Prayer as Surrender

The main condition of successful prayer is seeking God's plans rather than our own.

by John Powell

I have to make a disclaimer right at the beginning. I have to tell you that I'm a phony. It's terrible living with myself after I give a good sermon.

I remember once giving a sermon on death, and I was asking people, "What do we have to fear? If we really believe that death is the beginning of life, it's not the end and suddenly I got a pain in the center of my chest.

"Whoa! I said. "This could be a heart attack!

Recently they put out a John Powell reader (called Through Seasons of the Heart), and I was asked to review the selections to make sure they were the most important things I wrote. Well, I was reading the manuscript, and I said, "Hey, this is good stuff. Wonder why I don't practice it?

And I really mean that. What I'm about to say to you represents my ideals, and you might know more about it than I do.

They say that every relationship is as good as its communication. I think that's true in our relationship with God, too. Our relationship with God is about as good as our communication with God, and this communication is called prayer.

I believe that God hears us and responds to us.

I pray all day long. I talk to Jesus. If someone could drop a sound track in my head, they would say, "Hey, something's the matter with this fellow; he's talking to someone who isn't there to which I would say what Franz Werfel wrote at the beginning of The Song of Bernadette, "For those who believe no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.

One time recently I heard myself say, "Jesus, you better be there. I've gambled everything on you. You better be there. And I realized my fractionhood again.

I asked a Scripture scholar once, "How is it that people who study Scripture can come up with such different interpretations?

My friend said, "It all depends on your assumptions.

"Oh, I see. And you can assume something to begin with and then you interpret Scripture accordingly?

"Yes, he said.

I think we do that with regard to prayer, too. There's an assumption the deists make that God does not interact with us. They believe that God gave the world a flip, and then put it on its own, gave it natural laws and so forth. I don't believe that.

I classify myself a theist, who really believes in the interaction of God, that God hears us and responds to usnot always the way or on the time schedule we would like, but he does respond.

What's really important at the beginning of prayer is to pray for the grace to pray well, to ask God, "Give me the grace to pray well.

I think everything is God's gift. I've often thought humility and pride begin the same way: by acknowledging everything that's good. Then humility attributes it all to God, and pride claims it for itself.

So I think that we have to ask God at the beginning of our prayer, "Help me to pray well. Help me to be real with you, God. Give me that grace and enlighten me and empower me to know that you are there, and that what I'm saying is important to you.

At the bottom of every religious experience is surrender to God.

Not long ago one of the of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, published his correspondence with the great psychiatrist Carl Jung. He thanks Carl Jung for his contribution to Alcoholics Anonymous. He said, "You have no idea the important role you played in the forging of the famous 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. You were treating a man named Roland H., and you said, 'Roland, you're a hopeless alcoholic, there's nothing more I can do for you except take your money, and I don't want to do that.'

"Roland asked you, 'Is there anything I can do?' and you said, 'Yes, there is something you can do. Have a religious conversion. Have a religious experience.' (And Roland H. did have a religious experience, and he became sober. He's a recovering alcoholic.)

"At the same time, continued Wilson, "my doctor told me I was a hopeless alcoholic. And I said, 'Isn't there something I can do?'

"At the time I was reading William James's A Variety of Religious Experience, and I noticed at the bottom of every religious experience was that turning your life over to God, that surrender to God. So I went home, and I said, 'God, I don't know if I even believe in you. But if you're there, if you're there, God, will you help me please?'

"In that moment I knew I was healed. In that moment I knew that the addiction was broken, that I was a free man, maybe for the first time in my whole life.

He talks about this in a movie that was recently on television, My Name is Bill W. It's about how he experienced the peace of God, the strength of God, but at the price of surrender, of turning his life over to God. That is very important. To experience the reality of God in prayer is that moment of surrender.

I recently read a story by a woman who said that as a girl she was poor. She said, "I grew up in a flat, but I married a man who had money. And he took me up to a place where I had flowers, and I had gardens, and I had grass. It was wonderful. And we had children.

"Then suddenly I became sick. I went to the hospital, and the doctors ran all sorts of tests. One night the doctor came into my room, and with a long look on his face, said, 'I'm sorry to tell you this. Your liver has stopped working.'

"I said, 'Doctor, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that I am dying?' And he said, 'I, I can't tell you any more than that. Your liver has stopped working. We've done everything we can to start it.' And he walked out.

