Humbly asked [God] to remove our shortcomings.
—Step 7 of the Twelve Steps
“Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness, in your great tenderness wipe away all my faults, wash me clean of my guilt, and purify me from all my sin.”
—Psalm 51:1–2
“If there is anything you need, pray for it, asking God for it with thanksgiving; and the peace of God, which is much greater than understanding, will guard both your thoughts and your heart.”
—Philippians 4:6–7
“In your prayers do not babble on as the pagans do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard. Do not be like them; your Father knows what you need even before you ask him.”
—Matthew 6:7–8
Well, if God already knows what we need before we ask, and God actually cares about us more than we care about ourselves, then why do both Step 7 and Jesus say, each in their own way: “Ask, and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7)? Are we trying to talk God into things? Does the group with the most and the best prayers win? Is prayer of petition just another way to get what we want? Or is it to get God on our side? In every case, notice that we are trying to take control.
In this short chapter I will simply try to address that one simple, often confused, but important mystery of asking. Why is it good to ask, and what is really happening in prayers of petition or intercession? Are we needed or encouraged to talk God into things? Why does Jesus both tell us to ask and then say, “Your Father already knows what you need, so do not babble on like the pagans do” (Matthew 6:7)?
Let me answer in a few brief sentences, and then I will backtrack and attempt to explain what I mean. We ask not to change God but to change ourselves. We pray to form a living relationship, not to get things done. Prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. (That is why Jesus says all prayers are answered, which does not appear to be true according to the evidence!) God knows that we need to pray to keep the symbiotic relationship moving and growing. Prayer is not a way to try to control God, or even to get what we want. As Jesus says in Luke’s Gospel the answer to every prayer is one, the same, and the best: the Holy Spirit! (See 11:13.) God gives us power more than answers.
Keeps Us From Entitlement
The death of any relationship with anybody is to have a sense of entitlement. Any notion that “I deserve,” “I am owed,” “I have a right to,” “I am higher than you” absolutely undermines any notion of faith, hope, or love between the involved parties. This is certainly why Jesus made one of his strongest statements found in all three Synoptic Gospels, and yet one of his most denied and ignored. He says, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25). Jesus says that about no other group. The mind of a rich person is invariably one of entitlement. “I deserve this because I worked hard for this!” we think. Or, “I am owed this by reason of my station in life” as even many clergy or famous people have imagined (with full cooperation and codependency from the crowds, I must add).
To undo and undercut this arrogant and soul-destructive attitude, Jesus told us all to stay in the position of a beggar, a petitioner, a radical dependent, which is always spiritually true, if we are honest. To know that you don’t know, to know that you are always in need, to know you are a “nomad and stranger on this earth” (Hebrews 11:14) as my father Francis quoted in our Rule, keeps you situated in a place of structural truth. Let me explain.
Beggars Before God and the Universe
The longer I live the more I believe that truth is not an abstraction or an idea that can be put into formulas or mere words. Our real truth has to do with how we situate ourselves in this world. Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, said many years ago that “the natural habitat for truth is in interpersonal relationships,” whereas we have made truth an idea on paper. There are ways of living and relating that are honest and sustainable and fair, and there are utterly dishonest ways of living and relating to life. This is our real, de facto, and operative “truth,” no matter whose theories or theologies we believe. Our life situation and our style of relating to others is “the truth” that we actually take with us to the grave. It is who we are, more than our theories about this or that. Jesus says as much in his parable of the two sons. (See Matthew 21:28–32.)
Prayers of intercession or petition are one way of situating your life with total honesty and structural truth. It is no accident that both the early Franciscans and many Buddhist monks were official mendicants or beggars. Francis and Buddha did not want us to lose this central message, which is now almost entirely lost in our self-made, can-do, and climbing culture. What has been lost is honest relationship with the earth and with one another, and a basic humility too. How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe. We are all and forever beggars before God and the universe.
We can never engineer or guide our own transformation
or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-
controlled version of conversion, with most of my preferences and addictions still fully in place but now well disguised. Any attempts at self-conversion would be like an active alcoholic trying to determine his own rules for sobriety. God has to radically change the central reference point of our lives. We do not even know where to look for another reference point because up to now it has all been about me! Too much “me” can never find “you”—or anything beyond itself.
So Step 7 says that we must “humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.” Don’t dare go after your faults yourselves or you will go after the wrong thing, or more commonly a clever substitute for the real thing. “If you try to pull out the weeds, you might pull out the wheat along with it,” as Jesus says (Matthew 13:29).
Instead you have to let God (1) reveal your real faults to you (usually by failing and falling many times!), and then (2) allow God to remove those faults from his side and in God’s way. If you go after them with an angry stick, you will soon be left with just an angry stick—and the same faults at a deeper level of disguise and denial. Thus most early-stage people in alcoholic recovery just replace one addiction with another: Now it is nicotine, caffeine, stinkin’ thinkin’, and the angry stick, which is now OK because it is a Christian angry stick.
God’s totally positive and lasting way of removing our shortcomings is to fill up the hole with something much better, more luminous, and more satisfying. Then your old shortcomings are not driven away, or pushed underground, as much as they are exposed and starved for the false program for happiness that they are. Like used scaffolding, our sins fall away from us as unneeded and unhelpful because now a new and better building has been found. This is the wondrous discovery of our True Self, and the gradual deterioration of our false and constructed self.1
When you learn what good food is, you are simply no longer attracted to junk food. You don’t need to crusade against greasy burgers and fries, you just ignore them. They become uninteresting as you happily search out the whole, organic, fresh, and healthy markets. All spiritual rewards are inherent and not rewards that are given later. Take that as a trustworthy axiom. Not heaven later as much as health now—which prepares you for—and becomes—heaven later!
Right Relationship With Life Itself
Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, said in his very wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual desire. It drains away our deepest and true desire, that inner flow and life force which makes us “long and pant for running streams” (Psalm 42). Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object. It has been a frequent experience of mine to find that many people in recovery often have a unique and very acute spiritual sense; more than most people, I would say. It just got frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need and desire took off before boundaries, strong identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.2
So it is important that you ask, seek, and knock to keep yourself in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to you without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep your hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think you deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s “gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap” (Luke 6:38). In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. For some reason, to ask “for your daily bread” is to know that it is being given. To not ask is to take your own efforts, needs, and goals—and yourself—far too seriously. Consider if that is not true in your own life.
After a few years in recovery, you will know that your deep and insatiable desiring came from God all along, you went on a bit of detour, looked for love in all the wrong places, and now have found what you really wanted anyway. God is willing to wait for that. Like Jacob at the foot of his dreamy ladder, where angels walk between heaven and earth, you will lay your head on even a stone pillow, and say, “You were here all the time, and I never knew it! This is nothing less than the house of God, this is the very gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16–17).
It’s even better than that. The final discovery, as Thomas Merton put it, is that this “gate of heaven is everywhere”! Now all of our faults and ego possessions are just heavy and burdensome luggage that keep us from walking through this always-open gate—or even seeing it in the first place.