Petitioning God: How I Learned to Get Prayers Answered—
and Find Light & Joy
Chapter One: Introduction
I was going on fifteen when the Creator of the universe decided to zap me, at a
junior high Bible study I’d gone to for purely social reasons. (I’d known I was gay
for about a year, but—happily—the process of chasing girls wasn’t really any
different from what most of my friends were doing to chase boys.) After about half
an hour of chips and dip, Hawaiian Punch, and awkward attempts to impress our
newfound objects of desire, we giggly adolescents settled down in our classmate’s
living room, and the Presbyterian minister began a simple talk about the parable of the
sower. A few minutes into it, suddenly a huge presence—way too big and powerful
to be a figment of my imagination—was lifting me up and showing me, in a blinding
flash of light and truth, that everything on Earth was contained within a sort of giant
aquarium, which was itself part of a larger world where everything was overflowing
with love and brightness. Suspended, just for an instant, above the sofas and chairs
and paintings, I knew everything was going to be OK, and that nothing earthly was
really very important in itself, due to the planet’s position as a world within a larger
world. A minute or two later, when I tuned back in to the minister’s talk, he was on
the last category of the sower’s seed, that which fell on the good soil and yielded a
hundredfold crop. I thought my brain was going to explode with joy.
Over the decades since, my memory of my vision has been an awesome source of
comfort, and my relationship to the huge presence has been constantly evolving—and
still is evolving, even to this day.
At some point after the Bible-study zapping, I started thinking how neat it would be if
I could get petitionary prayer to work—you know, “ask, and it shall be given unto
you.” So I started trying to figure out how to get the being to give me what I asked
for. The only method I knew about from the Bible was faith, so I started asking God
with a kind of willed belief to prevent my biggest problem in life, which was
embarrassing incidents caused by my congenital hearing impairment. What I mean by
“willed belief” is that I simply tried my hardest to believe God was going to do what I
was asking. Well, it worked! The incidents, which mainly consisted of being called on
in class when I had no idea what was being asked, largely stopped.
As time went on, I gradually began to pray for other kinds of help, and to develop—
by trial and error—more sophisticated petitioning techniques. By my early forties, I
was getting prayers answered at a pretty remarkable rate in areas like relationships,
employment, and my efforts to teach school despite my disability. But this success
came only through repeated psychological struggles. Since I had never seen a book
on praying that looked at what actually took place in the gray matter of the person
trying to pray, I began keeping a detailed spiritual journal. That journal is the raw
material of this book.
The main thing I’ve learned is that successful petitioning is nearly always tied to
lessons we need to learn or spiritual growth we need to undertake if we want God to
answer our prayers. I discovered this in an “aha” moment when I suddenly realized
how the whole prayer issue fit together with my long-held belief that God lets
undesirable things happen to us in order to help us mature. Since the Creator (who is
love, as Jesus came to tell us) hopes we’ll freely choose to be transformed from what
we naturally are (well-meaning, maybe, but often selfish and shortsighted) into beings
who are truly in the image of God, he shapes our circumstances to spur us on to
make this choice of transformation. This means that whenever we do meet God’s
challenge and turn one of our unloving or shortsighted attitudes over to God, letting
him or her replace it with a godly one, we qualify ourselves to have the corresponding
unwanted circumstance removed or changed, since we no longer need the lesson it
was designed to teach. All we have to do is ask faithfully, and God will be glad to
deliver.
The Biblical basis of this idea of attitude adjustment is Jesus’ introduction of the
Lord's Prayer, when he says we’ve got to forgive others if we want God to forgive
us and answer our prayers (Matthew 6:14-15). Jesus states the same principle in
another context in Mark 11:25: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have
anything against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your
trespasses.”
Suppose there’s somebody at work who really ticks us off. I think God put them
there to challenge us to change our feelings toward them. This God who is love
wants us to forgive them—for existing if for nothing else—and to love them as we
love ourselves. And if we do this, God will then forgive us and give us what we pray
for.
If you’re thinking this won’t work because when someone ticks you off, there’s no
way you can change the way you feel about them—well, trust me, I was just as bad
as you are. But that’s what Petitioning God is all about: how I learned to let go of my
anger and other selfish attitudes and let God change me, so that then God was glad to
give me what I asked for. It wasn’t easy, but that was how badly I wanted my
prayers answered!