"I knew I was dying. I was so weak, I had to feel my way along the corridor down to the chapel of the hospital. I wanted to tell God off. I wanted to tell God, 'You are a shyster! You've been passing yourself off as a loving God for two thousand years, but every time anyone begins to get happy you pull the rug out from under them.' I wanted this to be a of God.

"And just as I got into the center aisle of the chapel, I tripped, I swooned, I fainted. When I awoke, I looked up, and there stenciled along the step into the sanctuary, where the altar is, I saw these words: 'LORD, BE MERCIFUL TO ME, A SINNER.' I know God spoke to me that night. I know he did.

She didn't say how God communicated this to her, but what God said was, "You know what this is all about. It's about the moment of surrender; it's about bringing you to that moment when you will surrender everything to me. These doctors, they do the best they can, but they only treat. I'm the only one who can cure you.

And she said, "There with my head down on my folded arms in the center of the chapel, repeating, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner,' I surrendered to God. I found my way back to my hospital bed, weak as I was.

"The next morning, after the doctor ran the blood tests and the urinalysis and so forth, he said, 'Your liver has started working again. We don't know why. We don't know why it stopped, and we don't know why it started up again.' And I said in my heart, But I know. Oh, but I know. God has brought me to the brink of disaster, just to get me to turn my life over to him.

That's what William James said is at the bottom of every successful conversion: the turning your life over to God.

Sometimes God lets you love the question until you can live the answer.

I remember when I was going away to become a priest, I went across the street to say to the man who had been so good to us growing up. He had money, and he bought us roller skates and footballs. When I told him I was going away to the seminary, a stricken look crossed his face.

He said, "Oh, don't! Oh, don't do that.

I was puzzled, and I said, "W not?

"Because there is no God. There's no God. My son was a medical doctor, and he was drafted into the army in the Second World War. He came back a broken man, and he could no longer practice medicine. No God presides over this world.

And I thought, How strange that such a good man doesn't believe in God.

He told me he had been raised in the faith, and he knew the Scriptures better than I did. But he thought faith was a lot of baloney, that there is no God.

To say the Jesuit novitiate was Spartan is an understatement. It was terrible. We knelt on wooden blocks for three hours a daywe all had housemaids' knees. The doctor who examined us for the military draft said, "Do you guys shoot craps for a living?

"Uh, no. We pray.

One day I was walking along in my long black skirt, and I thought, What if there is no God? I went up to the novice's chapel, a small little chapel on the third floor of our novitiate, and I prayed, "This is mayday. This is mayday. O God, help me, if you're there. And nothing happened.

So I went down to the larger chapel, the community chapelI thought I'd get better service thereand I said, "O God, please help me! And nothing again; nothing happened.

Someone has written that God lets you love the question until you can live the answer. I think that's what God was letting me do, because on a night in the spring of that year God touched me. I was in the corridor of the novitiate, and I felt filled with the presence of God, just before our night prayer. It was like being alone in a room and suddenly feeling a hand against your face. That novitiate became a heaven on earth because God touched me, and suddenly nothing was the same. Oh, I knew it!

I previously had gone to the master of novices telling him I was an atheist. He was from the Carl Rogers school of counseling: he said, "Uh huh, uh huh. (You have to get new ball bearings put in your neck every Christmas when you do that.)

Well, I went back and said, "Father, guess what?

And he said, "I know. I know.

But I had to experience four months of the hollowing out before the grace of God could repose in its place, in the emptiness that had been created by God's absence and by my doubts. When I read that sometimes doubt eats away old forms of faith, so that new and deeper ones can be born in usI truly believe it.

We have to seek God's plans rather than our own.

I think that is a main condition for success in prayer. I think without a doubt that prayer really changes things: It changes us! We change. We become ready. But I think that the main condition is that I have to seek God's plans rather than my own.

I have a sign on the mirror of my room that I see every morning in my groggy condition, when I first wake up: WHAT HAVE YOU GOT GOING TODAY, GOD? I'D LIKE TO BE A PART OF IT. THANKS FOR LOVING ME.

I have to find my place in God's plans, rather than make my own little plans and then ask God to support them: "Come on, God, give me an A in this course. Come on, God, do this for me. Instead, I pray, "What have you got going today, God? You love this world. You loved this world into life. You created this world. We're all yours. What's my part in the drama? What part do you want me to play? I will play any part you say. Want me to be a success? I'll be a success for you. Want me to be a failure? I'll fail for you. Whatever you want.

That's the condition of successful prayer.

