Prayer

Most people who say God does not answer them have not stopped praying. They keep at it, and the thing they ask for never comes. Fr. Ferreol Girardey takes the complaint seriously, because he takes seriously the promise behind it: Christ said that whoever asks will receive. If that holds, something on our side is missing, and this short book is about finding it.

He gives three plain answers. The person asking means to keep the sin in the way. Or the thing asked for would do him harm, and God refuses it as a father refuses a child a loaded weapon. Or the prayer is said without attention, humility, or confidence, with no intention of doing one’s own part, or is dropped after a few days. Each fault gets its remedy and its example: the farmer who credited his harvest to hard work and fertilizer and lost the next one, the blind boy at Annecy who would not ask for eyes once he had been told to ask for God’s will, the saints who needed twenty, thirty, and forty years of asking before they became patient.

The second half reads a dozen scenes from the Gospels, from the centurion’s servant to the penitent thief, as lessons in how to ask, and adds the story of a Carmelite priest who prayed for years for his mother’s conversion and received, six years after her death, a stranger’s letter about her last moments. The book ends with morning and night prayers, a first method of mental prayer with eight model meditations from Fr. Bronchain, and an epilogue on the crucifix as the one book every Christian can read.