You Know Before We Ask

A reflection on the Collect for Proper 11: The Sunday closest to July 20

Today’s Collect of the Day¹ is Proper 11 (The Sunday closest to July 20):

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Today’s collect prompts one of the oldest questions of Christian theology: Why is prayer necessary, if God already knows our necessities before we ask? “Your heavenly Father knows that you need them,” Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, encouraging us not to worry and fret about the necessities of our lives. And yet Jesus also teaches us to ask God for our needs to be met every day.

Christ Consider the Lilies, by Kelly Latimore

Exercising desire and working out divine purpose

This has been a common question for people of faith for a long time. In the third century, the theologian Origen answered it this way: “God knows, of course, what we are going to say and do, but God has decided that he will work out his purposes through what we decide to say and do.” Our prayers are part of how God works out the divine purpose in the world. Perhaps Augustine was riffing on Origen a couple hundred years later when he wrote this in one of his letters:

Why [God] should ask us to pray, when he knows what we need before we ask him, may perplex us if we do not realize that our Lord and God does not want to know what we want (for he cannot fail to know it), but rather wants us to exercise our desires through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what he is preparing to give us. His gifts are very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it… The deeper our faith, the stronger our hope, the greater our desire, the larger will be our capacity to receive that gift, which is very great indeed.

In other words, the point of prayer is not to inform God of our needs, nor is it to perform for God to earn God’s favor or attention, nor is it to perform for others, to demonstrate our piety to maintain and consolidate status and power (a major theme for Jesus in his teaching on prayer in the gospels). The point of prayer, rather, is to “exercise our desires” so we can “receive what [God] is preparing to give us.” Prayer is not for God, in other words, it’s for us. Prayer is the main way we grow into our full capacity for communion with God.

This process of growth is necessary because “our capacity is too small and limited” to receive the good gifts God desires to give. I’m reminded of a well-known passage from C.S. Lewis:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This turns a common assumption about sin on its head. The reason we “fool about with” sinful desires is not that the gospel is a bit boring, and so we turn to more exciting pursuits. Instead, the gospel has infinite joy to offer, but we don’t yet have an appetite for it because our capacity for joy has atrophied, and we’re comfortable with what we know. We are like adults who never outgrew our preference for mac and cheese and hot dogs and thus forgo the glories of the complex flavors of the cuisines of mature food traditions, even when they are offered to us.

The gospel is an acquired taste

It would seem that the gospel is an acquired taste, and we must learn to perceive and appreciate it. Often it doesn’t immediately strike us as good, because our desires have been shaped and formed in an idolatrous way over many years. Our longings for belonging, security, and significance have been “aimed” in certain directions where we think those desires will be fulfilled, but we’re often very wrong. (This is essentially what idolatry is.)

So rather than just assume our desires are good and trust them as they are, or assume they are bad and reject them as they are, we “exercise” our desires in prayer, bringing them to God to be discerned and shaped. We do this so our capacity to receive the gifts God wants to give us can grow, and so we can participate with God in working out God’s good purposes in the world.

And our capacity to receive God’s gifts must grow, because salvation is not a transaction we make with God, it is a life we live in God. Through the incarnation of the Word, communion between God and humanity has been achieved and is now a reality for us in principle, but must be worked out in practice. When we were baptized, we died, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God, but now, for that very reason, we “set our minds on things above” (Col 3:2). Because of our union with the risen and ascended Christ, our essential humanity really is with God in heaven, but we must grow into this reality in our existential humanity, our everyday lives.

This is the trajectory of our lives as Christians, and prayer is an essential part of how we put off the old self and put on the new, how we bring our desires to God to be shaped and formed, how we expand our capacity to participate in the life God shares with us through grace. We pray because, left to our own devices (including own prayers, which is why liturgical prayer matters), our desire for God will grow cold. We must learn to aim our desires in God’s direction so we can live. We learn to do this in prayer, because it’s how we practice our communion with God.

Today’s collect recognizes the smallness of our capacity to receive the gifts God desires to give, and so we pray that God would “have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask,” trusting that “the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans” (Rom 8:26).

1. Every Sunday I reflect on the “Collect of the Day” from the Book of Common Prayer. A collect is a simple form of prayer designed to “collect” the longings of God’s people and distill them into a succinct, theologically robust request. The Book of Common Prayer has a wide variety of collects for all kinds of circumstances and needs, and assigns a specific collect to be prayed on each Sunday of the liturgical year, and then at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout the following week—the “Collect of the Day.”