THE PURPOSE OF PRAYER: WHO NEEDS TO CHANGE, GOD OR ME?

God answered Solomon’s prayer in these words,

“Because you have asked for this---not for a long life

for yourself, nor for riches, nor for the life of your

enemies, but for understanding so that you may know

what is right---I do as you requested.”

I Kings 3:5,7-12

I own a lot of books, even though I have culled through them several times over the years, especially when it comes to moving from one house to the next! Most of them, I rarely look at, even though I go digging through them for something every now and them. There are, however, a few books, maybe 10 in all, that I would really hate to lose, books that have changed my life in one way or another. One of those books is a 56 year-old book by Fr. Louis Evely entitled Our Prayer. It was the book that helped me really understand what prayer is all about! I turn to it often, especially when I talk to groups about the role of prayer in their lives! It’s now out of print! I would really hate to lose my copy! 

The insight I got from that book changed my prayer life and helped me make sense of the purpose of prayer.  I had prayed all my life, but I didn’t feel that it was doing all that much good.  I was like that old farmer in one of my former parishes who said that he never prayed for rain because “God’s goina do what God’s goina do anyway!” No matter how much I prayed, it has always seemed to me to that “God was goina’ do what God was goina’ do anyway.” That old book helped me discover that, even though I believed in Jesus and I thought I believed in prayer, I was actually praying like a pagan! 

How do pagans pray?  They whine, beg, cringe and try to bribe their moody, mean and reluctant gods to loosen up and give them what they want! Their prayers are attempts to inform their gods of things that need to be done as well as how and when they should be done! Their prayers are attempts to get their gods to wake up and pay attention! Their prayers are an attempt to get their gods to change their minds and moods and do what they want through bribery or self-inflicted pain! Pagan prayer has been portrayed best in those old TV jungle movies. In those old movies, it was almost always the same. Poor people lived at the foot of an active volcano where they believed that their god lived! Their volcano god was moody and unpredictable and often blew his top, killing hundreds of their people. To get this god to be good to them, they lived in fear of him and their prayer was basically bribes to keep him at bay and do their bidding. Their sadistic god loved pain, especially pain that involved the shedding of blood.  So, if you cut yourself or whipped yourself till you bled, you had a better chance of getting a favor out of him. If that didn’t work, you threw the prettiest virgin in town into the bubbling lava!  Pagan prayer was always an effort to get the god to change his mind or change his sadistic behaviors or his indifference toward human beings.

I used to pray like a pagan. My prayer was more about telling God what I wanted, rather than listening to God tell me what I needed. I thought prayer was about informing God about what needed to be done in my life and in the world around me. I believed that I needed to work on God if I ever had a chance of getting him to do what I wanted! I felt that I had a better chance of getting what I wanted if I pleaded and begged and cried and starved and deprived myself. I even tried to offer bribes: I would light a 30 day candle instead of one of those cheap two-hour candles, I would say 50 rosaries instead of one. I would do a seven-day novena instead of saying a simple silent prayer, I would promise to make a big contribution to charity if my wish was granted. I would attend an all-night vigil instead of a few quiet moments during the day.  I probably would have pushed a virgin into a volcano, but there was a shortage of virgins in my town! Pagan prayer is all about getting the attention of a cold, distant, cruel and aggravated god and persuading him to alter his behavior through bribery and sadism. That, my friends, is no way for Christians to pray!

Today, we read one of my favorite readings about prayer in our first reading. It is the story of the wise and famous King Solomon’s prayer. We are told that God “appeared to Solomon in a dream one night,” “inviting him to ask for something in prayer.” Solomon points out to God that God had chosen him to be king of a huge nation, even though he was young and inexperienced. In his prayer, Solomon asks God simply for what he needed to do all that God wanted him to do: “an understanding heart” and “the wisdom to know right from wrong.” God was impressed with Solomon’s prayer and answered it, noting that he could have asked for selfish needs: a long life, riches or vengeance on his enemies! 

Solomon teaches us the real meat of all prayer: to do well what God wants us to do! Solomon teaches us the purpose of all prayer: to have us be changed by God, rather than having God be changed by us, as pagans try to do to their gods!  The perfect prayer, as Solomon knew, is to know what God calls us to do and to ask only for the “daily bread” we need to carry it out!

