Praying with Boldness

Benedicamus Domino!

Today, I'd like to talk about an idea in Christian thought which has puzzled me for some time, but which, I think, I know a little more about now than I did before. This is the idea that we must pray with boldness. In much hymnody about the saints, they are described as having boldness before the Lord. The Mother of God is described as having boldness with Christ because He is her son, and mothers can get their sons to do things that other people might not be able to. We take the wedding at Cana as the first of these motherly intercessions, where Mary asks Jesus to provide wine miraculously and He does it.

But what has always puzzled me is how we, when we are supposed to be humble and meek and such, are also supposed to pray boldly. Should we pray boldly for the things we want? Should we be demanding mercy or commanding grace? Is this what is meant by boldness in prayer? There are some Christians who seem to view God as their personal vending-machine. "Lord," they say, "I need more money. Please take away the demon of poverty and give me money." I once heard a preacher say that "our God is a results-oriented God. He wants us to pray to Him so He can do miraculous things in our lives." He meant healings, success, the realization of goals, and this in itself is not incorrect, but the equasion he used was missing something. "Accept Christ as your personal God," he seemed to say, "and anything you want will be added unto you, because God wants us to have whatever we want. He wants to give it to us, if only we accept Christ."

So, I reject this form of praying with boldness, because it misses out on some key elements of what it is to become a follower of Christ. I have only come to what I think may be the truth, or some of the truth at any rate, of things very recently, and I only discovered it by experience. It's not something that can really be described, but being someone who enjoys challenges, I'm going to try to describe what real praying with boldness would seem to look like.

Let's begin with intercessory prayer. We ask the saints and also our fellow Christians to pray for us on our behalf. We also pray for them and for the dead, or we are taught to do this in Orthodox Christianity. We believe that intercessory prayer is effective, both for the person being prayed for and the person doing the praying, especially if we ask for mercy for someone whom we truly do not like, since it humbles us and makes us less judgmental--we hope. We further believe that praying for someone is a mystical experience, which allows us to offer via our prayers some aid. It is God who is aiding the person, but it is we who are asking His aid, and so are somehow participating in it. This is a Mystery.

Now, a key element to true prayer is the complete and utter certainty that we in ourselves are, in fact, nothing. Or should I say: we in our egos are, in fact, nothing? At any rate, we have to really know this, and I don't mean intellectually. I mean that we have to know it deeply, and this is given by grace, and it will usually have to be given again and again, because that ego, those passions are stubborn things! So alright. First, we have the complete and utter certainty that we are nothing in our current state. Then comes the complete and utter certainty that God loves us as we are right this second. He's there right at this moment and is desiring us to come to him in our filth and nakedness. (Yes, I'm intentionally using those strong words.) We have to see ourselves like the man who was robbed on the road to Jerico, and Christ as the Sammaritan who will bind our wounds. Again, this is given by grace, and grace comes when we are ready to receive it. We can push it away if we wish, but praying regularly and trying very hard to silence the mind is a good beginning.

After the realization that God does in fact love us as we are, there must be a desire to become better. There must be a wish and a will to be changed by God, and a sort of surrendering to that change. I like to think of it as allowing ourselves to be caught up into the Kingdom of Heaven. This sounds terribly mystical and esoteric, but I believe that this is what we need to try to allow in ourselves. We can't make it happen, but we can try to keep a peaceful heart and keep trying to regain it when it is lost, which it often will be due to the world and its vicisitudes. In this surrendering to God, there will come a moment when we are perfectly cognisant of our unworthiness while at the same time being cognisant of His abounding love and mercy to us, and it is at this point when true boldness in prayer can happen. Because we know how manifold are God's works and how infinitely much He can do for us as compared to what we can do for Him, we become empowered in a certain way. We realize that in our weakness His strength can be manifest, and we pray, not emotionally or anxiously, but peacefully and with a courage that we might not otherwise feel.

You see, the hymnody often trips us up. Or well, it trips me up. We say in our hymns that since a saint has "gained the victory" by their struggles, they now have boldness with God. This often sounds to me as though a saint has somehow triumphed by his or her own will, in the manner of the stoic philosophers. Indeed, I believe (and this is merely an opinion) that the stoics have had a great influence on the poetry which has come down to us about the martyrs and the desert monks especially. However, to the point again, while the will and the struggle has to be there, it's the surrendering to God's love and grace in full knowledge of both our weakness and His awesomeness where the true victory is gained. We must struggle, yes, but it is a struggle which is not conducted by ourselves alone. True freedom comes when we surrender, not in a fearful and abject way, but in a hopeful and grateful way, to God and His bounty.

And so, again, we come round to the notion of living eucharistically. We can offer a lot of things (from our point of view, that is) to God. We can offer our talents, our time, our prayers, our finances, the work of our hands; but all this is a mere beginning. All this is a preparation for when we are able to truly offer ourselves, body and soul, to God, and it is only through his offering Himself to us that this can be achieved. There will be more about this mutual offering in my next post.

Deo Gratias!