Don't forget to pray for yourself.

Jesus used it, and he taught his disciples to use it. Why, then, don't more Christians use petitionary prayer to have a little heart-to-heart with God?

A student chaplain was assigned to the urology floor of a large urban hospital. One of the patients, a white woman about 30 years old, had been hospitalized for two months and was described by the head nurse as depressed. The student chaplain had visited her the previous week and observed that she was more interested in watching TV than in conversing with him.

This time, he found Mary a little more receptive. She told him that she was scheduled to have surgery again, because she had developed an infection from her previous surgery. "I've had problems with infections for 11 years, but what can you do about it? It doesn't do any good to complain. I know that everyone is doing their best. I just have to be patient." She volunteered that she had a cousin who was a Methodist minister and wrote her letters and sent cards. This prompted the following exchange:

Chaplain: I imagine that you have people praying for you, then?

Mary: Oh, sure. My cousin prays for me, and my grandmother prays for me all the time. There are lots of people praying for me.

Chaplain: You sound thankful for their prayers.

Mary: Sure.

Chaplain: Do you pray?

Mary: Sure. I believe in God. I don't really feel like I belong to any church. I don't go very often, but I believe in God, and I pray. I figure that if you just try to be a good person and do what's right, help other people, you know, that's what counts.

Chaplain: When you pray, what kinds of things do you find yourself praying for?

Mary: You know, I mostly pray for other people instead of myself.

Chaplain: You don't pray much for yourself?

Mary: No. I mostly pray for other people. I know that God didn't make me sick. I don't think God wants me stuck in the hospital. It's just my body. There are other people worse off than me, so I pray for them. If I'm meant to get better, I will, but there's nothing that I can do about it now except be patient. It isn't God's fault, though. I know that.

After a bit more conversation, the chaplain offered a prayer in which he asked God "to send your spirit of comfort and healing" to Mary. After the prayer, he expressed his hope that Mary would be feeling better soon, to which Mary replied, "Yeah, well, when it happens, it happens."

From his conversation with Mary about prayer, the chaplain felt that Mary had become apathetic about her life and her chances for survival. Commenting on this visit, the chaplain said he felt "professionally frustrated" because he was "painfully aware that she did not respond to anything said in the prayer." He continued to visit her, but after a few weeks, she developed an abdominal infection and died, leaving him to wonder if her passivity, what she called her patience, had contributed to her death.

This encounter raises the age-old question of whether it does any good to make requests of God.

Many of us are torn between Mary's view and the chaplain's view. Something in us resonates with Mary's realistic assessment of her situation and with her sense that there isn't much that God can do about it. On the other hand, something in us also resonates with the chaplain's view that we should not hesitate to ask God to "send your spirit of comfort and healing," for there is, in fact, something that God can do about it, and God may even be waiting for us to ask before acting on our behalf.

The chaplain, I think, was too quick to dismiss her view as a "fatalistic attitude." There is also something to be said for asking God to intervene in our lives and to do so in the very manner that we request. What is at stake here is the effectiveness of petitionary prayer.

To begin with, more confusion surrounds petitionary prayer than any other type of prayer. Mary's worry that engaging in petitionary prayer might imply criticism of God, as though God was somehow responsible for the fact that she is stuck in the hospital, is one of many such confusions.

Christians usually consider petitionary prayer the most basic form of prayer: this was the prayer form that Jesus himself used and taught his disciples to use.

While expressions of adoration and thanksgiving occur in the Lord's Prayer, and while this prayer also contains a strong note of confession, the prayer itself is a prayer of petition. In both biblical versions (Matt. 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4), the prayer asks the "Father" (or "Our Father") to respond to certain urgent requests of the petitioner.

Furthermore, Jesus' well-known prayer for personal deliverance in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39,42; Mark 14:36; and Luke 22:42) - "remove this cup from me" - is also a petitionary prayer. Much discussion of the effectiveness of prayer has centered on prayers for personal healing. The case above illustrates this in an especially poignant way. Would Mary be alive today if she had felt it appropriate to pray for her own healing?

The Catholic sociologist Joseph H. Fichter recently asked health care personnel whether, in their experience, patients turn to God in their suffering. In his book Religion and Pain (Crossroad, 1981), he reports that most responded that it depends on the religious background of the individual. In general, those who turn to God when they are sick are usually also those who turned to God when they were healthy.