My friends, the difference between the way pagans pray and the way Christians ought to pray is very different. Pagans pray to persuade their gods to change. Christians pray that God will change them. We do not have a moody, disinterested or stingy God who needs to be bribed or woken up or persuaded to give us what we ask. Our God already wants to give us what is good for us. Our God simply wants us to open ourselves to receive the good he already desires for us. The perfect Christian prayer is a prayer of openness and gratitude. A perfect Christian prayer is the prayer of Mary, “Thy will be done!” The perfect Christian prayer is the prayer of Solomon, “Give me what I need to do the job you have given me!”  The perfect Christian prayer is the pray of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemani, “Your will, not mine, be done!”  God does not need to change, be instructed or informed. We do!

For my conclusion today, I turn to “bumper sticker theology.”  We are all familiar with the bumper sticker that says, “prayer changes things.” There is another bumper sticker that, I believe, is more accurate. It says, “prayer changes people and people change things.”     

 

CHURCH CHAT #38

 

NEW AT THE ST. THERESA FAMILY LIFE CENTER: A "MEN'S GROUP"

In early 2021, I started to lead the remodeling of the old St. Theresa/Cross Roads School in my hometown parish in Rhodelia, Kentucky, into a new St. Theresa Family Life Center and the old rectory into a  Guest House for presenters, private retreatants and visiting priests. One of the main features of the project is a museum room and a long hallway (both sides) old historic photo gallery. The project was dedicated October 15, 2022 - the Feast of St. Theresa of Avila. 

The idea was to build a place where the family life of the community could be celebrated, preserved, strengthened and empowered. A few groups like AA, Sunday Coffee after Mass and Youth Confirmation Retreats have already used the spaces. The parish offices are now located there. Even 30 American Bishops, who visited the grave in St. Theresa's old cemetery of the grandmother of Father Augustus Tolton, first black priest ordained in the US, had drinks and refreshments in the new Family Life Center. 

One of the newest groups to start using the Family Life Center is a Men's Group meeting each Thursday evening. Soon to follow will be a Women's Group. Father Knott had the opportunity to attend the July 2, 2026 Men's Group meeting pictured below. He was asked to present a "Saturday Afternoon Men's Retreat" on October 10 (2:00 to 6:00) followed by the Saturday evening Mass at St. Theresa Church next door. The retreat will be called "Get a Grip on Your Personal, Family and Spiritual Life." 

 BEFORE

AFTER

THE NEW PORCH HAS ROCKERS AND CAN BE USED FOR SHELTERED PICNIC BOOTHS

The old classroom for the 3rd and 4th grades was renovated into a meeting room for discussions. 

25 men of the new Men's Group met on July 2, 2026 filling the above room. 

The new St. Theresa Family Life Center has an extensive hallway photo gallery and museum room celebrating the parish history from its founding in 1818 to the present. It also holds five parish offices, another large meeting room, a beautiful kitchen, a cafe room (below) and two updated restrooms. 

Four of several cases and wall displays in the museum room.

Historic photos fill both sides of this long hallway.

The whole Family Life Center is heated and cooled with an underground geo-thermal system and powered by an above-ground solar panel system pictured below. 

The old rectory (below) has been totally renovated for use as a Guest House for visiting presenters, visiting priests and private retreatants.

The living room has a flat screen TV and several recliners. 

One of the bedrooms (below)

The downstairs has a laundry room and more space for overnight guest use. 

"HE'S SMART, KIND AND HUMBLE, BUT HE'S NO PUSHOVER"

 

BEWARE OF THOSE OVERLY ZEALOUS WEED PULLERS!

 

…if you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until the harvest.

Matthew 13:24-30

Religious fanatics have probably done more damage to religion than all the atheists, agnostics and public sinners put together! As Blaise Paschal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction!” Cock-sure and blind as bats, they claim to have perfect eye-sight when it comes to good and evil, setting themselves up as judge, jury and executioner! 

