We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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Most sane people never ask “Did Michelangelo cause the statue of David, or was it his chisel? Did Shakespeare cause Hamlet, or was it his pen? Choose!”
But for some reason, when the subject turns to evolution, many fundamentalists, both atheist and Christian, completely forget that a thing can have primary and secondary causes. Instead, they start by demanding that we choose between God or Nature, one or the other, as the sole cause of life on earth. The answer, from a Catholic perspective is “Why not both? God made me and used secondary causes called ‘my ancestors’ to do it. So why couldn’t he have used a massive artillery of secondary causes stretching back 13 billion years to do it?”
Secondary causes do God’s will all the time. Pigs serve God according to their piggy nature, rooting around in the mud and having a swine old time of it causing piglets. Dogs serve God according to their doggy nature, eating with gusto, adoring their master, sniffing the daylights out of everything in scent, and causing puppies. Stars serve God’s purposes according to their starry nature by burning brightly and, now and then, exploding and making heavier elements such as carbon useful for building things like pigs and dogs and you and me. God made them that way, to his glory.
Of course, when it comes to those secondary causes called “human persons,” since God made these particular causes to be rational animals in his own image and likeness, a new dimension enters in: dignity and free will. Treatment perfectly appropriate for pigs and dogs is inappropriate for men and women, which is why the former dislike being called swine and the latter dislike being called bitches. We are human beings, not beasts, and entitled to be treated as such.
Because of our unique status in the created order, we humans have the duty and privilege of doing something no other animal can do: we can ask God for things. We can even ask for God to do things—often quite remarkable things—for our causality is unique. Pigs cause more pigs, and dogs more dogs. Both can cause stains on the carpet if you keep them in the house, but man alone can cause, not merely natural events, but even supernatural ones to happen, because he can ask God to move his hand and perform mighty works.
“Give us this day our daily bread” is the clause in the Our Father where Jesus sums up this paradox of our position before God as we enter into petitionary prayer. There are several things to note about it, the first being the marvel that it exists at all. Christians may not see this as clearly as non-Christians do, so let a former non-Christian point out what they take for granted.
Growing up, I was not baptized and never went to Church. I had a curious scruple against petitionary prayer, not because I was an atheist (not enough faith for that) but because as a pagan with a cloudy reverence for the Unknown God, I considered it both the height of arrogance and emblematic of a sort of Welfare State mentality. Why, I thought, should God bother himself playing waiter and bellhop to insignificant specks who were constantly looking for handouts on this insignificant grain of sand orbiting a third rate star on the rim of an unremarkable galaxy? He’s got billions of such galaxies to juggle. So, I thought, deal with it yourself and don’t pester the Almighty with your stupid requests.
This rugged sort of Libertarian theology, of course, eventually fell on hard times as I discovered things like “I am a creature who could not so much as exist without God’s actively willing it from nanosecond to nanosecond” and, more embarrassing still, “I am a wretched sinner who needs God’s help, not only for my daily necessities, but still more because without his help I would be a monster, not a Jeffersonian paragon of the Free and Good Man at Home in Nature.” So I discovered that petitionary prayer, while certainly not the highest form of prayer, is still good and not merely permitted, but commanded by our Lord. That such an infinite God could hear, much less lovingly answer, our prayers ought to astonish us.
Another thing I noticed was that Jesus’ petitionary prayers have none of the sort of courtly embroidery that surrounds what we normally think of as “religious language.” There is a matter-of-fact brevity to the Lord’s Prayer that could almost be taken as rudeness if we didn’t know this was the Son of God teaching us. Picture yourself at dinner with a family where the teens look the adult in the eye and say, “Give me the bread” without so much as a “please.” Yet this is the norm set out for us in the Lord’s Prayer. No “please.” No “O Great and Gracious God, if it is possible, though we are wretches who deserve nothing but death, of your ineffable kindness, we beg that you would stoop down and from your endless bounty, give us a morsel of bread and we will praise you forever for your goodness to us.” Just a straightforward, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It’s a prayer of pure trust such as you only see from really small children who have not yet learned that some adults need to be truckled to; children who have completely internalized the fact that their Father loves them and will give them what they need. It is, in a curious sense, the opposite of selfishness since, as the Catechism says:
The trust of children who look to their Father for everything is beautiful. “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). He gives to all the living “their food in due season” (Psalm 104:27). Jesus teaches us this petition, because it glorifies our Father by acknowledging how good he is, beyond all goodness. (CCC 2828)
Like the whole of the Our Father, this petition is made in the full awareness that prayer is always done in community. Just as we do not pray the My Father, so we do not pray, “Gimme this day my daily bread.” Instead, we pray as members of the covenant community of Jesus, people who have not invented this stuff for themselves, nor figured it out on their own, but who have been graciously welcomed into the Body of Christ by God and by other members of the Body, without whom we would be completely lost.
By the same token, as we pray for “us” we pray on behalf of others who, likewise, need the help of our prayers just as much as we depend on the prayers of others. Our request for daily bread goes up to heaven, not only on behalf of ourselves and our loved ones, but for the Church around the world. Somewhere in Somalia, a child may well be getting a meal right now because you, sitting in Suburbia USA, prayed “Give us this day our daily bread.” This is solidarity in action in heaven, with the expectation, of course, that we shall likewise put it into practice “on earth as it is in heaven.” That is why the Christian tradition has always linked this prayer to concrete works of mercy such as feeding the hungry. To pray this prayer and ignore those in the world without the common necessities of life is to risk playing the wrong part in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (cf. Luke 16:19-31). Our unstable age tends to want to place a crazy emphasis on work vs. prayer as opposites, as though those who pray are exempt from feeding the hungry and those who do social activism don’t need to pray. The sane Catholic balance is to pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you.
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