Petitioning God: How I Learned to Get Prayers Answered—and
Find Peace & Joy
Chapter One: Introduction
I was going on fifteen when the Creator of the universe decided to zap me, at a junior
high Bible study I had gone to for purely social reasons. (I had known I was gay for about
a year, but—happily—the process of chasing girls wasn’t really any different from what
most of my friends were doing to chase boys.) After a half hour or so of chips and dip,
Hawaiian Punch, and awkward attempts to impress our newfound objects of desire, we
giggly adolescents settled in our classmate’s living room, and the Presbyterian minister
began a simple talk about the parable of the sower. A few minutes into it, suddenly a huge
presence—way too big and powerful to be a product of my imagination—was lifting me up
and showing me, in a blinding flash of light and truth, that everything on Earth was
contained within a sort of giant aquarium, which was itself part of a larger world where
everything was suffused with love and light. Suspended, just for an instant, above the sofas
and chairs and paintings, I knew everything was going to be OK, and that nothing earthly
was really very important in itself, due to this position the planet occupied as a world within
a larger world. A minute or two later, when I tuned back in to the minister’s talk, he was
on the last category of the sower’s seed, that which fell on the good soil and yielded a
hundredfold crop, and I thought my brain was going to explode with joy.
Over the decades since, my memory of my vision has been a steady source of
comfort, but my relationship to the huge presence has been constantly evolving—and still is
evolving to this day.
At some point after the Bible-study zapping, I started thinking how neat it would be if
I could get petitionary prayer to work—you know, “ask, and it shall be given unto you.” So
I started trying to figure out how to get the being to give me what I asked for. The only
method I knew about from the Bible was faith, so I began asking God with a kind of willed
belief to prevent my biggest problem at school, which was embarrassing incidents caused
by my congenital hearing impairment. I mean things like being called on in class when I had
no idea what was being asked. Well, it worked! The incidents largely stopped.
As time went on, I gradually began to pray for other kinds of help, and to develop—by
trial and error—more sophisticated petitioning techniques. By my early forties, I was
getting prayers answered at a pretty remarkable rate in areas like relationships, employment,
and my efforts to teach school despite my disability. But this success came only through
repeated psychological struggles. Since I had never seen a book on praying that looked at
what actually took place in the gray matter of the person trying to pray, I began keeping a
detailed spiritual journal. That journal is the raw material of this book.
The main thing I’ve learned is that successful petitioning is nearly always tied to
lessons we need to learn or spiritual growth we need to undertake if we want God to
answer our prayers. I discovered this in an “aha” moment when I suddenly realized how
the whole prayer issue fit together with my long-held belief that God lets undesirable things
happen to us in order to help us mature. Since the Creator (who is love, as Jesus came to
tell us) hopes we’ll freely choose to be transformed from what we naturally are (well-
meaning, maybe, but often selfish and shortsighted) into beings who are truly in the image
of God, he shapes our circumstances to spur us on to make this choice of transformation.
This means that whenever we do meet God’s challenge and turn one of our unloving or
shortsighted attitudes over to God, letting him or her replace it with a godly one, we qualify
ourselves to have the corresponding unwanted circumstance removed or changed, since
we no longer need the lesson it was designed to teach. All we have to do is ask faithfully,
and God will be glad to deliver.
The Biblical basis of this idea of attitude adjustment is Jesus’ introduction of the
Lord's Prayer, when he says we’ve got to forgive others if we want God to forgive us and
answer our prayers (Matthew 6:14-15). Jesus states the same principle in another context
in Mark 11:25: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone,
so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”
Suppose there’s somebody at work who really ticks us off. I think God put them
there to challenge us to change our own feelings toward them. This God who is love wants
us to forgive them—for existing if for nothing else—and to love them as we love ourselves.
And if we do this, God will then forgive us and give us what we pray for.
If you’re thinking this won’t work because when someone ticks you off, there’s no
way you can change the way you feel about them—well, trust me, I was just as bad as you
are. But that’s what Petitioning God is all about: how I learned to let go of my anger and
other selfish attitudes and let God change me, so that then God was glad to give me what I
asked for. It wasn’t easy, but that was how badly I wanted my prayers answered!
