THE PRAYERS OF THE SAINTS

Dear Friends in Christ:

When I was on retreat in May I had a strong sense of being prayed for, by the retreat’s leaders and other members of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, by the other retreatants, by parishioners, and by the unseen hosts of the saints who have gone before us in the journey of faith. That awareness of prayer set me to thinking about the mystery and the controversy about the prayers of the saints.

Christians raised in the Roman Catholic Church have grown up with the practice of asking for the prayers of the saints. The second section of the prayer Ave Maria is “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.” Even though I learned that prayer by hearing it recited on the radio by Cardinal Cushing, whose voice was anything but pleasant to the ear, I have come over the years to value the two important truths that are expressed in the prayer.

First, this prayer, and any prayer that asks for or recognizes the prayers of the saints, affirms the eternal importance of prayer. Those who have gone before us were people of prayer. Some of us have had moments of vivid awareness of the praying that has happened in our church building over the years. It is almost as if the prayers had soaked into the pews and the pillars. If these saints were people of prayer on this side of death, why wouldn’t they be on the other side? Prayer is the most natural activity for a Christian, prayer that brings us into a deeper relationship with God, prayer in which we open our hearts to God by sharing our fears and hopes and concerns. Prayer is one of the ways that we become, to borrow a phrase from a friend, “intimate with the Ultimate.”

Second, our asking for or our awareness of the prayers of the saints is an affirmation of our need for such prayers. All of us need the prayers of others, especially in times when we find it hard to pray ourselves. When we ask people to pray for us, we may well be asking them to pray in our stead, to pray because we for the time being can’t. In times of crisis, the only prayer we may be able to make is to ask someone, a friend or relative or the Virgin Mary, to pray for us. In one sense, there is no solitary praying. All our praying is done within the Communion of Saints, those who share with us this earthly pilgrimage and those who have gone before and are now, in words from the Book of Common Prayer, going “from strength to strength in the life of perfect service,” in God’s heavenly kingdom.

As we enjoy these days of summer, may we be constant in our prayer for another and for this world that God loves so very much, and we may pray always in the knowledge that the saints who have gone before us are constant in their prayer us, that they are cheering us on in our journey of faith.

Your brother and priest,

Father Dan