Category: Spiritual Exercises

Intercessory Prayer

A friend inquired,

Never understood how your prayers can benefit me. Do you?

I wrote back,
If you have  no trouble understanding petitionary prayer, why should you have a problem understanding intercessory prayer? 
He responded,

Prayer is hard to understand. In a legal proceeding if my testimony can exonerate some one, I see the relevance. When I pray for you, does this imply I have some grounds for defending or recommending you morally? I don't think so. Is prayer a plea for mercy more than justice? Don't know. If I pray for someone fighting cancer, am I pleading for mercy? Well, sort of.

A Substack entry of mine opens as follows:

I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or for another, as in the case of intercessory prayer. In some of its forms it borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of petty, ego-enhancing benefits, a sort of Cosmic Candy Man, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable.  Some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  (Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?)  But much of it is objectionable.  What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material  benefits?

Now let's consider my friend's cancer example. Suppose you have stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and I pray to God for you. That would be a case of petitionary prayer in its intercessory form.  I could pray for your recovery or I could pray that God grant you the spiritual strength bear up well and accept your coming demise with equanimity as a sort of purgatory on earth and thus as an opportunity to atone for your sins and put your spiritual affairs in order.  It seems obvious to me that I should do the latter and not the former, especially if the friend is say 60+ years old and has had a good life.

Would it not be utterly absurd, and indeed morally offensive, to call upon God to grant a few more years of life to the old coot so he could waste more time chasing women, hitting little white balls into holes, and piling up  loot? I would even go so far as to argue that it is metaphysically offensive. After all, if the God of classical theism exists, then everything else is next-to-nothing in comparison ontologically (being-wise) and axiologically (value-wise).  This is is traditional RCC doctrine, not that the likes of Begoglio & Co, understand it or could explain it.

My friend asked, "If I pray for someone fighting cancer, am I pleading for mercy?" In some cases, but not in every case.  In the case I just sketched, I am not praying that God have mercy on the cancer victim's soul, or that God intervene in the course of nature  to stop the metastasis of the malignant cells.  I am praying that God spiritually fortify the soon-to-be-dead man so that he can make good spiritual use of his suffering and naturally inevitable death.

A Salutary Spiritual Exercise for the Month of Gratitude

November is gratitude month around here. One way to start the day right is by finding five things to be grateful for. Example:

  • I slept well.
  • All household systems are fully operational.
  • The cats are happy and healthy.
  • And so is the wife. ("Happy wife, happy life.")
  • Nature is regular and reliable: coffee goes down, thoughts percolate up, this day, every day. The sun also rises.

Prayer: A Fall-Back Position

Suppose there is no God. That might be so even if I am a believer. (And it seems that I must be a believer, actually or potentially, if I am to pray sincerely.) Whether or not God exists, when I sincerely pray for someone I produce benevolent thoughts that benefit me even if they do not reach beyond me.  Intercessory prayer, then, is good for me even if God does not exist. 

What about petitionary prayer? I take a dim view of  petitionary prayer for mundane benefits for oneself. Petitionary prayer for another, whether for material or spiritual goods, falls under the rubric 'intercessory prayer' which is good for the one who prays whether or not God exists.

As for non-petitionary prayer to God, prayer in which I do not ask for anything material or spiritual for myself or for another, but simply aim to elevate my mind/heart to God in worshipping and loving him, this too is beneficial even if there is no God. In this case there is a self-elevation and self-ennobling in a God-ward direction. 

Of course, I won't be able to engage in this sort of aspirational prayer unless I sincerely believe that the object of my worship, love, and aspiration exists.  My point, however, is that I become a better man when I engage in this sort of prayer whether or not God exists.

This is the 'fall-back' should it turn out that there is no God.

Objection: If you pray in any of these ways, and God does not exist, then your prayer life is one of self-deception and you waste your time on an illusion!

Response: Not so! For the objection to hold water, the objector would have to know that God does not exist. But he knows this just as little as the believer knows that God does exist. Both the existence and the nonexistence of God are epistemically possible, that is, possible given what we can claim legitimately to know in the strict sense of 'know' which implies impossibility of mistake.  One cannot prove either the existence of God or the nonexistence of God, if 'prove' is used strictly and responsibly.

An objector who thinks otherwise is himself guilty of self-deception. If he is an atheist, he fools himself into thinking that it is objectively certain that God does not exist, and if he is a theist, he fools himself into thinking that it is objectively certain that God does exist.  There are rationally acceptable arguments on both sides of the question, but no rationally compelling (rationally coercive, philosophically dispositive) arguments on either side.

Taming the Wild Horse of the Mind on the Road to Benares

This morning's meditation session ran from 3:10 ante meridiem to 4:00. Before that I was sketching six blog posts in my journal. My mind was on fire with ideas fueled in part by  some entries from Volume Five of Tom Merton's journal.  As flabby a liberal as he is, both politically and theologically, he is engaged in the seven volumes of his journal in a wholly admirable project of relentless self-examination. I love this argonaut of interiority with all his inner conflicts.

He fled the world but was drawn back to her. The contemplative of contemptus mundi  became a peace activist. He who preached The Silent Life (the tile of one of the best of his books) was an inveterate scribbler of journal entries, articles, poems, letters — how many volumes of correspondence? Five? –  not to mention too many books some of them good many of them not so good.

His journals are a treasure trove of ideas, references, self-criticism, culture-critical observations, weather reports, whimsical vignettes, extrapolations, autodidactic and amateurish, from his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Camus and plenty of people you've never heard of, Isaac of Stella, Evdokimov, Julien Green . . . I could go on.

Anyway, my mind was racing when I hit the black mat of meditation. Now you can pull in the reins brutally on the wild horse, or let him run. Best to let him run and tire himself out while you observe his antics. After 20 minutes he settled down, leaving 30 minutes for a peaceful dive toward Silence or Mental Quiet, the first stage on the mystical descent. The German Versenkung taken mystically* as opposed to nautically well captures the sinking below the  waves of discursivity into the depths.

Now it can happen that you sink so deep that you fear that you will never come up again. The terror of ego loss grips you. At this point you need a great faith and a great trust, lest you miss the opportunity of a lifetime: to penetrate the veil while enwrapped in the mortal coil. I was offered this opportunity many years ago but the fear of ego death  sent me to the surface again when the whole point is to transcend the ego, to let it go, to give up control.  The ego must die for the soul to live. I am alluding to what may be the deep meaning of Matthew 18:3: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The little child trusts. Plato: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

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* (KONZENTRATION) Zustand tiefer Konzentration, Meditation absorption , contemplation
die Verbindung zum Göttlichen durch die sitzende, stille Versenkung: connecting with the divine by means of seated, quiet contemplation.

If you need an app to pray . . .

. . . I will say a prayer for you.

You don't even need the 'closet' referred to at Matt 6:6:

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)

Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio, ora Patrem tuum in abscondito: et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi. (Biblia Vulgata)

Related words: closet, claustra, enclosure, claustrophobia, exclaustration. 

Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief

Substack latest.

One day, well over 40 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri de coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind, and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

Detachment and Renunciation

The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume Two, The Quest, p. 130, #242:

Detachment from the world is an absolute necessity for the man who seeks authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. But renouncement of the world is not necessary to any except those who have an inborn natural vocation for the monkish life.

It is not easy, but one can be in the world but not of the world. Paradoxically, however, the monastic life is an easier way to detachment. To live a life of monkish virtue in a monastery is relatively easy; to do so in the world, hard.  This is why monasteries were established in the first place.