Concerning the health care professionals' own views regarding prayer, Fichter says:

We asked them the blunt question whether they think that "prayer is a helpful part of the healing process for people in pain." None of the respondents disagreed with this statement, but the percentage of those who "strongly agree" is twice as high among the religious Sisters (61 percent) as it is among the physicians (29 percent).

Recognizing that an affirmative answer to this question could simply represent a belief that prayer gives the patient a more positive attitude and not necessarily a belief that God actually intervenes in the healing process, Fichter asked whether "in the long run, all healing is attributable to the providence of God." He reports that this question "did not get a universal affirmation, even from the professional religious.

"Three quarters of the chaplains and Sisters agreed with the statement, as compared to three out of five (61 percent) of the physicians, nurses, and social workers." He suggests that the lower percentage among the latter group may be due to their desire to "reserve some of the curative achievement for themselves." Respondents may also want to reserve some of the credit for the patient whose attitude may play an important role in the healing process.

While Fichter's study indicates that many health care professionals believe in the power of prayer to heal people and are also able to describe cases from their own experience that support belief in divine intervention, it does not tell us very much about petitionary prayer itself.

For example, we wonder whether we should ask God for healing or whether we should instead resign ourselves to whatever happens. We wonder what an appropriate request of God is, and what is inappropriate, and further, what our attitude should be when we ask God for something.

Should we be resigned, humble, and deferential (emphasizing our compliance with whatever proves to be "the will of God"), or should we be more bold, confident, and forceful (as in Jesus' story of the widow who took her case to the judge on several occasions until, out of exasperation, he finally acceded to her request)?

Moreover, how can we know whether our prayer has been answered, for couldn't God answer our prayer in a way we did not expect or correctly perceive?

As the Lord's Prayer and the Gethsemane prayer reveal, Jesus prayed to God as "Our Father" and "My Father" and thus forged a very strong link between petitionary prayer and a particular understanding or image of God. When God is viewed as a father, it seems especially appropriate to view prayer as an act of petition, for it is common for sons and daughters to ask their fathers to take certain actions in their behalf.

Still, where earlier generations of Christians could assume a common understanding of the God whom they addressed in their petitionary prayers, this is much less true today. Whether one's requests are addressed to God as father, mother, healer, liberator, judge, creator, or friend is likely to bear on the degree of confidence one has that God hears one's prayer and on one's expectations about how God might answer.

Thy will be done

In his major treatise Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion (Oxford, 1932), Friedrich Heiler points to three elements of the prayer experience: faith in a living personal God; faith in his real, immediate presence; and a realistic fellowship that we enter into with a God conceived as present. For Heiler, petitionary prayer is inconceivable if God is not understood to be a person.

For Christians, Jesus' own petitionary prayers create a very strong expectation that our prayers to God in our own behalf will reflect this intimate, personal relationship between self and God. Perhaps many of us do experience precisely this relationship as we pray for personal healing or for some other need or desire. For everyone who experiences prayer as a direct personal conversation with God, there are undoubtedly two others who view it as an empty form.

One reason petitionary prayer has fallen into disuse by many who consider themselves to be believers in God is that petitionary prayer is often understood as an attempt to influence the "will" of God. I believe that this understanding of petitionary prayer stands in direct opposition to the understanding that Jesus intended, namely, that it be an intimate, personal conversation, one in which both persons communicate fully and freely what is on their minds and what their innermost hearts have prompted them to say.

I suggest that one feature of Jesus' model prayers stands in tension with their personal communication aspect. This is his emphasis in both prayers - the Lord's Prayer and the Gethsemane prayer - on the "will" of the Father. Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer includes this petition: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And in all three gospel versions of the Gethsemane prayer, Jesus made this statement of apparent deference to his father after he requested the removal of the cup: "Yet not what I will, but what thou wilt," or "Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done."

Jesus' emphasis on the will of God in the Lord's Prayer, and his very strong emphasis on the conflict of his will with his father's in the Gethsemane prayer, is responsible for much of the confusion that has surrounded petitionary prayer throughout the centuries. And it continues to sow confusion for us today, diminishing our ability to view petitionary prayer as a wonderful opportunity to talk intimately - in heart-to-heart communion - with God. The problem, however, does not lie primarily with the model prayers themselves but rather with the fact that these prayers, especially the Gethsemane prayer, are taken out of context.

