Lovely post at Light and Momentary about knitting, and giving, and praying. Really. Go read it right now.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting when I started knitting these socks, but it was not a rapid and dramatic answer.
Rapid and dramatic answers: for me, few, but memorable. They have never come when I expected them, or even when I hoped for them (in the sense of: Gee, every once in a while I seem to receive a rapid and dramatic answer. Maybe this time I will too!) Just enough, though, that I almost always have in the back of my mind: yes, even this improbably crazy hope could be granted, even this lost cause could be moved just a little bit farther, even this long stony silence could be broken, even this tiny offering could increase an already-infinite treasure. It’s a huge temptation to believe that prayer does nothing outside of the self. The gift of even one “rapid and dramatic answer” — besides the answer in its own time — is the memory: No, wait. At least once, I know Someone was listening and responded to me. With the knowledge that it’s not a thing you deserve, not a thing you earn, that it’s a gift — then you can keep speaking, keep asking, keep offering, not so much in the hope of a response but in the awareness of a Listener.
One of the things about Catholicism I particularly like is that our oral tradition is full of extremely dramatic answers to prayer, even to the point of, um, melodramatic ones. Kooky-sounding ones, even. Of course none of them are required belief or even required reading — if it doesn’t help you to believe in St. Rita’s festering stigmata then fine, just go about your business — but having all those stories in the back of your mind does, I think, insulate against the notion that the only kinds of “answer” you should hope for, and ask for, are invisible ones.
Not that it’s small potatoes to have God answer your prayers by, say, increasing your fortitude, or nudging you toward forgiveness, or granting a grace.
More that, we live in bodies, in a physical world, among other humans, and it’s perfectly all right to hope that answers come to us visibly. A sight that shocks us into perspective so that our own complaints seem small and we can bear up under them; an spoken message that displays that person’s human weakness and awakens pity, the midwife of forgiveness; a token, some object, that passes into our hands, a thing that is in some way exactly a manifestation of the asked-for grace, a thing that we can turn over in our fingers and read the clear message: I was listening.
Can we go too far in our expectations? Yes, most of us can, I think, but more by expecting in the wrong way than by expecting too much. If you fall into the answer-me-or-else trap, then you’ve got a problem. I imagine, though, that some of the great mystics (St. Teresa of Avila comes to mind) were granted the gift of a conversational relationship with God — something more nearly face-to-face — one where they could “expect” responses to everything they ask. (If you have read the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who had a special love for her “older sister” St. Teresa, you know the sort of audacious expectation of familiarity, of intimacy, that I mean. On one level it’s charming and childlike in St. Thérèse, but there’s a real edge to it too.)
I guess you could also go wrong by tending to see a message in everything. As far as I know, there’s no reason not to believe that there’s no such thing as a coincidence and everything is connected and woven together in a well-orchestrated Plan. (Me, I think that probably lots of things are unimportant details, but that it’s pritnear impossible from a human perspective to know which ones are truly unimportant.) But even if there’s no such thing as a coincidence, and that means that you’re constantly receiving a stream of personal Messages, um, well, then, so is everybody else so don’t let it give you a big head, OK? Or worry you a lot, either. It’s easy to see how certain personality disorders interact with a reasonable belief in the efficacy of prayer to produce serious trouble. (There’s nothing specially destructive about religious belief here. Personality disorders interact with all sorts of reasonable beliefs to produce serious trouble. Witness the interaction between OCD and standard hygiene recommendations.)
It seems to me that the proper attitude toward “answers,” whatever their form is to regard them as gift, pure gift, like all graces. Or maybe not exactly like all graces… because answers to prayer are unusual in that, by definition, one must “do something” to merit them. That’s “merit” only after a certain fashion: By definition, an answer is the kind of free gift you do not get unless you first ask.
…to be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize you are part of God’s story.
Worth reading the whole post, which is about trying to read “messages” into everyday life.
bearing blog 