To get a petitioning dialogue started, one method that works for me is to ask myself,
“How do I, in my unimproved state, really feel about this person or this problem?”
and “How would God prefer I feel?” This jump-starts the conversation I’ve got to
have with God and my conscience if I want to find out what it is God wants me to
change before he’ll change the unwanted circumstance, which he’ll be glad to do
since it will have fulfilled its function of spurring me to change. That is, he’ll be glad
to as long as what I’m asking for can fit into his big plan of spreading the kingdom of
heaven on earth. (That last point will become clear as the story goes on.)
On the matter of which pronoun to use for God, I’ve decided to mostly stick with
“he,” since this seems to make for the smoothest reading. But since God is not male—
or even a human, for that matter—I plan to sometimes use phrases like “he or she or
it,” in an effort to cover all understandings of the deity.
The important thing for all of us to realize, and continually re-realize and re-realize
again, is that God is love (as other prophets as well as Jesus came to tell us), and God
loves us, and will help us out in a heartbeat if we’ll only make the choice to align
ourselves with that love.
To carry out a petitioning project, we have to look inward—the only place God can
truly be found. This is, to be sure, a huge challenge in our twenty-first century world,
its strong emphasis on never-ending external communication.
But if we can do our looking inward, we’ll be on our way to becoming double
winners. The transformations we find we have to undergo to get our prayers
answered typically bring us even more fulfillment than the granted petitions they give
rise to. M. Scott Peck, author of the classic The Road Less Traveled, describes the
project of spiritual growth as arising out of "smart selfishness." We—not those folks
we stop hating—will be better off this way.
What’s more, the whole act of obeying our consciences and participating actively in
God’s love is—at least as far as I can tell after thinking about it for decades—the only
way we can be lastingly happy and at peace during this life. When I first started the
portion of my spiritual journey described in these pages, in my early forties, my
purpose was not to keep depression and existential despair at bay, but that turned out
to be a wondrous side effect. Now, in my fifties, I don’t usually find myself obsessed
with big prayer projects like the ones you’re about to read about in here (which are
mostly about improving my relationship with someone I wished was my significant
other!), but I constantly—I mean like daily and hourly—work on staying in touch
with God and transforming myself into the person God wants me to be because I
want to keep on being happy!
Also, once we internalize the truth that spiritual growth is the very purpose of life,
there will no longer be situations that seem to do nothing but aggravate us, scare us,
or bore us, since all experiences can be sources of growth. Goodbye, angst!
Goodbye, feelings of meaninglessness!
The well-known Serenity Prayer, about accepting some things and having the
courage to change others, is a super strategy for the petitioning life. A person who
accepts everything in his or her life is going to miss a lot of growth (and joy) because
so much growth is achieved only by trying to change things. For example, have you
ever needed to give up romantic feelings for someone you were only meant to be
friends with? If so, did you find yourself tempted to simply stop associating with the
person instead of trying to change your feelings? Well, if I hadn’t been so determined
to change the way I felt about “Belinda,” but instead had just let her fade out of my
life, I wouldn’t have had the hugely transformative experience of finally letting go of
my desire for romance, nor would either of us have enjoyed the amazing friendship
God wanted us to have.
On the other hand, people who refuse to accept the things in their lives that cannot
be changed thereby harden themselves, making growth impossible. Learning to accept
some circumstances but trying to change others—through petitionary prayer and the
growth that comes with it—is a main way humans can become powerful and,
eventually, holy.
Despite the fact that once you begin to develop your petitioning skills you'll be asking
God to do things for you, your new openness to learning and growth will mean that a
lot of the time, your basic stance will be to react to events, rather than to try to
control or orchestrate them. In fact, Peck says we should learn to milk our
experiences for all they’re worth. Let me try to give an example.
In Chapter Six I write about a hearing test where the audiologist stopped what we
were doing so she could tell me to answer only the questions being asked, even
though all I'd been doing was adding bits of information that I thought were
significant. In decades past, I'd simply have chalked her comments up to coldness
and put the incident out of my mind. But since I was milking my experience for all it
was worth, I recognized the tester’s instructions as a pointed reminder of my
tendency to ramble, just in time for a highly anticipated dinner out with somebody
important to me.
