Your Father Knows What You Need

The Word of God is alive. One of the things this involves is that "now" words can spring forth from it, mixing with my heart in a variety of ways. I'd say it is something like different chemical reactions, if only I knew something more about chemistry. But it sounds reasonable.

Maybe it is more like an adaptogen. The Word comes to meet my now need. Ok, enough of analogies.

What I heard in today's gospel struck me in a new way, even though I've heard it hundreds of times before. "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him." The context there is not to rely on the number of words you can produce in prayer, or (ahem) feeling like you can find just the right word to express what you want to say to God. (Caught out -- yes I love precise words and find it pretty important to do the work to reveal my interior thoughts in all their magnificent brilliance...) Yeah, ok. Jesus says our Father knows what we need before you ask him. A couple things stood out there with immediate clarity.

First, God does actually know what I need and want better than I do. That is not the same thing as saying that God denigrates what I feel I need because He is smarter and knows better and I'm stupid. He is smarter, and I am stupid, but he doesn't treat me that way. He is a father, a teacher, and as Fr. Iain Matthew OCD says, he loves us from the standpoint of what we will be in eternity: whole, complete. God loves us into that; that's kind of the process that life in Christ on earth is all about. 

There have been plenty of times when I've come to the Lord with desires and realized his communication that he has a complete grasp on what my desire entails, while I have a partial grasp. At first, this was a bit offensive to me, because I did feel like he was rejecting something deeply important to me. Anything that gives a mental image of God as a mean oger is a lie and feeds spiritual warfare and human pride. My thought was something like, "Well, why would you care about knowing about my desires if you just want to tell me that they are aiming way too low?" It really revealed to me something about myself -- that I expected to be thought little of, not called on to fuller potential. This put me on the defensive and fed my distrust in God and my belief that I had to somehow pull myself up by my spiritual bootstraps, and THEN find favor with God. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

One time I specifically prayed about something, knowing completely full well that I was taking the posture of a toddler asking a parent for delightful goodies. There's something big in that. Theresianly big. In the first place, I approached God as a Father that I trusted in, and delighted in at least as much as the goodies I was asking for. I kind of knew my priority was not the goodie, but my posture of asking, because it was a trustful act of opening my real desire to God. It was on a Divine Mercy Sunday. It is not super often that the Lord will answer me in clearly discernable words, but this was one of them. His response was, "What you really want is kept in heaven for you with more certainty than if you had [this thing you are asking for all scheduled and prepared for today]." For years and years, that phrase echoed in my mind: "What you really want." For the first time I realized there was more in my desire than met my eye. God's desire was in it... but I didn't know Him -- or myself -- well enough to grasp the actual potential it was pointing to. Once I trusted God, he was ready to answer my prayer by this kind of confounding revelation.

Which leads me to the second point that became clear today. If my Father knows what I need before I ask him, a worthy chunk of my prayer is profitably spent on burrowing my heart into the infinite heart of Almighty God, who has all wisdom, all understanding, along with all provision for things temporal and eternal for me, and for all of creation. That, I suppose, could define contemplative prayer. 

I have a very strong need to understand things. If I am facing a crisis, whether that be health, relational, practical, spiritual, or any combination of these, my first natural response is to investigate every avenue to understand it. It gives me a sense of control of chaos, of peace and order. But I've definitely learned that this has limits. Sometimes some things really are out of my control. I can't understand problems away, or fix them by knowing about them. 

My Father knows what I need. Maybe lately I have felt like I have things pretty well in hand. As if "I and my Father are one." But this is also pride, and pride is danger. Humility is the true foundation of all prayer. What I am hearing today is the call to come to God, needing to be shown who I am. Not, obviously, fearing condemnation. But also not settling in to a comfort and control of my own making, that already has everything in hand.