Chapter 3

The Lay Vocation

God's love and prayer

God's love, then, has no "plan" for our lives, or no preconceived notion of our "true reality"; and so there is no sense in which we can disappoint him or make him unhappy. But, as we saw, this does not mean indifference to us, because he will in fact give us the opportunities for advancement and happiness, so that if we want to take them, they will be there for us.

Does this mean, however, that we should just launch out totally on our own, and we can never pray, "Thy will be done," or ask God what his will for us is?

No. This is another one of the Christian paradoxes. God's plan for my life is my life; but this does not mean that he does not know my potentials better than I do, and so know better than I what would lead to my enjoying life to the full. I may think I know what will make me happy; but God knows what will make me happy; and the two might or might not be the same.

God's respect for my reality is such that if I pursue what I think will make me happy, then he will not interfere to inform me that I am actually on the wrong track unless I want this interference; and if I persist, knowing that I am on the wrong track, to pursue as my happiness what I know will only lead to unhappiness, he will not interfere. This is, of course immorality: to define as happiness one's own misery; and hell is the "fulfillment" of this self-contradictory condition--getting the unhappiness you defined as "my goal in life; my happiness."

But God's love and respect is not indifference. If I want my happiness, and am willing to give up what I think will make me happy for what really will make me happy, then he will not leave me to the mercy of my own ignorance and folly. Hence, if I pray to my Master for a given thing, with the proviso that "if this isn't really what will make me happier, then please give me what will make me happier," the Master might not answer the prayer with what I asked for, but with what I would have asked for had I known as much as he does.

Now, in giving me what I ask for and/or what will make me happy, God also respects the reality of the rest of his creation. Thus, I cannot expect to receive what might make me happy at someone else's (or something else's) expense; such a request, involving harm to another, is self-contradictory and immoral. If my desire to be a great philosopher, for instance, meant that what I wanted was to be regarded as the world's greatest thinker, so that Immanuel Kant would be despised; then this envy of another's greatness means that I want things to be different from the way they are (because Kant is a great philosopher, and not despicable); and so what I want would be a contradiction--or in other words, frustration. And God's respect for me means that I would get what I really wanted in this case.

The danger in prayer, you see, is that you get what you want. You don't necessarily get what you ask for either way; but you get what was implicit in what you asked for.

The God we believe in does intervene in this world. He respects his world and respects it infinitely; but this does not mean that he leaves it alone. Even the world beneath us needs his help as it evolves beyond itself; and he intervenes gently to give it this help. He intervenes to help us too; but since we can choose, he helps us only to the extent that we want to be helped.

Prayer, of course, is a recognition that we cannot do anything on our own; that God has to cause our every act. Prayer is the act by which we acknowledge our absolute dependence on God.

Ordinarily when we talk of prayer, we refer to the prayer of petition: asking for something from God. But there is also the prayer of adoration, in which we simply recognize the relationship of absolute dependence we have upon God; there is the prayer of thanksgiving, by which we acknowledge that what happens to us is in fact due to God's causality and is the result of his love for us; there is the prayer of contrition, by which we acknowledge that we have made a mess of our lives, and we would now like him to perform the miracle of making us that different person who does not have self-contradictory goals.

Not all prayers are explicit, however; in a sense, the goal of prayer is for the person to be so aware of God and his dependence on God that God is always present to his consciousness in some sense--more or less as our hands are always present to us; not necessarily always adverted to, but always at least on the outskirts, as it were, of our consciousness. When this stage is reached, everything a person does is a prayer.

One thing that prayer is not: manipulation of God. The pagans used to "propitiate" the gods and try to get them to do what they wanted; and there are many radio preachers who, in effect, seem to be saying the same thing. Norman Vincent Peale, for instance, talks as though God and Jesus are a power in you by which you can do amazing things--which is true, in a sense; but which is not the point. God is not to be used; we depend on God, who loves us; he does not depend on us. Since he loves us, we will achieve our goals; but this does not mean we have "power," still less power over him. We are absolutely powerless, absolutely.

My problem with this sort of thing is not exactly what is said; it is the question of attitude. The "Let Jesus work in you to solve your problems and bring you joy" school is saying that what Christianity is about is that Jesus and God are "relevant" for our happiness; they are means we use to achieve our goals fully. But God is not the means: he is the end, for the Christian. The Christian is not interested in his own fulfillment, still less willing to use God as a tool to achieve it--even if God is willing to be so used.

St. Paul said this in his first letter to Timothy: "This is what happens to people who have destroyed their minds and turned away from the truth; they think religion ought to be 'useful.' Religion is, of course, very useful--when you aren't looking for benefits in this life." So you see I am not making this up.

And in fact this attitude (which I think is anti-Christian) works against itself, for the reason I was outlining earlier in this section. If you start praying to God and "using the dynamism of the ruler of the universe" to achieve your goals, then you will be using God to give you what you think will make you happy; and he will give you this, even if it does not make you happy--and it won't, unfortunately, because you are perverting the ordination of creator and creature.

It is still true that to be Christian, you have to give up yourself, your fulfillment, your goals, your happiness. If you do this, you will get fulfillment, happiness, and the rest of it; but you can't give it up for this reason, because that contradicts itself; you have to give yourself up absolutely. You must not matter to yourself.

The function of prayer, then, is not a vehicle by which you can manipulate God into giving you what you want; it is an acknowledgment that you are not important and only God matters. So, as Jesus said, we shouldn't worry what we pray for; God already knows what we need. Not that we shouldn't pray for them, so that we recognize that they come from God: "Give us our share today of the bread you rain down on us; release us from our debt to you if we release those in debt to us; and do not bring trouble down upon us; keep us from harm," as Jesus told us to pray. But we don't need to make a speech about it, as he told his Representatives just before he gave this example of prayer; you can't "persuade" God to do anything for you.

Then why does he tell us to persist and insist in prayer? Not because God will finally relent, like the dishonest judge with the widow pestering him; but because it takes a long time for us, often, to get out of the goal-seeking mentality of manipulating God and praying in self-forgetfulness, where "Thy will be done" does not mean "Thy will be my will." His will for us is our will for us; but it is this self-will which we must give up to be Christian. What we mean is not "give me what I want and make me happy with it," but "let me be happy with what will really make me happy, not with what I would like to have make me happy." In that sense we want God's will rather than ours; and this is what prayer is to do for us. This takes perseverance.