The alternative to the growth-oriented approach to life is spiritual laziness—which,
alas, comes lots more naturally to us. Unless we repeatedly make the choice for
growth, most of us spend our time either complaining about our lives, or stoically
toughing them out on our own power, or blandly coasting through them the easiest
way we can. In the story you’re about to read, I regularly do spiritually lazy things
like losing my temper at telephone operators for taking up my time, grumbling about
obese poor people in line at Subway who I think shouldn’t be spending so much of
their family’s money on their own food, and tutoring a cerebral palsy patient for
months without going to the trouble to pray for his progress. In each case, a growth-
oriented approach would have made both me and those around me a million times
happier than did the stupid-selfish ways that I actually acted.
But of course, I was just being human. Making the choice for growth means entering
into a new quality of life, one that offers incredible satisfaction that we can get no
other way. And the wondrous thing is that it’s open to all of us, just for the asking.
If you think all this sounds great but isn’t a possibility for you because you're not
mentally healthy enough to carry it out, I hope you’ll get help in the form of therapy,
twelve-step programs, or pastoral counseling—or maybe even medical treatment. All
of us are damaged in some ways, and modern treatment methods make healing
possible for just about everyone. You can then try to extend your healing by entering
into a dialogue with God like the one described in these pages.
The subjects of most of the prayers in this book are not what most people would
consider “serious.” In fact, many of them are downright highschoolish. Since the
main narrative is that wished-for love story I mentioned above, there I am trying to
get God to help me with conversation topics for an upcoming hot date, or with
stalking the object of my obsession after things had turned sour between us. But this
less-than-dire condition of my problems was the reason I had the time and energy to
keep the spiritual journal in the first place. If my troubles had been truly serious things
like poverty, sickness, or abusive relationships, I hope I would still have been able to
pray about them, but I'd never have been able to write it all down as I went.
It was lucky for me that I did the work of improving my petitioning ability and my
relationship to God when I did, though, because—as you’ll see in the last quarter of
the book—a few years after I started that spiritual work, I got cancer. By this time I
had internalized the basic outlook of growth, so that I automatically viewed the whole
experience as a series of life lessons that was entirely for my own good. Thus my
attitude was positive, faithful, and humble throughout, and God sent me a mild
experience and positive outcome. Believe me, though—just a few years earlier, the
whole thing wouldn’t have been nearly as pleasant, because I would’ve been a terrible
patient!
(The late Molly Ivins, in the middle of chemotherapy, remarked that she couldn’t
work on her spiritual growth because she was nauseated. What a good reason to
work on it when we’re healthy!)
Although I’ve believed in God ever since I got zapped at that Bible study in 1971, you
absolutely do not need such certainty in order to start a petitioning program yourself.
Since the time of St. Augustine, the activity of praying to a God that one isn’t sure
exists has been a recognized spiritual option. You can try to develop a relationship
with God as though he or she exists, just to see what happens. Since the whole
process is a method of self-therapy, the insights you’ll gain will lead you to greater
maturity regardless of the status of your belief.
In addition, while it seems clear from the setting in which I was zapped that
Christianity is one way to understand the supernatural being and our relationship to
him or her or it, I’ve never seen any reason to confine my ideas about God and
spiritual progress to the Christian point of view. I think other religions (such as
Buddhism and Judaism) and other fields of knowledge (such as psychology and the
Kabbalah), can also shed light on the mystery of how we can connect to our Maker.
Just remember, however you choose to view God, he or she or it is found within, not
in church or temple or mosque!
The idea of asking for help from a higher power seems to be everywhere in our
culture, but mostly in the form of a comfortable myth. Secular humanists, careful not
to name a supernatural being, commonly say things like “Let’s have a good thought
for her,” while nearly all religions recognize petitionary prayer as one way humans
can relate to the divine. But no one is the least bit surprised one’s the least bit
surprised when prayers don’t work, because they don’t expect them to, not
consistently anyway. Petitioning God is the story of what can happen when we do
expect prayers to work.
To Chapter Two