Attitudes for Effective Prayer

By Fr. Christopher Foeckler, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

How many times have you heard or felt that the Lord was not listening to you or not concerned about your prayers? As a confessor, I hear a version of that complaint more often than I’d wish. So what’s the answer? For our prayers to be effective we have to have Faith and Humility to start with but then a third essential quality to prove these first two. 

Faith that God exists and that He cares enough to listen to our prayers and answer our needs is an obvious requirement for us to even start to pray. The more we believe it, the better our chance of getting what we need. Whereas, if we believe that God is distant and the “Clockmaker-God” of the Deists, we shouldn’t expect Him to answer our prayers at all. But He is close to us, as Jesus Christ showed us by dwelling among us and answering our requests in an “immediate” fashion as we often hear in the Gospels. It is Faith that our Lord looks for in granting requests!

Humility is necessary for effective prayer, for while I believe that God can answer, humility helps me to accept peacefully the fact that He doesn’t have to answer me at all or right away. He has and is doing so many wonderful things for us already! So if He delays or doesn’t seem to answer what I ask for, humility helps me not to storm off in anger or slink away in self-pity and discouragement. Humility strengthens my Faith. When Jesus prayed in Gethsemani, He said to His Father, “If it is possible…yet not My will be done, but Yours.” And when He knew the Father hadn’t answered His prayer and the soldiers appeared, He stepped forward like a champion and said so courageously, “It is I you are looking for; let these others go free!” that the guards all fell back at His words. Jesus knew that His Father knows best and wants the best for all!

Yet, the Key to effective prayer is Persistence! By persisting relentlessly in prayer for the important needs of our world, our country, our families and of our own souls, we show that we have Faith. The Lord taught this explicitly with the examples of the unjust judge granting the persistent widow’s claim, and the sleeping friend giving the bread not for friendship sake, but because the petitioner wouldn’t go away! Jesus praised the persistent Canaanite woman because she persisted in pleading for her daughter in spite of the disciples trying to get rid of her, the Lord ignoring her and even rebuffing her because of His obligations. “O woman, Great is your Faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”