Have you ever sat in room with a group of committed Christians and listened to them pray earnestly and passionately for something you had real doubts God wanted? Several people in my life have had this experience recently. It’s strange in a way that goes beyond the personal discomfort of being the outlier. The experience raises uncomfortable questions about what’s happening in the room.
Speaking for myself, I trust that God can mercifully ‘filter’ misguided prayers according to God’s wisdom. But there’s still something unsettling about observing how easily we can rally our passions against God’s purposes, without noticing the difference. And it’s sad to think that a well-intended prayer time can turn into a spiritual campaign against God’s own desires.
It’s hard to know what to do in the moment you think this might be happening in a room. Do you ‘counter-pray’ against the group? “Dear God, please ignore the prayers of my misguided brothers and sisters over there and answer my clearly better prayer instead.” I’ve done it. But it’s hard to shake the uneasy awareness that the misguided one here might be me. Also, I’m not sure this is in the kind of relationship I want to have with my Christian brothers and sisters, secretly trying to spike their prayers out of the air even as they’re rising.
All this explains why my mind was slightly blown recently when a Catholic friend introduced me to a spiritual practice I’d never encountered before as a lifelong Protestant—praying the Lord’s Prayer “with intention.”
My friend pointed something that should be rather blindingly obvious—God doesn’t need our instructions to figure out the best thing to do. Therefore, whatever prayer is meant to do, a good prayer probably doesn’t require assigning God an action plan for how to accomplish God’s work. But then how do I pray to a God who knows infinitely more than I do? How do I pray in a way that does more than expose and entrench my own biases? How do I learn to pray so that what I ask is more consistently aligned with the mind of God?
It turns out, Jesus has already answered this question.
As a Protestant, I’ve heard countless sermons about the Lord’s Prayer as a model for praying. As I’ve always understood the lesson, each line of the prayer serves as a kind of topic heading that more specific and personal prayers can be stacked underneath. I pray “let your kingdom come,” and I then lay out where and how I think that kingdom is needed. I pray “lead us not into temptation,” and I then intercede against the form of temptation I see my neighbor falling prey to.
To be clear, I don’t think way of praying is wrong. Yet it is often layered very thickly with my own subjective assumptions of what is wrong and what is needed and what the ideal outcome is.
Praying the Lord’s Prayer “with intention,” to borrow the Catholic phrasing, is different. We come into prayer with an intention—a person, place, or situation we are interceding for. We hold that intention within us and then pray the Lord’s Prayer over it, deliberately and without embellishment. We don’t try to give God instructions. We let God identify what it means for God’s kingdom to come here, what bread is needed, what temptation is threatening, what deliverance is required. We focus on aligning our ‘yes’ with God’s ‘yes’ and invite the inbreaking of God’s own desires, whatever they might be.
This isn’t the only good or faithful way to pray. But I’m finding it is a powerful one. To be frank, there is so much going on in the world right now that I’m not sure how to pray for. It’s hard to see through the pain and chaos what the best outcomes might be. I’m less certain than I used to be than I can untangle the thick knots of cultural biases, ideological assumptions, and contingencies of history and see clearly the true shape of all God’s investments.
But praying with greater humility doesn’t mean praying with less passion. To the contrary. It’s an invitation to loosen my grip on the answers and strengthen my reliance on the One who really hold them. It’s an invitation to shift from calling God in to back my desires to throwing my whole weight into backing God’s dreams, those glimpsed and those still unknown.
When I pray the Lord’s Prayer this way, it tends to sound something like this:
“Good Father, here’s the pain in the church or the world that is on my mind. May your name be known and honored in the outcome here. May you get whatever you want. May these people receive what they really need (not what they or I assume they need). May your grace cover the complex human mix of truth and error present here. May temptation be resisted and evil be thwarted, including dangers none of us know how to recognize. Because this is your world. And this is your story. Because your glory is always the truest good of us all.”
