If I pray for a miracle but it doesn’t happen, does that mean that God didn’t hear my prayer? Did God not care about my petition?
It’s important that we pay attention to the roots of our requests to God in prayer. Are we praying for a particular outcome out of selfishness or worldly ambition? Or are we truly placing the outcome of the situation in God’s hands? It’s not wrong for us to pray for a particular petition, like for the health and safety of a loved one, but it’s important that we make our request to God in faith.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a terrific section on the topic of faith beginning with paragraph 143 and continuing through that section. It includes a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas that states, “In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace: ‘Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.’” If that leaves you scratching your head a bit, please don’t worry; I felt the same way the first time I read that, too.
In a very general sense, we can say that “to have faith” is similar to having trust in something. I can say that I have faith that the bus will arrive at the time it’s supposed to because, statistically, it usually does. But when we speak of faith in relation to God, it takes on a much deeper reality. We have faith in God, we trust in Him; why? Because God has revealed Himself to mankind as our creator, and He has made each of us out of love. God sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins so that we may have the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. We have faith in God because He has shown us how deep and boundless His love is for us. Like a loving parent, but infinitely greater, we trust that God knows what’s best for us, His children.
I know of a person who traveled to Lourdes, France, to visit the place where our Blessed Mother appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous. This particular individual went there to pray for the healing of a physical disability that they had struggled with throughout their life and had been the cause of much suffering. Upon their return to the U.S., this person still had the physical disability that they had struggled with. To the casual observer, it would seem that the trip was an utter failure; but they were able to share about the immense spiritual healing that had taken place in their soul through Mary’s intercession. They became aware of God’s love for them in a deeper way and that the Lord was seeking to work through the cross they carried through their disability. They trusted that God wasn’t punishing them with this suffering, God wasn’t apathetic toward their cries; rather, God was helping them to know they could lean on Him. It may not have been the healing they initially hoped for, but God gave them a deeper healing.
There are many times when it may seem that our prayers and petitions to God go unanswered, but it is precisely in these moments that we are called to lean on our faith in God our Father. In the Our Father we pray “thy will be done,” not our will. We have faith in the will of God and the truth that God’s plans are infinitely greater than our own. It may even be the case that we never know on this side of heaven, but we have faith in God’s response to our prayer.
The next time we make a prayerful petition to God, let us pay attention to what is at the root of our prayer. Is it a selfish request seeking to only further our own worldly ambitions, or is it a request that we can faithfully conclude with “thy will be done”?
Father Dan Kavanagh is director of the Catholic Deaf Ministry in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
