The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that it is an “absurd and… impudent delusion” for someone to pray for something from God in order to divert God “from the plan of his wisdom (to our present advantage)” (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:196n). In other words, we should not resort to prayer to influence God to do something for us. God is omniscient and arranges everything wisely. Compared to God’s knowledge and care for the whole world, our wishes and needs seem petty. Kant thought that instead of asking God to do things for us, we should only use prayer to excite in us a “disposition to a life-conduct well-pleasing to God, and to this [end] speech serves only as an instrument of the imagination” (Religion, 6:198). In other words, praying to God helps us to live a good life by helping us imagine how to conduct ourselves in a way that pleases him, but we cannot effectively petition God to do anything for us.

Thinking like this might draw some of us away from prayer, even during the suffering and uncertainties of the coronavirus pandemic. After all, even our Lord acknowledges that God, “knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt 6:8). God already knows that this pandemic threatens our lives and health and appreciates the added threats social distancing poses to our social, economic, and spiritual welfare. We cannot present God with any new information. We cannot influence him to want something he does not already want for us. Wouldn’t it be delusional to think that God will respond to our needs through our prayers?

Our faith informs us otherwise. Jesus himself emphatically and repeatedly urges us to pray and to pray for something (see especially Luke 18:1-8). Furthermore, we know that God responds to prayer, such as when he responded to Moses’s intercession such that, “the Lord changed his mind about the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people” (Exod 32:14). Finally, while it is true that no creature may “divert” the Creator from what he intends to do in his wisdom, we must remember that God always intends to accomplish things in a certain way.

Take the woman in the Gospel who, having suffered hemorrhages for twelve years, touches Jesus’s cloak and finds healing (Luke 8:40-48). In the narrative, Jesus inquires, “Who has touched me, for I know that power has gone out from me?” Here, the narrative and Jesus’ own words make it sound like it was the woman who brought about the healing. Jesus almost reaffirms this when, on finding the woman, he informs her: “your faith has saved you.”

Any healing Jesus performs he performs as God; thus, he would not have healed the woman unless he first wished it to happen. We also know that God could have healed her at any point during the twelve years she suffered. But Jesus did not want only to heal this woman; he wanted to heal her in a specific way. He wanted to heal her through her reaching out to touch his cloak in faith. He wanted to heal her by answering her prayer.

It is often the case that God wants to give us what we need, but he wants to give us what we need as a response to our prayers. Prayer evokes something in us. By our prayers, we rely on God to fulfill our needs and trust that God loves us and wishes to provide for us. By telling him our needs, we place ourselves in his hands. We do not change God’s mind, for he already knows what he is going to do and how. Nevertheless, how God chooses to fulfill our needs is often in response to our asking him in faith. As St. Thomas writes so lucidly, “we do not pray in order that we might change the divine disposition but so that we might obtain what God disposes to give through the prayers of his saints” (ST II-II.q.83, a.2).

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Image: El Greco, Santo Domingo en oración