Intercessory
Prayer
From
St John's Eagle, October 2001
The
readers of Dante's Purgatorio are likely to be surprised to find that various
souls undergoing spiritual rehabilitation there beg the poet to urge their living
relatives to redouble their prayers for them. And, despite their own involvement
in an arduous discipline, they still find time to pray for the living. Intercessory
prayer is thus very real for Dante: it is part of his understanding of the communion
of saints, of the mystical body of Christ, of the church as existing in three
intimately inter-related dimensions: the church militant here on earth, the church
suffering in Purgatory, and the church triumphant in Paradise.
Our
prayer books, have preserved the concept of the communion of saints, for it is
after all part of the Apostles' Creed. The present book of Common Prayer explains
it thus:
The
communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those
whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer,
and praise.
(p. 862)
We
have also continued to use the phrase "the mystical body," as in the
postcommunion prayer: "we are very members incorporate in the mystical body
of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people" (p. 339). This concept
of course is profoundly Pauline.
But
it must be admitted that the Reformation drastically altered these doctrines from
the form in which we find them in Dante. Sixteenth century Protestants were outraged
by the picture of a royal court in which lesser mortals addressed their prayers
to other persons higher in the heavenly hierarchy to the saints, to the Blessed
Virgin, to those with enough "pull" to obtain the favors that we are
seeking. (This world picture is lovingly and exquisitely described in Henry Adam's
masterpiece, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.
The
impact of this revolution on intercessory prayer has been devastating. Prayerbook
people pray to God through Christ, "our only mediator and advocate."
We remember the saints for their good example, but we do not ask them to pray
for us. We do pray for the living (those who have birthdays, those in need) and
for those who have died. But at least in public prayer, we do not ask others to
intercede for us. Privately, of course, we often do.
Surely
this radical abridgment of intercessory prayer was a much needed correction of
late medieval excesses. But after some four hundred years, one might hope that
the dust of Reformation controversy is at last beginning to settle. Maybe in this
new millennium we can begin to recover some sense of the entire company of faithful
people, living and dead, united in a vast circularity of love and mutual prayer.
But
how to do this without reverting to unacceptable images of high placed courtiers
whispering in the ear of some capricious monarch?
We
have come to believe in an evolving universe, and many of us maintain that this
evolution is not wholly random but rather is moving toward a goal. God does not
manipulate evolutionary change from the outside, as it were like a master chess
player moving the pieces on his board or a computer expert programming his computer
to do his will by endlessly pressing buttons or moving his "mouse."
Rather, God is in all things, propelling each of them to fuller self realization.
This propulsive activity, working always through individual entities, does in
fact result in violent collisions. Yet at some point in this cosmic travail ,
self interest gives way to concern for others; after billions of years, consciousness,
freedom, love emerge. Their future is not necessarily guaranteed, but we can hope
that it is real and work for its continuing growth.
Imagine,
then, a universe in which matter at last becomes conscious of itself and capable
of freedom and love. The energizing power is God's power, but we participate in
it. Imagine a small pool of loving concern, slowly emerging, slowly growing, until,
at some unimaginable point, it becomes a kind of cosmic ocean, what Teilhard de
Chardin terms the Omega Point. We contribute to this development
when we intercede for others' others add to it, whether they are among the living
or the dead, when they intercede for us. Intercession is not begging for favors;
it is a pooling of loving concern that can move the universe to new dimensions
of being.
Nothing
wrong then in asking our dead, or those recognized by the church for outstanding
holiness, to join with us in this relationship of loving mutuality. As it grows,
it must build upon existing realities: there is no other way for evolution, material
or spiritual, to proceed. We have a role to play in the communion of saints, all
saints, living or dead. This is the way we go from strength to strength toward
our ultimate fulfillment together.
This
may be the moment, in our cosmic evolution, when we can move beyond the wounds
of sixteenth century polemic. Prayerbooks yet to be written may embody these insights.
—
John Harcourt
