God’s will first

We should pray for blessings and graces, not miracles. That is, we pray that God’s will be done — that he will bestow special blessings and graces of improvement, change, joy and happiness on the situation at hand.

If God chooses to upgrade our request to an outright miracle, that’s his prerogative, and we rejoice if so. But all we must ask, through the intercession of our candidate for canonization, is that God’s will be done.

A matter of miracles

One might ask, “Why not pray for a miracle, since Jesus said, ‘Ask and it shall be given to you’”? Furthermore, “Anything you ask of the Father in my name, it shall be granted to you.”

It seems that if you don’t ask for what you want, you might miss the chance to receive it. To use a golf analogy: If you want a hole-in-one, you aim at the hole, not some general area of the green hoping for a favorable bounce.

A problem exists with this all-or-nothing approach, whether in golf or in prayer. Unnecessary pressure might fall on the players, or the pray-ers, to get everything they want or feel unsatisfied. It also assumes we know what is best — a miracle! — when something less might be optimal.

However, another school of thought says, “Expect miracles!” These thinkers argue the problem is not praying big enough — offering only small prayers and then trying to control the outcome. Big prayers force us to rely solely on God, acknowledging we cannot do it ourselves.

How to pray

So the answer might be: Pray big, but let go and leave the outcome to God. Pray with love and joy for the Lord’s will, not with demands that he conform to ours.

Bishop Robert Barron often says we are in a theodrama, not an egodrama. The world does not revolve around us, and we are not directing the production. “All the world’s a stage,” but as Catholics we must add: And God’s the director.

Handling faith and hope constructively means believing God can do anything, while knowing he will not do everything exactly as requested. Likewise, we hope God will grant our needs, but we shouldn’t hope ourselves into frustration or discouragement when things don’t move as fast as, or in the direction, we assumed.

It’s a bit like playing the lottery, to use a mundane comparison. You buy a ticket and hope to win, but your actual expectation of winning is virtually nonexistent. You know you could possibly win, sure, but you don’t quit your job while demanding that you will.

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, who will be beatified this month, said: “The essence of prayer is not the effort to make God give us something. ... Rather, the purpose of prayer is to give God the opportunity to bestow the gifts he will give us when we are ready to accept them.”

The seemingly impossible

God will answer our prayers; we just don’t know how, when or where. We have faith and hope in what is possible but refrain from demanding anything. As the saying goes, “Pray like everything depends on God, but live like everything depends on you.”

“What though the odds be great or small,” we hope for all possibilities, as the Notre Dame fight song implores. We, too, are fighting, praying to the Father for the seemingly impossible, no matter what the oddsmakers might predict.

“I do believe, help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24) cried the desperate father begging Jesus to heal his dying son. We want to believe; we do believe. We ask God for help in that believing, trusting in his will for whatever comes next.