Advent Devotions

Today’s author is Prince of Peace member Carol Swanson.

Our prayer life includes praying for family. From the time we were very young we were probably taught to say a simple prayer like, “God bless Mommy and Daddy, God bless Grandma and Grandpa.”  We pray for the health and well-being of others we feel connected to—our friends and colleagues, people in our community.  Our church’s Weekly Prayer emails share requests for our members and mission partners. To deepen our appreciation of these prayers, I share once again from Marjorie Suchocki’s In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayers (chapters “Intercessory Prayer” and “Prayers of Healing”}.

“We pray for the well-being of those we love. In praying for their well-being, we are sometimes specific, but more often not. In faith, we do not know enough to be specific, for the fullness of another’s circumstance even those we most deeply love, is more than we are capable of knowing. But God knows. Remembering that all language in prayer is translated into God’s own knowing, words become particularly insignificant, and so we pray instead through images. We ‘see’ the face of the other, holding it in our heart with a yearning for that person’s well-being, offering this fullness to God as prayer. We visualize the one for whom we pray in our minds or hearts or wherever such visualizing takes place, and open ourselves to God’s will for that one’s well-being.”  (pp 55-56)

“So how and why do we pray for healing? …God wills the well-being of this world, even in the midst of its fragility and mortality, and not all illnesses need be terminal. Prayers for healing make a difference in what kinds of resources God can use as God faithfully touches us with impulses toward our good, given our condition. …prayers give God more to work with in influencing a person, body and soul, to fight a particular disease.” (p 59)

“Prayers for healing, even when the illness in question is thought to be terminal, sometimes contribute to a reversal toward health for the one for whom we pray. In these happy cases, God can combine the divine resources with those of the person’s own self and with the communities of personal and professional care surrounding the ill person…..God alone knows when such reversal is and is not possible in identified terminal cases. Thus, to give prayers for healing in the context of terminal illness is to pray for the health that is possible, whether that be total recovery, partial recovery, or the recovery of those who mourn. In releasing such prayers to God, we look for and rejoice in the forms of healing that can be and are given.” (p 64)   

“….for healing comes in many forms, and there is a health that is deeper than death.” (p 60)

“So, then, prayer that takes place in an interdependent world most surely involves prayers of intercession for healing, even for those who are terminally ill. Our praying makes a difference to what God can do. We offer our prayers for well-being, knowing that God will fill in the blanks of precisely what that well-being can be. And we know that there is no inadequacy in our praying, no matter how inadequate we might feel, for God’s own self, through the Spirit, prompts our prayers, receives our prayers, and translates our prayers into the stuff for God’s doing. And so we release our prayers to God to whom we give them, trusting this God who works with us all to do with them as God can and will.” (p 66)

As we close this series on Prayer, we pray:

Thank you, God, for your gift of prayer that deepens our relationships with you and the world. Amen.