord with our natures as earthly creatures. We instinctively ask for things when we need them, and if God prohibited us from asking for our earthly needs, he would be prohibiting us from acting on our natures.

There is, of course, a natural temptation to view earthly matters are inconsequential in comparison to spiritual ones, and it is quite true that spiritual matters are of transcendant importance compared to earthly ones, but one should not set the two in opposition to each other. God made us as creatures that are both earthly and spritiual. Earthly matters are thus important, too, because God made them essential to human nature. They’re part of his creation and of us in particular.

In fact, since what we do in this life determines our eternal fate–since the flesh is the hinge of salvation, as the saying goes–earthly matters have eternal rammifications, for the virtues we build in this life by learning love and compassion for others will affect the way we are rewarded in heaven.

So here, as in so many areas of Christianity, the truth is paradoxical: The last shall be first, one gains by giving, acknowledging one’s weakness and need for God’s help makes one stronger, and praying for earthly things leads to spiritual growth.