To get a petitioning dialogue started, one of the best methods I've found is to ask
myself, “How do I, in my unimproved state, really feel about this person or this problem?”
and “How would God prefer I feel?” This jump-starts the conversation I’ve got to have
with God and my conscience if I want to find out what it is God wants me to change
before he’ll change the unwanted circumstance—which he’ll be glad to do since it will
have fulfilled its function of spurring me to transform myself. He'll be glad to, that is, as
long as what I’m asking for can fit into his big plan. (That last point will become clear as
the story goes on.)
On the matter of which pronoun to use for God, I’ve decided to mostly stick with
“he,” since this seems to make for the smoothest reading. But since God is not male—or
even a human, for that matter—I plan to sometimes use phrases like “he or she or it,” in an
effort to cover all understandings of the deity.
The important thing for all of us to realize, and continually re-realize and re-realize
again, is that God is love (as other prophets as well as Jesus came to tell us), and God
loves us, and will help us out in a heartbeat if we’ll only make the choice to align ourselves
with that love.
To carry out a petitioning project, we have to look inward—the only place God can
truly be found. This is, to be sure, a huge challenge in our twenty-first century world, its
strong emphasis on never-ending external communication.
But if we can do our looking inward, we’ll be on our way to becoming double
winners. The transformations we find we have to undergo to get our prayers answered
typically bring us even more fulfillment than the granted petitions they give rise to. M. Scott
Peck, author of the classic The Road Less Traveled, describes the project of spiritual
growth as arising out of "smart selfishness." We—not those folks we stop hating—will be
better off this way.
What’s more, the whole act of obeying our consciences and participating actively in
God’s love is—at least as far as I can tell after thinking about it for decades—the only way
we can be lastingly happy and at peace during this life. When I first started the portion of
my spiritual journey described in these pages, my purpose was not to keep depression and
existential despair at bay, but that turned out to be a wondrous side effect. Now, in my
fifties, I don’t usually find myself obsessed with big prayer projects like the ones you’re
about to read about in here (which are mostly about improving my relationship with
someone I wished was my significant other!), but I constantly work on staying in touch
with God and transforming myself into the person God wants me to be because I want to
keep on being happy!
Also, once we internalize the truth that spiritual growth is the very purpose of life,
there will no longer be situations that seem to do nothing but aggravate us, scare us, or
bore us, since all experiences can be sources of growth. Goodbye, angst! Goodbye,
feelings of meaninglessness!
The well-known Serenity Prayer, about accepting some things and having the courage
to change others, is a super strategy for the petitioning life. A person who accepts
everything in his or her life is going to miss a lot of growth (and joy) because so much
growth is achieved only by trying to change things. For example, have you ever needed to
give up romantic feelings for someone you were only meant to be friends with? If so, did
you find yourself tempted to simply stop associating with the person as closely as you had
before? Well, if I hadn’t been so determined to change the way I related to “Belinda,” but
instead had just let her fade out of my life, I wouldn’t have had the hugely transformative
experience of finally letting go of my desire for romance, nor would either of us have
enjoyed the amazing friendship God wanted us to have.
On the other hand, people who refuse to accept the things in their lives that cannot be
changed thereby harden themselves, making growth impossible. Learning to accept some
circumstances but trying to change others—through petitionary prayer and the growth that
comes with it—is a main way humans can become powerful and, eventually, holy.
Despite the fact that once you begin to develop your petitioning skills you'll be asking
God to do things for you, your new openness to learning and growth will mean that a lot of
the time, your basic stance will be to react to events, rather than to try to control or
orchestrate them. In fact, Peck says we should learn to milk our experiences for all they’re
worth. Let me try to give an example.
In Chapter Six I write about a hearing test where the audiologist stopped what we
were doing so she could tell me to answer only the questions being asked, even though all I
had been doing was adding bits of information that I thought were significant. In decades
past, I'd simply have chalked her comments up to coldness and put the incident out of my
mind. But since I was milking my experience for all it was worth, I recognized the tester’s
instructions as a pointed reminder of my tendency to ramble, just in time for a highly
anticipated dinner out with somebody important to me.