Jesus' statements of deference to the will of God in the Gethsemane prayer stand in some tension with the expectation that prayer to God is a very personal conversation. I can best explain this by reference to human relationships, especially those between children and parents. Heiler suggests that the main features of a human personality are thought, will, feeling, and self-consciousness, and that it is the will that is usually the source of greatest tension and conflict between children and parents. In fact, many so-called Christian psychologists believe that the primary obligation of Christian parents is to "break" the child's natural will so that the child will be receptive to the will of God.

Saint Augustine turned to petitionary prayer when he was being beaten by his teachers for being "slow at learning," and his parents merely laughed when he showed them the stripes on his back. As he wrote about this experience in The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Image Books, 1960), "I, little one, but with no little feeling, I prayed to you that I would not be beaten at school [but] you did not hear me." Instead of viewing his parents as the legitimate agents of God's discipline, the child saw God as a potential savior and called on him in his distress.

I believe that Jesus' model prayers, especially the Gethsemane prayer, loom in the background of this punishment scenario, as they both envision a conflict between the will of God and our own and counsel the subordination of our will to God's. The Gethsemane prayer also leaves the distinct impression that God, in his fatherly wisdom, will not always intervene but will instead allow the petitioner to experience the fate from which he or she pleads to be spared.

This is not, however, the case with Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. This prayer is profoundly intimate: it begins with a very personal address - "My father" - and proceeds with an unabashed and unflinching statement of personal desire: "Remove this cup from me." Moreover, the ensuing statement, "Yet not my will but thine be done," is expressed voluntarily and is not, as in the examples just cited, imposed from without by an external authority. Also, it is especially striking that even after Jesus said to his father, "Yet not my will but thine be done," he continued to pray that the cup might be removed. Thus, although Jesus offered to defer to his father's will, he did not cease to pray for what he desired. If anything, it meant that he was free to pray even more earnestly, precisely because he had placed the final disposition of the matter in his father's hands.

Lord, hear me out

Based on this analysis of the gospel texts, we need to reject the traditional interpretations of Jesus' Gethsemane prayer, such as this one offered by John Casteel in his book Rediscovering Prayer (Crossroad, 1981):

Only the endorsement of our asking with the words Jesus used in Gethsemane - "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done" - can save our prayers from becoming self-centered, trivial, or even harmful to ourselves or others. But to pray in this way is not easy. As William Temple said, we are tempted to pray that God's will be done, but then go on to tell God what his will should be.

This view exaggerates the conflict of discrepancy between our will and God's. Moreover, it is overly suspicious regarding the motivations behind our petitionary prayers (for how can prayers in one's own behalf not be self-centered?). Furthermore, it fails to take adequate account of the fact that Jesus' prayer at Gethsemane is part of an ongoing conversation or dialogue with his father, which is why he is able to discern his father's will in the matter and, at the same time, is free to "tell" God what he deeply and urgently wishes.

By reducing Jesus' statement - "Yet not my will but thine be done" - to a formulaic statement recited in every one of our petitionary prayers, we lose all sense of its original expression of personal love and solidarity. Absent from our prayers are the intimacy with which Jesus speaks to his father and the expression of any real desire or passion. The experience becomes desultory and routine. We pray in a spirit of resignation, as we assume that our will is contrary to God's and that, in any event, nothing we might say to God could possibly alter God's will.

If we assume that our will and God's will are inherently incompatible, the prospect of our will actually prevailing will not bring us any real satisfaction. Rather, this is the outcome we most fear and dread: we cannot help believing that in one way or another we will pay a price for our seeming victory over the will of God. If we get our way, it is as though God has decided to teach us a lesson: "Okay, have it your way, but I guarantee you that you will be sorry."

Some might object to this whole line of argument because it seems to imply that conflicts between our will and God's will simply do not exist. However, although our experiences of punishment as children cause many of us to exaggerate the conflict between God's will and our own, such conflicts do exist.

The Gethsemane prayer itself presents a powerful, if disturbing and ultimately impenetrable, example of how the human and divine will may be at times in fundamental conflict. In his inspiring book The Meaning of Prayer (Abingdon, 1949), the great American preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick suggests that it is sometimes for the best that our will is superseded by God's will, either because God knows better than we do what is good for us or because God actually wills better things for us than we will for ourselves.

We do not give enough credence to the possibility that God is not primarily trying to thwart our will or to correct it but actually shares our desires and wants for us what we want. Furthermore, we do not give sufficient attention to the resources available to us that, over time, effect a real, not imagined or merely wishful, congruence between what we want and what God wills for us.

