The Ground of Our Beseeching

Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

- collect, 10th sunday after trinity

The collect for the 10th Sunday after Trinity makes a curious request. After asking God to keep His ears open to our prayers, it asks Him to exercise His power over those very prayers: “. . . and, that [thy humble servants] may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee.”

When I read these clauses I’m given pause. Make them to ask? What does that mean? Am I supposed to pray that God will . . . make my prayers for me? But still keep them inside me? Is obtaining the things I pray for dependent on me letting God make my requests in prayer instead of making them myself? But then . . . if I do that, are my prayers even mine anymore?

In her Showings, Julian of Norwich observes how difficult it can be to trust that our prayers mean something — that they are heard, valuable, and efficacious — “because of our unworthiness and because we are feeling nothing at all; for often we are as barren and dry after our prayers as we were before.” And then, she says,

“. . . our Lord brought all this suddenly to my mind, and revealed these words and said: I am the ground of your beseeching. First, it is my will that you should have it, and then I make you to wish it, and then I make you to beseech it. If you beseech it, how could it be that you would not have what you beseech?”

Julian calls this revelation “a great strengthening,” and proceeds to discuss how the fact that God is the “ground” of our beseeching is what makes it possible for us to persevere in prayer and have any confidence that it will persist in meaning something or effecting goodness.

Prayer is a strange thing. We talk about it a lot, and have to practice it all the time, so it’s easy to forget just how mysterious and odd it is. When we pray, we often take for granted that we can ask God to do certain things for us, or expect him to make us feel better or more at peace when we dislike our circumstances. We want a feeling of general wellbeing and peace, and perhaps a sense of confidence that we’re good at praying, to follow from the faithfulness we express in our prayer.

But last week’s collect, and Julian’s wisdom, challenge us to regard prayer as a gift. It’s not something we generate and give to God to prove how faithful we are — rather, it’s something God gives to us. It’s something He gives us the opportunity to participate in with Him.

Others have written about how a long practice of prayer forms our will so that it is in keeping with God’s will. Julian is more blunt than this, and more delighted. She writes, “it is the most impossible . . . that may be that we should seek mercy and grace and not have it. For everything which our good Lord makes us to beseech he himself has ordained for us from all eternity. So where we may see that our beseeching is not the cause of the goodness and grace which he gives us, but his own goodness.” The deeper our knowledge of and confidence in this reality, Julian claims, the more moved we will be to “beseech.”

For Julian, prayer (“beseeching”) is not just a matter of proving to God that she is faithful, someone committed to the Christian thing. To pray is to be bound to the goodness of God. I would suggest that this is true even if we ask something that is not in keeping with God’s will, and even if we bring it to prayer with great reluctance. By offering it in prayer at all, we implicitly accept that God’s will is a mystery to us, and practice a belief that our particular desires and requests must be submitted in some way to His goodness.

And if Julian is right, anytime we pray with a heart that is truly open to God’s will — regardless of the specific terms or content of a particular prayer — we are ultimately asking not for what we think we want, but for the goodness God has ordained. We are also enacting the union with Him that is given to us in Christ. Prayer is a plea for mercy and grace and, as Julian observes, any request for mercy and grace will never go unanswered; it will always be answered with a further gift of mercy and grace.

If we do not think God has given such goodness in response to our prayer, perhaps we simply need to pause until He reveals how it is given. We are, after all, but human — our sight is quite weak, and for now we see as in a mirror, dimly. God is eternally, infinitely good, which means He is eternally, infinitely mysterious. There is no way for us to fully understand His goodness or the ways in which He gives it. But as we persevere in our prayer, He grants us glimpses of His love for us, and always encompasses us in mercy and grace. This is, in itself, a powerful kindness, simple yet eternally significant: we are never left alone, and our prayers are always heard — always received, always treasured. As Julian writes:

“Beseeching is a true and gracious, enduring will of the soul, [oned] and joined to our Lord’s will by the sweet, secret operation of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord himself is the first receiver of our prayer, as I see it, and he accepts it most thankfully, and greatly rejoicing he sends it up above, and puts it in a treasure-house where it will never perish. It is there before God and all his holy saints, continually received, always furthering our needs.”

Perhaps we can articulate prayer as the practice of the life we have in Christ. In Christ, we give up our life to Him, and in return we are given an abundant life that we can hardly comprehend, a life that is held and sustained in Christ, which He continually both gives to us and treasures on our behalf. So too with prayer. God is the ground of our beseeching. He gives our prayer to us and gives it life, and as it is held and treasured in the ground of His being it flourishes and grows until that “will of the soul, united and joined to our Lord’s will” becomes the entirety of who we are.

We might think of the image of earth. God is the rich, loamy ground that holds the seed of our beseeching, and as He holds and treasures it — as He gives us that ground, and as we delight in Him, and as our prayer is safely held within His warm embrace — He causes the seed to grow and flourish until it is a magnificent tree. A tree that has its own life, its own needs, its own relationship with the world around it — but that is always rooted in the Ground that gives it life.

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If you’d like to read more of Julian’s writing on our “beseeching,” I recommend this edition of her Showings, chapter xix in the short text, and chapter 41 in the long text. Note: many translators use the word “united,” or something similar, where in the original Old English Julian uses the word “oned.” “Oned” is a term she coined, and is worth using in place of “united,” given its greater poetic, emotional, and spiritual accuracy and depth.