We have a problem with the prayer of petition. You're not going to like this, and I don't even like to say it, but we can't get things from God because we ask for them. That would imply that we have a power over God. If I ask you for something and you give it to me, it means I have a power over you. We don't have that power over God.

But Jesus is so big on the prayer of petition, "Ask and it will be granted to you, knock and it shall be opened to you. Keep asking. And I'm saying that God is not influenced by our prayers.

That's because God has already held out graces to us. God has already decided to give us certain graces. God has already decided to enter our liveson the condition that we pray, that we are ready to receive these graces of God. One of the conditions is that surrender to God; that total surrender to God: "Into your hands, Father, I commend my spirit. I used to carry my mother up and down the stairs of our home here in Chicago. She would grab onto the banister and hold on to it so tightly we couldn't move.

I'd say, "Momma, you have to let go of the banister or we can't move.

And she looked at me with her plaintive little eyes and said, "I'm afraid you'll drop me.

I said, "Momma, I'm going to drop you right now. When I count to three, I'm going to drop you! And then she would let go, and we'd go two more steps, when she would grab on again.

That is a microcosm of my interaction with God. I'm hanging on to the banisters of life. I'm hanging on to these little things that make me feel secure. But God loves me more than I love my little mother, and God would never let me come to any harm. God knows where we're going.

It's that moment of surrender: "What have you got going today, God? I'd like to be part of it. I think that God has already offered us these graces, but we have to be ready for them, to accept them.

I have to tell God who I really am.

And this brings me to what I would suggest is the beginning of almost every successful prayer: I have to tell God who I really am.

You know that you can't deal with masks. If I put on a mask now and say, "My little children ... you couldn't relate to me. I would be giving you only a mask to relate to. When it comes to people who wear masks, you may have known them for a long time, but you've never really known them; you've never been able to see through that mask.

It's very important to say to God, "Hey, God, this is who I really am. Sometimes we think we ought to say the pious words in our prayer books. But sometimes they don't represent what is really inside of us. We say to God, "O, Holy Father, I am filled with the sweetest sentiments of faith, hope, and charity. And we're really filled with homicidal thoughts.

We have to tell God that: "This is who I really am. God can't deal with a mask any more than you or I can deal with a mask.

And who I am changes every day. It depends on the amount of sleep I've had, the amount of food I've had, depends on things going my way. But I try to tell God who I really am.

Then I listen to God. I listen with the five antennae of the mind: God puts new ideas in my mind. God puts new desires in my heart. God puts new peace in my emotions; sometimes he puts affliction into those emotions. (God comes to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.) Sometimes God stirs up memories inside me. God puts words in my imagination.

The real difficulty in all this is the power of discernment. I have to know whether God really said this to me, or whether I made it up. And I think there are three tests. First, when God touches us, it lasts. Somehow it lasts. It endures. If the next morning I can't even remember what happened, it probably was not God.

Second, it immerses me deeper into reality. Instead of putting me off in some ivory tower somewhere, it puts me deeper into contact with reality.

The third test is the charity test: it makes me a more loving person. Then I know that God really has spoken to me.

Once I was giving a talk to all of my order's houses in the Midwest. I was the third speaker on a panel of three. I'm never nervous before I speakI mean, I have too much mileage on my mouth. At least I was never nervous as we traveled around to all the other houses.

We came at last to Loyola University, here in Chicago, where I teach. I was confronted with my own community. I wanted to impress them. They'd never heard me speak, and I wanted to tell them, "Fulton Sheen is coming out from wraps tonight, brothers, you've had a gem right here in your midst. You may not have known that, but you did.

So I was nervous. My mouth was dry. My hands were cold. When all else fails, you try prayer, right? So I tried prayer. And nothing happened.

I said, "Jesus, I'm asking in your name. You said whatever we ask in your name you're going to give us. And nothing happened. So I said, "You're trying to tell me something? And he did.

I heard inside me (you can debate my sanity later), "You're getting ready to give a performance. You're getting ready to perform for your brothers so they'll know how good you are, and they don't need that. They need you to love them so they will know how good they are.

I looked out at the community, and I said, "I'm going to love you. I don't know whether I really have in the past, but from now on I'm going to love you.

It is true what they say, that when you love you are not nervous. All nervousness disappeared: the saliva came back into my mouth, the blood came back into my fingers, and I felt very much at home.

And I knew the effect when I love. When we love, God acts. God did act that night through me. I know he did.

Father John Powell, S.J., is professor of theology at Loyola University at Chicago.

(c) John Powell

Preaching Today Tape #108

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