The Mystery of Asking

Humbly asked [God] to remove our shortcomings.  

—Step 7 of the Twelve Steps 

This week’s meditations continue to explore the wisdom of the Gospels and the Twelve Steps. Father Richard responds to the perennial question, “Why do we pray?”: 

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 to get God on our side?  

This is the mystery of asking. Why is it good to ask, and what really happens in prayers of petition or intercession? Why is it that Jesus both tells us to ask and then says, “Your Father already knows what you need, so do not babble on like the pagans do” (Matthew 6:7–8)?  

I believe prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves. We pray to form a living relationship, not to get things done. (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.  

Prayers of intercession or petition are one way of situating our life within total honesty and structural truth. We are all 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 our preferences and addictions still fully in place, but now well-disguised.  

So, Step 7 says that we must “humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.” We don’t dare go after our own faults or we will go after the wrong thing—or, more commonly, a clever substitute for the real thing. Instead, we have to let God first reveal our real faults to us (usually by failing and falling many times!), and then allow God to remove those faults, from God’s side and in God’s way.  

It’s important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it.  

Selected from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 57, 59–60, 61.