Praying Like Esther

I had a chance a few weeks back to visit someone in the hospital. This is a person who is afraid of hospitals and was going through a medical procedure that would have them stay there a few nights. They have no local family and very few friends. On their first night there, they described waking up in the middle of the night feeling anxious and all alone. This is a person who is also a devout Christian and as they described their night to me they said, “I felt like Esther!”

Being raised Catholic, I, of course, had to go look up the reference!

This woman was talking about today’s first reading from EstherC12. In case you try to go find the book of Esther in your bible, it may not be there. It is a book that was “removed” from the biblical canon in some traditions but is part of the original Greek version of the bible.

In the story, Esther is facing a very desperate situation and feels like she has lost all hope. As she is lying on the floor, she says to God, “Help me, who am alone and have no help but you…”

These are not the kinds of prayers we hope to pray, and maybe you have said this kind of prayer at some point in your life – during a moment when you felt lost or alone. Maybe you even felt that God was not listening.

Which is why it may seem paradoxical that in Matthew 7 today Jesus tells his hearers, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

If you’re like me, when I read this I think, “But I have asked and not received, sought and have not found, knocked and no door seemed to open.” So how true can this be?

I often find the words of Richard Rohr very helpful. He says that we must understand Jesus’ words today in a context. Rohr says that

If God already knows what we need before we ask, and God actually cares about us more than we care about ourselves, then why [does] Jesus say: “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.”

I’ll be honest, I struggle with prayer – especially the part when prayers are not answered (at least not in the form that we ask them). And I am not just talking prayers like, “God please let me get a new car.”

I know some people who kind of do a form of spiritual twister to say, “Well the prayers were really, kind of answered because God didn’t get you a new job but God got you some new shoes so that you can look nice when you get that new job!” If you drew that conclusion yourself, more power to you! I find that difficult to do with a lot of situations.

I’m talking about prayers like those prayed by the people in Gaza, the families of the Israeli hostages or the people living in Sudan, Haiti or the Congo.

I’m talking about prayers like those prayed by families with loved ones who are dying.

I’m talking about prayers of those who are incarcerated, those who sleep in homeless shelters, those who are chronically ill or in pain, those in nursing homes.

I’m talking about the prayers by so many who are impacted by everything our government is doing right now – those who are being deported, held in detention centers, losing their jobs.

There is much I do not understand in the spiritual life.

What I do know is that Esther today comes as an example of the kind of relationship that Rohr speaks of when he says, “we pray to form a living relationship.” A relationship of radical dependence. A relationship of deep trust. A relationship where we know that no matter what happens to us or in the world, we rest in God’s arms somehow.

Maybe that’s why they call it faith.

For today, spend some quiet time with God. Ask, knock and seek for what you need. Ask, knock and seek for what the world needs. Pray with your whole heart. And as John Lewis once said (quoting an African proverb), “Pray with your feet.” But in the end, just rest in God’s loving embrace.