The religious community can play a vital role in construing, in advance, what may or may not be the will of God. D. Z. Phillips in The Concept of Prayer (Seabury, 1981) cites the example of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. If someone living today were to argue, on the strength of the Abraham-Isaac story, that it is God's will that he sacrifice his son, the only appropriate response is that this cannot be. Why? Because "What Abraham did can only be understood, if understood at all today, by reference to the community of his day, the religious nature of the family, Abraham's position in the tribe, and, of course, the practice of child sacrifice itself.

"These factors are not incidental to the action, but give it its meaning." Thus, Phillips concludes, "What can conceivably be said to be the will of God is determined by prevailing beliefs about God." And this means that in a general sense, God's will is already known. To pray to know God's will, then, is somewhat paradoxical. Phillips continues:

I do not mean that one cannot seek God's guidance on a problem unless one knows what God's guidance is going to be, since that would make prayer superfluous. By "already known" I refer to the communal concepts of God which determine the broad limits of what the will of God could and could not be, in sympathetic or unsympathetic relation to which the individual believer prays to know the will of God.

Thus if the majority of Christians can readily think of God as healer, they would assume that God's will would be for Mary to get better and eventually be restored to full health. This, in fact, is what the student chaplain assumes when he prays that God's spirit of healing will come to Mary, an assumption that many who attended the memorial service - family members, health care professionals, and patients - confirmed when they thanked him after the service for his remarks.

But the religious community is not the only resource available for engendering congruence rather than conflict between our will and God's. An equally important resource is the individual's own relationship with God. When Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, his personal relationship to God seems to count much more than the religious community in "determining the broad limits of what the will of God could and could not be."

Because it was a long-standing relationship, Jesus "knew" his father's will without needing to be told what it was. In effect, he had internalized the major features of his father's personality - his thoughts, feelings, will, and self-consciousness - and was able therefore to "sense" or "intuit" his responses.

A concept in communication theory called coorientation helps us see how our relationship with God may determine, in any given situation, what we might call the "narrower limits" of what the will of God could or could not be (in contrast to the "broad limits" provided by the religious community).

In communication between individuals, coorientation means that we simultaneously orient our selves to the subject of discussion and to another person's anticipated view of the subject. Coorientation may occur without any verbal exchange, as we may simply anticipate the other person's response to the subject in question, and this anticipation takes the place of an actual verbal response: "There's no need to ask my mother if I can go. I already know that she will say no." Or, alternatively, "There's no need to ask her. I already know that she will say yes."

When applied to petitionary prayer, the concept of coorientation suggests that we may anticipate God's response to a need or problem of ours, with such anticipation based on how we have experienced God in the past. The petitioner "senses" or even "knows" how God views the matter, and this knowledge or awareness is itself a response to one's prayer.

This anticipation of God's response may occur even when our view and God's view are not entirely the same. The very point of coorientation is that we know not only our own thoughts and feelings about the matter in question but also the thoughts and feelings of the other.

On the basis of how a relationship works between two human individuals who have each other's interest at heart, we can say that God always responds to our prayers, as it is God's nature to do so. What we may not know is how God will intervene in the matter, though, even here, our prior experience of God's intervention in our lives provides some insight and clues.

This is why we must view petitionary prayer in the context of our personal relationship to God; this relationship plays at least as important a role as the religious community in determining what the will of God could be in any given situation.

If offering petitionary prayers allows us to view certain matters from God's perspective, our prayers will inevitably influence our own personalities, especially in effecting a greater congruity between our own natural wills and what we understand God's will to be. This does not mean that we must abandon our own will and become passive or merely resigned, for this would mean giving up our own personality, our own individuality, with our own thoughts, feelings, will, and self-consciousness - and this is the very opposite of what God wills. Is it not, after all, God's nature both to value and to foster our becoming the selves that we truly are? Instead, this tempering means that our personalities bear the influence of our relationship to God and reflect a whole lifetime of viewing our situation from what we understand to be God's own perspective.

We know, of course, that we have often misjudged God's perspective - often because we have held false or distorted images of God. But this is precisely the value of engaging in petitionary prayer: Prayers in our own behalf allow us to reflect on our intuitions regarding God's view of our situation. Such reflections may cause us to reevaluate what we previously viewed as the limits of what God's will for us could or could not be.

In any event, when we apply the concept of coorientation to petitionary prayer, we can appreciate the fact that prayer leads to increased understanding, both of God and of ourselves. By viewing the matter from God's point of view, we gain a new perspective on our own point of view.

