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Helping on Our Knees
by Father Dominic Legge, OP 

The disaster in Haiti stuns the mind. The death toll is staggering. The wrenching suffering of the people of Haiti is, for those of us watching the news from a comfortable distance, unimaginable. Many of us desire to do something, yet what we can offer seems feeble indeed.

We can donate money, but what other material help can we give? Even the international relief supplies now headed to Haiti encounter logistical bottlenecks at Haiti’s airport and devastated harbors.

We can pray – but does prayer actually have the power to change anything, or is it merely a psychological comfort to us who remain contentedly remote from the real suffering in Haiti? 

If prayer means nothing more than keeping the suffering of the Haitian people “in our hearts and minds,” if it is simply another way to say “thinking of you,” then perhaps we should drop it. A prayer that does not leave my heart is no prayer at all, and it is hard to see how it could help anyone but myself. If this is what we mean when we say that we’re praying for the people in Haiti, then we might be guilty of a hidden but profound selfishness. After all, Haiti is full of real people in desperate need, and our response should be more than the spiritual equivalent of a cup of “Sweet Dreams’ herbal tea.

In its proper sense, prayer is a turning towards God. And, without doubt, God has the power to help even in the most desperate of disasters. “With God, all things are possible” (Mt 19:26). 

Still, can our prayers change God’s mind? (An impious priest once introduced the intercessions at Mass by saying: “God knows what we need even before we tell him – but I guess we’re going to tell him anyway!”)  God is eternal and unchanging, and so the answer must be “no.” All is “now” for God.  In fact, in His eternal “now,” God already knows what will happen in Haiti tomorrow, next week and next year.  Then why pray? 

St. Thomas Aquinas, with his usual perspicacity, tackles this problem head-on. God wills some things to come about through the natural actions of creatures. He willed you to exist, and also that you would come to exist through the free actions of your parents and even of others (like the doctor who delivered you). Just because their actions were free does not mean that God was uninvolved. In the same way, God has eternally ordained some things to occur as the result of the prayers of others. We do not pray to convince God to act; our prayer for others is actually God’s way of permitting us to share in the good that He wants to give to them. As Aquinas puts it, “we do not pray to change the divine disposition, but that by our prayers, we may obtain what God has appointed.” 

There is more. God does not will the evil we encounter in the world – which means God does not affirmatively will the suffering and death that accompanies a terrible natural disaster like Haiti’s earthquake. (In fact, Aquinas hints that, before the first sin, human beings would have enjoyed such a harmony with nature that they could avoid injury from such events – perhaps it would have been something resembling the anecdotal evidence that cats and dogs can sense an earthquake before it strikes.) Evil, suffering and death are the fruits of sin, of a turning away from God, of the folly that we can be self-sufficient without Him. Seen in this light, sin is the opposite of prayer. And a true prayer – a humble turning to God in the midst of our weakness – is the perfect remedy for the evil and suffering in the world.

We cannot know with certainty the effect of our prayers. Neither can we know the full extent of the effects of our sins. Perhaps some innocent child is suffering in the rubble of Haiti because of my impatience and selfishness. All the more reason for us to do all we can – on our knees.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)