Those of you who are social media savvy likely already know that the algorithms are designed to show you your “preferred content” based on your browsing habits, the stuff you click on, etc., right down to how long you spend looking at something. You can tell what a person’s into by simply scrolling through their Facebook feed. Care to know what’s on mine? Well, in my FB feed you’d find stuff like superhero movie clips, The Legend of Zelda clips, science-y things from popular science influencers such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox (Science!!!), stuff about healthy eating (that’s due the influence of Kathy Fritz!), relationship and dating advice (does God want me to be a monk…?), Christian apologetics responses to theological questions from the likes of William Lane Craig and Bishop Robert Barron, Catholic-Protestant debates, and yes, even counter-apologetics from prominent atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris.
So as I was scrolling through FB one time, I chanced upon an apologetics clip aimed at answering an all-too-common question which I’m sure you’ve asked at some point: “If God has a plan and He already knows what we’d pray for, why even pray?” As you can imagine, I came upon various answers, such as “Prayer is not aimed at changing God’s will, but rather aligning our will to His,” or this interesting one from Catholic Answers which went along the lines of, “God already knows what we’ll ask, but sometimes He makes things contingent on our asking so that we learn to depend on Him.” One particularly humble answer (perhaps the answer I respect the most) came from a certain Randall Smith, a theology professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. One of his students had asked, “But if I am totally surrendered to God, I shouldn’t be asking for things, should I?” And Smith admits to giving an answer which he describes as “not sophisticated theology or inspired apologetics.” His answer was “Jesus said you should ask for things you need. So maybe you should listen to Him because He probably knows what He’s talking about, being God and all.” I dunno about you, but I have great respect for theological humility!
Now of course, if you know me, or if you’ve read my previous posts, you know that despite my respect for humble answers, I have an insatiable urge to find all the possible answers I can when a question is stuck in my head, and questions have a very unpleasant way of sticking in my head for a long time! Sometimes they spiral into other questions, such as: If I ask for something in prayer, is the thing I ask is either aligned with God’s plan or not, or is there a middle category, i.e. not necessarily in God’s plan but not against it either, such as what food I eat for breakfast, or does God’s plan extend to my breakfast choice? If we ask for the intercession of the saints because their prayers are powerful, does that mean that the strength of my prayer is increased through a saint, and conversely, would my prayer be “weaker” had I not asked for the saint’s intercession? Is my prayer likewise strengthened if I say it while I’m right next to the tabernacle containing the Blessed Sacrament? Is my prayer strengthened by the number of times I say it? Is there like a baseline efficacy value for prayer which can be increased in direct proportion to one’s level of holiness, one’s spatiotemporal location in relation to the Eucharist, and one’s persistence? I could probably seek all kinds of theologically sophisticated answers from Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae or William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith articles, but something tells me I’ll be more at peace with a humble answer…
I will say though that in that clip I mentioned, the speaker brought up a phrase that has stuck with me since: “the dignity of causality.” He was making the point that our prayers can cause changes in the world that would otherwise not happen if we didn’t pray. If you Google “dignity of causality” on your phone, the AI Overview will say “The concept of the ‘dignity of causality,’ coined by Blaise Pascal, refers to the idea that God grants humans the capacity to affect outcomes through their actions and prayers.” If the name Blaise Pascal doesn’t ring a bell, you may nonetheless have heard of his famous thought experiment, known as Pascal’s Wager, which argues for belief in God on the basis of risk assessment. Notwithstanding my criticisms of Pascal’s very problematic argument, I must correct a little error of the AI (yes, AI is not infallible…). Blaise Pascal did not coin the term “dignity of causality.” That phrase actually appears in… you guessed it… St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, written centuries before Pascal was even born:
…there are certain intermediaries of God's providence; for He governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures.
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I q22 a3
To put Aquinas’ eloquent prose in the vernacular: God causes stuff, but you can cause stuff too, cause God is so good that He gifted you with the ability to also cause stuff! I’ve often vented to my friend Danielle about how summer is such a bummer (lol summerbummer…) for me because school is on break, so I don’t get to cause the stuff that I normally enjoy causing. I go “Danielle, I’m wasting my dignity of causality! I need to cause stuff in the world but instead I’m at home playing videogames…” Just ask Danielle how many times I've texted her asking about how I should exercise my causality! So then I try to push myself to go out and do something. And then in the idle times, like on the train rides, I remember that clip and I’m like, “Oh, I guess prayer is also a thing I can do…” See, social media ain’t all bad!
Finally, speaking of prayer, if your Mass plan this Sunday (July 27) involves coming to the 5pm Mass, might I invite you to come a little earlier, say, 4:55-ish? My Worship Band colleagues Danielle and Michelle have been hard at work preparing a special Gospel-style setting of The Lord’s Prayer, which we plan to offer as a prelude before the start of Mass. That’s a few minutes before the 5pm Mass this Sunday, July 27th. We hope to see you there!
With my peace,
Carlo Serrano, Music Director
No comments:
Post a Comment