A reader writes:
If Heaven is beyond time and space, and the Angels and Saints can hear our prayers as the book of Revelation shows, then are the prayers the saints hear ones that are made after their death?
Angels don’t have death, but yes, saints in heaven do hear prayers made after their deaths. Thus in A.D. 2006 I can pray to St. Paul, who died in the A.D. 60s. That doesn’t require heaven to be beyond time and space, though. Even if St. Paul is still fully within the flow of time, so that for him it’s also 2006, he can still hear the prayer as long as he has a way to perceive it.
The standard thought is that it is God who communicates to the saints the fact that someone is praying to them, so if I am in 2006 and St. Paul is in 2006, God can simply pass on my prayer to St. Paul. God, of course, is outside of time, but St. Paul doesn’t have to be for him to learn about my prayer long after his death.
If, because Heaven is beyond time and space, I could hear prayers from all times, then if I pray now, die and go to Heaven, will I be able to hear my own prayers that I made before I died?
Possibly. There are a few caveats, though:
1) While God is outside of time, it is not at all clear that human souls are outside of time. Or at least they are not outside of time in the same way that God is. God does not experience any sequentiality; he lives in an "eternal now" in which all of history happens at once (or, to put it more precisely, every moment in the history of the world is equally present to God).
Souls, however, clearly do experience sequentiality. There is the point at which they die, experience the particular judgment, are purified (if needed), and fully glorified, are restored to their bodies at the Resurrection, experience the general judgment, experience the eternal order, etc. Even if you want to say that this sequentiality doesn’t take place in time as we experience it (and I’m open to the proposition that it does take place in time as we experience it), you at least have to say that it takes place over something analogous to time that allows things to happen in sequence rather than all at once in an eternal now.
2) You don’t need to posit heaven being outside of time, though, in order to get your prayer request to your future, sainted self. As we mentioned, God is outside of time, and so if you are alive in 2006 and praying to yourself in heaven then God could tell you about that prayer in 2306, when you die and arrive in heaven (let’s assume that medical technology discovers something really fabulous that lets you live for more than three centuries).
3) It’s not clear that this would be necessary, however, since Scripture seems to indicate that we will have a whole-life review at some point–possibly at more than one point (i.e., both the particular and the general judgments) and we may have constant, continuous access to the events of our own lives in the form of memory (unimpeded by our brain’s faulty retrieval system). If that’s the case then, or whenever the whole-life review takes place, we could come across our former prayer request and be able to fulfill it.
4) On the other hand, there may be limits to what we can pray for on behalf of our former selves. One thing that it does not make sense for us to pray for is something that we know was not God’s will. For example, even today–with me still being alive–I could not ask God to make it so that I had never been born. I already know that it was God’s will for me to be born, and I cannot legitimately pray for something that I know to be contrary to God’s will.
(I could pray that God create an alternate timeline in which I was never born, but I cannot pray that I never existed in this timeline.)
Once we’re in heaven and have had our whole-life review and know everything that happened to us, we wouldn’t be able to pray that things turn out differently for us–at any particular moment of our lives–than they did, for to do so would be to pray contrary to God’s will for us.
5) We could, however, pray for things to turn out as they did. Since God is outside of time, I can ask him in 2306 to allow something to happen to me in 2006 that I know did happen to me in that year. In this case, I’m praying in harmony with God’s will–and such a prayer of mine in 2306 might (hypothetically) be a contributing factor to why God allowed the event to happen to me in 2006.
6) It is not clear, however, whether God would respond to this type of prayer. First, he might judge that the purpose of the Communion of the Saints is to build up the body of Christ by praying for each other. Praying for our own past selves might not be what he has in mind. For example, I’m not sure what God would think of me praying–now, in 2006–that he allow me to be born back in the 1960s.
In fact, I rather suspect that God might take a dim view of me making that request of him, at least while I’m in this life. Given that I already know what his will was on that matter, I suspect he would rather have me spending my time and energy praying for things where I don’t know his will–like my present needs or the needs of others.
In this life I have limited time and energy to devote to things, and God might well deem it more productive for me to devote my petitionary prayer to matters that are not yet settled from my temporal perspective. I might praise and thank him for allowing me to be born, but in terms of what I should be asking for, he might want me to ask that he bless me or my loved ones or the pope or the poor of the souls in purgatory or someone who I don’t already know it was his will to bless.
Here’s one way God might want us to handle things in prayer:
* If we know it’s his will, praise and thank him for it.
* If we don’t know if it’s his will, ask that he will grant the request if it’s his will.
* If we know it’s not his will, don’t ask him for it.
For our future selves, things that we know did happen to us would go in the first category and things that we know didn’t happen would go in the third. Once we’re in heaven, presumably nothing about our past lives would fall in the middle category. If that’s the case then praying for our past selves would not be in harmony with God’s will.
That’s assuming, of course, that God handles things according to the three categories mentioned above. He may not. As noted before, he might act on the prayers of our future selves in granting blessings to our present selves.
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