I0. Prayer of Intercession

The prayer of petition presents a problem. For a long time I thought it was a pointless exercise. When a nun said to me: "I pray for you", I thought she would be better employed communing with God, advancing in contemplation of Christ's burning love for us, without bothering Him with our little problems inevitably trivial. For after all, if it is a question of myself or of other sinners, the "Good God" has only to attend to His own business, and there is hardly need to ask Him: after all, is He not the first interested One?

On the other hand, some people think that they know better than He does what they need. God is too far away, or too reticent; He does not intervene enough as one might expect God to do. If they could exchange places with Him, things would be better. That was the famous prayer La Bruyere chose to make fun of:

"My God, do for the cavalier La Hire
What La Hire would do for you
If you were La Hire
And if La Hire was God!"

This is a false attitude, but why?

Because it establishes equality which does not exist between God and the cavalier.

La Hire is not God ( he is so much less than God in that he portrays God as a pure and infantile projection of what he himself would like to be), and God is not circumscribed by La Hire.

Man is a potential being, he is at a stage of development and therefore needs a teacher. He does not know, as neither do you or I or the rest know, what we really want! Besides, we do not know how to wish properly: herein lies all the difficulty.

I once knew the mother of a family who made the following bargain with her children: "you're asking me to buy you this toy today. Now if in a week's time you still want it, we'll buy it for you!" First of all, she had to be careful with money. Then what she did buy, corresponded to what was expected and desired. Finally, and more importantly, her children learned at the same time about desiring, asking for, really wanting and eventually obtaining what they had consistently requested in a mature and thoughtful way. The gap in time between the formulation of the desire and its accomplishment allowed the children to remain free in face of the tyranny of a wish, often as imperious at the moment, as diminishing in intensity in the waiting. In this time interval, they learned the lesson of their ability to choose. What then can be wished for that is really important?

This is where La Hire is ignorant and where we too can lack knowledge. Why does God want us to ask Him, and invite us to pray to Him? Because it is a first step in communication with the living God. Now it is a risky thing to enter into a relationship with Him, for we do not know how far that adventure will lead us. I throw myself into it with faith and with trust. Before the wide-open heavens, in face of multiple possibilities, what I most need is daring, the desire to live to the full, the audacity to ask for the moon, the lot! The "top job!", to ask for everything. "We must not ask God for less than Himself" said St. Thomas. We must ask Him for His Spirit.

Teresa of Avila could serve as a model of daring and even of impertinence, with that will-power which certain women like the widow in the Gospel are capable of ...and which justify the saying: "What a woman wants, God wants." We find again the symmetry of the beginning, not that of man who wishes to escape from his condition, and who claims the status of a little god, but the symmetry of the reciprocity of the gift of self, in the overflowing of love:

"If the love you have for me
O my God, is like that which I have for you,
Tell me why do I stop
And why do you?"