Intercessory Prayer

A Practice of Praying for Others

All prayer is social. We discover this when we pray for others. Whom do we pray for? What is this zone of mutuality we share with others, on which our being depends? Who intercedes for whom? The whole society of persons who make up our world comes quickly to mind, their hurts and hopes, their causes and failures. We speak of them to God; we lift them up to God; we entrust them to God, and often enough they do the same for us.

We pray for those we love because we must. We know that our love is not powerful enough to protect them from all harm, from all illness, from all evil, from death. Our love is not omnipotent. Our care for them, our insistence that they must have a good life, a full life, a life lived from the center of themselves, forces us to intercede with God on their behalf. By ourselves we cannot guarantee them much. We cannot even prevent our own faults from hurting them. We cannot restrain our own strong hopes and pressures so that they can find and live their own idea of the good life instead of the one we have ordained for them. When we recognize these limiting effects of our love, it is that very love for our children, our dear friends, our husband or wife that impels us beyond ourselves to confide their souls into God’s keeping. Praying for them changes our love from a closed to an open hand, from a hand that tightly holds them under rein to one that holds them loosely. Praying for them makes us supple and flexible in our love for them.

We learn to pray for those we dislike and avoid as well, for those we hate and fear, for our enemies. Such prayer shifts our attention from all the things others have done to us or neglected to do that so wounded or enraged us, to focus on what it is in ourselves that permits others to acquire such power over us, the power to put us, in effect, in the hell of anger, or dismay, or insecurity, or fear. Prayer for them directs us to the antecedent attitudes or conditions of personality in ourselves that deliver us over into others’ power.

Praying for our enemies changes our attitudes toward them. Enemies make us bring light into painful hidden corners of ourselves that we would prefer to leave dark. By trying to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, we may discover what we do that so irritates others and makes them dislike us. We hear new voices in our prayer that usually we tune out. We see ourselves from a different angle, one we could not find either by ourselves or with the help of friends. Only enemies can help us here. In this way they are priceless.

Intercession leads us to pray also for the dead. We pray for a father, a mother, a grandmother, or an aunt who loved us and helped us be by really seeing us as we were and rejoicing in our own special personhood, not because it was so superior or gifted, not because it caused such worry or fear, but simply because it was. They were glad in us, glad for what we were, and communicated to us their grateful joy of acceptance at the most basic level. This kind of acceptance makes life exciting because when we are met and greeted in this way we feel real, alive, and delighted to be our very own self. Praying for the souls of such persons, in death as in life, releases into life a fullness of gratitude for their existence. We pray for their joy, their salvation, their immediacy to divine presence, their being-at-the-core in whatever form of resurrected life exists for them.

In praying for those already dead, we open to our own dying, to the undoing of our life in its present forms. We give over control and we unravel the cares of this life, quieting down to admit the fears of letting go into the unknown. Praying for the dead makes a bridge in us to the death that awaits us and makes room for our uncertainties and fears. And contemplating death curiously enough calls us into life more fully, to live it right up to the end because we free our energies from the fear of death to the devotion to life.

We further pray for those we meet who are suffering or will suffer, that we may be attentive, neither interfering with hasty solutions that really only cut off other persons’ displaying to us how deeply they suffer, nor quitting the scene because we cannot stand their pain. Such prayers open unlived parts of ourselves, interceding for easier access for them to our consciousness and thus to our development. We open the windows wide to see what will come in from the outside and what will come out from the inside.

Prayer enters the non-space, nontime zone, that part of our life that knows no boundaries and partakes of the timelessness of God’s eternity. There, each moment exists in a permanent “now,” standing out from other moments as all there is. Thus we can pray across the limitations of time and space.

Intercessory prayer pulls us into the tow of God’s connectedness to everything. We are pulled into a current that shows us nothing is separated from anything else, no one from everyone else. Not only do we discover the hungry parts of ourselves that we need to feed when we pray for the hungry persons of the world, but we discover the neglected parts of the world through praying into being the neglected parts of ourselves.

As we pray for those who concretely come across our path, into our road— those within our immediate world and those without, those of the past and those of the future—the whole question of whether our prayers change other people rearranges itself. When we try to pray for others, we are clear we are changed ourselves. We open up, we soften, we put into perspective hurts they have dealt us. We enter their lives now from their point of view instead of exclusively from our own, and as a result we are introduced increasingly to God’s point of view, a remarkable vantage point from which to see their lives and our own. The question of causality (did our prayer do this for them?) dissolves in this increasing current of God’s interconnectedness with all of us and our intensified awareness of it in all the parts of our lives.

We live the meaning of the mystical body of Christ in this interconnectedness of intercession, where our pleas for others become pleas for ourselves and their pleas for themselves become pleas for us. We know by direct experience that we are, as St. Paul says, members one of another. One further confirmation of this extraordinary fact comes to us if in our development of intercessory prayer, we move into the prayer of free association. In it, we bring together whatever names and concerns come to our minds—or to our hearts or souls—as soon as we have selected our first name, our first person, for whom to pray. Others follow in remarkably fast order in a rich, gladdening discourse with the Spirit, each name suggesting another, and another, and another, directly connected or loosely connected or not connected at all except in our prayer. We do not have to hunt for people, or worry about what may be bothering them, or work at it with any degree of intensity. They will come to us, the people who should be filling our prayers, the needs they have or have had or are likely to have. Some of them may have been absent from our thoughts for years or even decades. Many of them we may have forgotten we ever knew. We will be surprised and occasionally disturbed, but we will almost always feel filled up, enlarged, and supported in ourselves by the experience. Our past and present and future come together here in this procession of the Spirit engendered by our prayers.