The alternative to the growth-oriented approach to life is spiritual laziness—which,
alas, comes lots more naturally to us. Unless we repeatedly make the choice for growth,
most of us spend our time either complaining about our lives or blandly coasting through
them the easiest way we can. In the story you’re about to read, I regularly do spiritually
lazy things like losing my temper at telephone operators for taking up my time, grumbling
about obese poor people in line at Subway who I think shouldn’t be spending so much of
their family’s money on their own food, and tutoring a cerebral palsy patient for months
without going to the trouble to pray for his progress. In each case, a growth-oriented
approach would have made both me and those around me a million times happier than did
the stupid-selfish ways that I actually acted.
But of course, I was just being human. Making the choice for growth means entering
into a new quality of life, one that offers incredible satisfaction that we can get no other
way. And the wondrous thing is that it’s open to all of us, just for the asking.
If you think all this sounds great but isn’t a possibility for you personally because
you're not mentally healthy enough to carry it out, I hope you’ll get help in the form of
therapy, twelve-step programs, or pastoral counseling—or maybe even medical treatment.
All of us are damaged in some ways, and modern treatment methods make healing possible
for just about everyone. You can then try to extend your healing by entering into a dialogue
with God like the one described in these pages.
The subjects of most of the prayers in this book are not what most people would
consider “serious.” In fact, many times they’re downright highschoolish. Since the main
narrative is that wished-for love story I mentioned above, there I am trying to get God to
help me with conversation topics for an upcoming hot date, or with stalking the object of
my obsession after things had turned sour between us. But this less-than-dire condition of
my problems was the reason I had the time and energy to keep the spiritual journal in the
first place. If my troubles had been truly serious things like poverty, sickness, or abusive
relationships, I hope I would still have been able to pray about them, but I would never
have been able to write it all down as I went.
It was lucky for me that I did the work of improving my petitioning abilities and my
relationship to God when I did, though, because—as you’ll see in the last quarter of the
book—a few years after I started that work, I got cancer. By this time I had internalized
the basic outlook of growth, so that I automatically viewed the whole experience as a series
of life lessons that was entirely for my own good. Thus my attitude was positive, faithful,
and humble throughout, and God sent me a mild experience and positive outcome. Believe
me, though—just a few years earlier, the whole thing wouldn’t have been nearly as
pleasant, because I would’ve been a terrible patient!
(The late Molly Ivins, in the middle of chemotherapy, remarked that she couldn’t
work on her spiritual growth because she was nauseated. What a good reason to work on
it when we’re healthy!)
Although I’ve believed in God ever since I got zapped at that Bible study in 1971, you
absolutely do not need such certainty in order to start a petitioning program yourself. Since
the time of St. Augustine, the activity of praying to a God that one isn’t sure exists has
been a recognized spiritual option. You can try to develop a relationship with God as though
he or she exists, just to see what happens. Since the whole process is a method of self-
therapy, the insights you’ll gain will lead you to greater maturity regardless of the status of
your belief.
In addition, while it seems clear from the setting in which I was zapped that
Christianity is one way to understand the supernatural being and our relationship to him,
I've never seen any reason to confine my ideas about God and spiritual progress to the
Christian point of view. I think other religions (such as Buddhism and Judaism) and other
fields of knowledge (such as psychology and the Kabbalah), can also shed light on the
mystery of how we can best connect to our Maker. Just remember, however you choose
to view God, he (or she or it) is found within, not in church (or temple or mosque)!
The idea of asking for help from a higher power pervades our culture, but mostly in
the form of a comfortable myth. Secular humanists, careful not to name a supernatural
being, commonly say things like “Let’s have a good thought for her,” while nearly all
religions recognize petitionary prayer as one way humans can relate to the divine. But no
one is the least bit surprised one’s the least bit surprised when prayers don’t work, because
they don’t expect them to, not consistently anyway. Petitioning God is the story of what
can happen when we do expect prayers to work.