[Epistemic status: this is a post I never got around to making while Catholic, about Catholic theology. It’s still important to me, so I’m making it now. It’s written from a Catholic perspective, even though I don’t believe that anymore, because that’s simpler than prefacing every sentence with “within a Catholic worldview…”. Read it as you would a worldbuilding post.]

Prayer is hard.

This feels halfway wrong, and halfway too obvious to state. It’s like “math is hard”. On the one hand, I think math is a lot more accessible than most people think, if it’s taught well, and a lot of what makes math hard for people is just trauma. On the other hand, math is an enormous field full of ambitious intellectual endeavors; of course it’s hard. Prayer is like that.

I’m very aware of what a novice I am at prayer. I’m not an extraordinarily holy person. And I often feel like I’m groping in the dark; I’m not the kind of person who has Spiritual Experiences (TM). Sure, sometimes I get nice fuzzy feelings when I pray, but there’s nothing supernatural about them. It’s the same kind of nice fuzzy feelings I get when I read certain fiction, or hear certain songs: directed at God insofar as all appreciation of the good and beautiful is directed at God, but not something to be taken too seriously as feedback.

But if there’s one thing that’s clear to me about prayer, it’s this: we’re told, explicitly and repeatedly, to argue with God. To demand more than he gives us – more than he offers – more than is remotely reasonable. God wants us to haggle, to pester, to listen to what he tells us we can have and demand a thousand times more. And he will give it to us.

I don’t pretend to be enough of a theologian to have a good answer to why God wants that. It’s the perpetual question about prayer, right: why would you pray, when God is already going to do what’s best? I don’t have a brilliant answer, but I’m pretty sure it’s the definition of the sin of vanity to decide that we’re very clever and very saintly for not praying, when we’ve been told over and over to pray for our daily bread. So I’m not going to try to explain why we’re supposed to do this – just why I believe that we are.

It starts with Cain. Popular culture gets the Mark of Cain wrong, a lot of the time. It’s not a curse, it’s a blessing. God curses Cain to be a “fugitive and a vagabond,” and Cain says: hey, that sucks, I’m going to get killed by the first person who sees me. To which God replies, oh, fair point, and puts a mark on him to tell people not to hurt him.

Even Cain got to haggle with God. And it worked.

We see this with Abraham in Sodom. God tells Abraham that he’s going to destroy Sodom, and Abraham immediately starts haggling with him. Won’t you spare Sodom if there are fifty just men in it? What if there are forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? And every time, God agrees.

(I always wonder what would have happened if Abraham had kept haggling. Could he have haggled God down to one just man? Would God have spared Sodom for the sake of Lot?)

Then there’s Jonah in Nineveh. God sends Jonah to tell Nineveh he’s going to destroy it in forty days. The people of Nineveh repent and fast and beg, and God changes his mind – and when Jonah gets annoyed about this, God gets mad at Jonah. It’s clearly important that God can be haggled with.

There’s lots more in the Old Testament alone. God tells Moses to go talk to Pharaoh; Moses says, hey, I’m no good at public speaking; God agrees that’s a fair point and has Aaron help. The Israelites get tired of manna and demand quail, and God accommodates.

(Another thing I wonder: I’ve heard a Jewish take that Abraham failed the test re: sacrificing Isaac, and that makes sense to me. Was he supposed to bargain with God? Was God disappointed that he just agreed to something so cruel and unfair?)

Possibly the most important instance of this, for me, is the wedding at Cana. For those not familiar with the story, it goes like this:

Jesus and Mary are at a wedding, in Cana, as per the title. Everything is going well, right up until they run out of wine. The servants tell Mary – I assume she’s the matron of honor, or something – and she tells Jesus, hey, they’re out of wine.

Jesus says: ugh, mom, you know I’m not starting in on miracles yet.

Mary, who is having none of this, tells the servants: just you watch, my son is going to fix this. Do whatever he tells you.

And Jesus, put on the spot, sighs and turns water into wine. It’s his first public miracle.

This seems incredibly important! God wouldn’t make that the beginning of his public life if he wasn’t trying to make a point with it! And I have trouble taking away any point other than: if God says no, keep demanding until he says yes.

Other instances in the New Testament include but are not limited to:

  • the parable about the man who stands at the door and knocks until the homeowner gets up in exasperation and gives him what he wants
  • the woman at the well who argues that “even the dogs eat the scraps which fall from the children’s table” until Jesus gives in
  • Thomas demanding to get to poke the holes in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side

As far as I can tell, God not only likes it when we demand more than he offers, he wants us to do it. And he usually gives it to us.

So my answer to the problem of evil, at least in part, is: demand more! Demand better! Scream at God and storm Heaven! Argue that bad things should not happen to good people! Insist on reparations in full! Demand that God retroactively unweave every shed tear from the fabric of the universe, because nothing less is good enough! Argue that not one sheep should be lost, not one soul fall into darkness, that even one evil person cast into eternal suffering is a blight on God’s justice and a wrong impossible to right!

I’m pretty sure God likes that sort of thing. And he might even listen.