As Daniel Day Williams points out in The Minister and the Care of Souls (Harper and Row, 1961), one way we keep prayer from becoming a mere routine and instead insure that it retains real meaning is "to keep it close to the search for self-knowledge."

Or as Anna and Barry Ulanov assert in Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (John Knox Press, 1982), "To pray is to listen to and hear this self who is speaking." And one way in which we "hear" and come to know our deeper selves is by hearing ourselves express our deepest desires.

Unlike our needs, which concern what is necessary for us to get through life, our desires express what we believe we need to become the self we truly are, to live the life we were created for. In hearing ourselves express these desires and intuiting how God hears these expressions of desire, we increase self-knowledge.

I want to conclude by drawing attention to another way in which we can apply the idea of coorientation to petitionary prayer: We can determine the limits of what God's will could be in a given instance by allowing the experience of others to guide us. In effect, we take someone else's perspective as our own. If we experience defeat, the memory of a grandmother who taught us that God never wants us to give up sustains our renewed efforts. Or a beloved teacher's conviction that God despises bigotry in every form enables us to believe in our hearts that it is God's will that we accept our son's or daughter's homosexual relationship.

Follow other examples

But we can also adopt the perspective of another by identifying with a character in the Bible or an important saint or other exemplary figure in our religious tradition. Those of us who value the Bible as our most sacred text often take the perspective of the psalmists and allow the petitionary prayers in the psalms both to put our own desires into words and to shape our understanding of what God could and could not will for us in the situation we now confront.

The psalms have been particularly popular where the situation involves the physical or emotional health of the petitioner, because so many of the psalms address precisely such situations. Thus the petitioner allows the psalmist to speak for her and anticipates that God will respond as God responded to the psalmist.

The fact that so many of the psalms are petitionary prayers means that they can be of particular value to persons, like Mary, who for one reason or another are unable to pray to God in their own behalf. Had the student chaplain encouraged her to read a portion of a psalm, or listen to him as he read on her behalf, he might have helped Mary identify with the psalmist and adopt the psalmist's anticipation of response from God as her own.

A psalm that would affirm her belief that she must be patient, but would reframe this belief as a prayer - and thus as anticipation of response from God - is Psalm 40, especially the first three verses.

I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

He might then conclude the readings with Psalm 131:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother's breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul. [I will] hope in the Lord from this time forth and for ever more.

In one of the most easily overlooked passages in Luke's account of Jesus in Gethsemane, we are told that after Jesus prayed that not his will but his father's be done, "there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him" (Luke 22:43). I believe that the angel from heaven represents God's response to Jesus' voluntary renunciation of his own will. God did not intervene to change the course of events. But God did respond to Jesus' prayer by sending an angel of mercy. So let us pray that when we, like Jesus, come to that point in life when we place our fate in God's hands, we, too, will sense the presence of an angel from heaven, strengthening us.

By identifying with the one who voiced this prayer - allowing his prayer to speak for us - we have assurance that we, like him, are God's beloved (Luke 3:22), and that we, like him, will know the strengthening presence of the angel from heaven, who is this love personified.

I do not know all the answers to the weighty questions that are raised in our minds about petitionary prayer and its effectiveness. But what I do know is that it is just as legitimate to make requests in our own behalf as to make requests on behalf of others. This is what Jesus himself taught us: As he prayed in his own behalf in the Garden of Gethsemane when he was in deep despair, so we should not hesitate to pray in our own behalf.

On this point, I believe that the student chaplain got it right. Mary should have felt perfectly free to ask God to send the spirit of comfort and healing or whatever else it was that she wanted for herself.

My concern here has been to make a strong case for the validity of petitionary prayer while recognizing that we will continue to have vexing questions about this form of prayer. In making this case, I have relied strongly on the communication model known as coorientation. But, in doing so, I am not basing my argument on a modern social scientific concept only, for in my view the most compelling model we have of such coorientation is Jesus' Gethsemane prayer.

There is nothing as intensely intimate and dialogical in all Christian literature as this profoundly moving prayer. What is especially striking about this prayer is the utter freedom that Jesus exhibits in pouring his heart out to God.

To engage in petitionary prayer as Jesus does is thus to have direct, immediate experience of our Christian freedom. To engage in petitionary prayer is to experience the release of our spirits from these recalcitrant bodies of ours.

Donald Capps, William Harte Felmeth Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey.