How Blessed Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love gave me a radical new perspective on prayer
What I learned from Blessed Julian today reinforced some of what I previously learned about prayer, which I wrote about in my article on my eureka moment on prayer. But it also radically changed my overall concepts of what prayer is, where it originates from, and what its purpose is. I learned that we don’t cause God to do anything with our prayers. This is because it’s His grace that causes us to pray in the first place. No prayer that was meant to be prayed came into our mind without His grace putting it there. Why? Two reasons: 1.) God wouldn’t leave His plan up to chance, which means He uses us to accomplish His will through our prayer, but He inspires us to pray for the things that were meant to be prayed for, so that He could answer those prayers and do His will. He doesn’t need to use our prayer to accomplish His will, but He chooses to do so because He wants us to participate in His redemptive work for our salvation.
2.) If He allowed us to pray on our own, without first being inspired by His grace, we’d rarely pray for the right things, and thus He couldn’t use us to carry out His will. We’re too selfish and blind to know what prayers need to be prayed for His will to be done. Also, if we relied on our own intellect, we’d be filled with doubt about whether or not we’re praying for the right things. This means we wouldn’t trust God enough for the prayers to work, because a prayer can only be effective when it’s said with trust in God, and with the person being in a state of grace. So we must feel with our hearts and know with our minds that Jesus is the source of all of our good prayers. That’s why He revealed to Blessed Julian that He’s the ground from which all good prayer springs.
This is a radically different idea of how prayer works than most Christians believe. On its face, it would seem as if God’s doing all of the praying for us, and we’re just puppets who have our strings pulled by God. But that isn’t the case. It’s His invisible hand, which is the Holy Spirit, which puts the right prayers in our hearts, but then we have to be open to hearing His voice. We won’t be able to hear Him speaking those prayers to us unless we first separate ourselves from the world and put ourselves in a state of grace, so that we’re able to receive His graces and pray those prayers.
The second step is to then unite our will to His, and will ourselves to pray the prayers He places in our hearts. That’s where our free will comes into the picture. We can either choose to pray what we’re meant to pray every day, or we can choose not to (barring sickness or other legitimate reasons why we can’t pray some days). When we choose to pray, we’re doing His will, but it’s also His hand (will) that’s guiding us. No good prayer can come from us, because we’re too spiritually dumb and blind to know what to pray for. Even the things that seem obvious to pray for, like someone’s healing, or having more faith and love, are only obvious because at some point in our life, God, through His grace, made us aware that those were things we should be praying for.
In conclusion, our prayer doesn’t cause God to do anything. Rather, it’s His grace that first enlightens us and thus guides us to pray the prayers we were meant to pray, which He then answers. Prayer is part of a chain reaction that God both starts and finishes. His grace is the invisible energy that puts the spark in us to start praying, the light that fills our minds and hearts with the knowledge of what to pray for, and the power that causes the explosion of an answered prayer.