We are painfully familiar with fanatic Muslims who would fly planes into high rise buildings as a way to rid the world of “degenerate western influences” or our own Puritans who would burn so-called “witches” at the stake to keep their church “pure.” In our own church, fanatics had a heyday during what we know as the “Inquisition” and "Crusades." The “Inquisition” and "Crusades" were invented by religious fanatics who wanted to do a good thing: rid the world of heresy, error and sin, but they chose some of the most vicious, cruel, inhumane and un-Christian, methods imaginable to accomplish their goals! Many good, holy and even saintly people were brutally killed by those misguided people with their "good" intentions - all in the name of God, of course! I am scared to death of the “Christian Nationalist” movement that is gaining strength in our country for these precise reasons. As Jesus reminds us in today's gospel: beware of overzealous, fanatic weed-pullers!

Today's parable is one of my favorites. In it, Jesus reminds us that in his kingdom here on earth, the good and the bad exist alongside each other and nobody but God can really tell the difference! To make his point, he again turns to farming for a parable. He tells the story of a farmer who planted good seeds in his field, only to find out that, as they sprouted, weeds also appeared growing right there with them! 

In this parable, God is that farmer and we are his hired hands.  One day, the farmer’s hired hands came in to report the presence of weeds growing among the wheat and to suggest that they could fire-up their big weed-eaters and go to work on them!  The wise farmer gives them a quick and firm “no, don’t you dare!” “Leave the weeds alone and let them grow together with the wheat till harvest time!” Wisely, the farmer tells his hired hands that if they uprooted the weeds now, they would end up pulling up the wheat along with them because, at this point, no one could tell one from the other! 

This is a wonderful parable because the specific weed Jesus is talking about is an especially noxious weed that looks exactly like wheat when it is young and tender. In fact, people back then had a nickname for this particular kind of weed Jesus was talking about. They called it “bastard wheat!” Not only did it look exactly like wheat when it was young and tender, its roots also entangled themselves around the roots of tender wheat shoots! Not only can they not be distinguished, one from the other, their roots had become so entwined that if you tried to pull the weeds up too early, you would end up destroying the precious wheat crop by pulling up the wheat along with them! 

When the time finally came for harvest, the weeds and wheat would cut together and threshed. Threshing was the process of separating the seeds from the chaff. The wheat seeds had a golden color and the weed seeds had a slate gray color which made it easier to separate them. The weed seeds were slightly poisonous, having a bitter taste and causing dizziness and sickness, so they had to be destroyed. The precious wheat could then be stored in the farmer’s barn.  

The point of the parable is that, unlike human beings who tend to judge quickly, God is lenient and patient and wise. 

This parable clearly reflects Jesus’ own experience of being condemned by religious people. They thought of themselves as the precious wheat while the social outcasts that Jesus associated with as the useless poisonous weeds.  Jesus could see that often it was the other way around! As Scripture says, “People see externals, but God can see into people's hearts.”

My friends, the message for us today is simple! Good and evil exist side by side in the church and in the world, but we need to be very weary of overzealous fanatics who want to "pull weeds" and “clean house” – whether they come from the church or the government! More often than not, those people do more harm than good because they really cannot see what they are doing, or even understand the purity of their own motives, all that well! As Jesus put it, when he warned people about false, people-abusing prophets whose uniform was a woolen sheep pelt, "Be aware of wolves dressed up to look like sheep!"  

What to do with "weeds," has always been, and will always will be, a problem for the church! However, as the parable teaches us today, we also need to know that overly enthusiastic weed-pullers have sometimes created bigger problems than the "weeds" they so eagerly want to pull up! As Jesus said, "...if you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest." As the great preacher, Billy Graham, so wisely put it, "It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to love!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHURCH CHAT #37

 

Ordained June 11, 1927, Father Reavy became pastor of my home parish of St. Theresa of Avila in Rhodelia in March of 1932.  He is pictured above, in his cassock, on his only mode of transportation in those early days. Thank God for horses! I guess it beats walking! However, I prefer my gasoline-powered car - without a cassock! 

In 1933, a new highway was constructed to Rhodelia (2-1/2 away) to replace the impassible dirt road during the rainy season. He was pastor of my home parish during most of my father's teenage years. He was promoted to pastor of St. James in Elizabethtown in January 1937 - seven years before I was born.