You raise the point that it almost seems futile to pray and not to receive any answers to prayer. You are puzzled as are many people when faced with the question – what do my prayers achieve and why should I continue to pray?

How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? (Habakkuk 1:2). Habakkuk, writing 605 BC already posed the question – why doesn’t God answer?

This is a question that every believer and even unbeliever has asked – what good are prayers and petitions to God if He remains silent? If we pray and nothing changes, what’s the point of this seemingly futile exercise? And this is the topic that we will look at in today’s letter. This question is particularly pressing when we fall ill or those we love become ill, or at times of mortal danger.

God is all-powerful and loving, so why does He not intervene in our times of need? Many are the times that people say they stopped praying because they saw no point to it since prayers are simply offered into a void without any reply whatsoever.

So, to start off our discussion, let us suppose that things were the way we supposedly want them. We pray for something – a disease to disappear, for example – and our prayers are answered immediately. What would this say about the world and about God?

God would now be at our bid and beckon and in fact, it would not be God who would be running the world but it would be we who would determine what will, and will not, happen. This may seem attractive to us but a moment’s reflection on the present state of our world would tell us that if we were completely running things, the world would be in an even more disastrous condition. I think we would all agree that it is better to have God running things and not mankind dictating the terms of creation.

And consider that we pray for something, and someone else asks for the opposite. Whose prayer would take precedence in this case?

The counter argument to all this is to say that we have no free will and everything is totally controlled by God with very little input from us. Again, an argument for considering prayer unnecessary.

In this case, no rational discussion can occur and this is again contrary to what we see in the world. Under these conditions it would be impossible to have any relationship with God we would simply be marionettes that are totally controlled by God. But this is not what we really see happening in the world. This is not the way things are – we do have free will even if it is limited.

At the heart of this argument lies the thorny question of human freedom which God respects and we should also reciprocate by our honoring God’s freedom as well. But there is also a third player in this drama of creation and it is one we seldom pay attention to, and that is the rest of creation, the non-human component. God respects the non-human created order and this enables the study of nature to arise – science. It is through science that we can investigate nature and learn its secrets. And it is this non-human aspect of creation that complicates our relationship to God, to nature and the illnesses that sometimes befall us and eventually bring on our death.

It is interesting that the book of Job is seen as a discussion of unmerited suffering by an innocent man – Job. Interestingly, the book of Job is the only book in the Old Testament whose main character is a gentile – Job. Job is, also, the only one in the Old Testament who is called sinless.

Unmerited suffering is explored in the book of Job, but it is the answer to this suffering that is unexpected. When God addresses Job, he doesn’t simply state yes – there is your suffering – and this is the reason for it and here is the solution to it. Instead, God’s answer almost seems like a non-answer. God calls on Job to consider nature, the world around Job.

Now, let’s flesh this out a little. I will bring two illustrations before you, but there are many more.

There is a protein called symcitin which is crucial in the very early development of the fetus. Symcitin enables the cells to hold together and thereby is crucial in the early development of the child. But there is a dark side to symcitin and that is that it causes childhood leukemia. Take away symcitin – no leukemia but also, no baby; so you see the quandary that the world faces. Couldn’t God have created a creation which did not need symcitin and there would be no childhood leukemia? This is a speculative question where we consider what God could have and couldn’t have done. It is very difficult to answer this question, but, basing ourselves on what we have learned about the universe, I will try to address this point a little bit more explicitly, shortly.

Through research we have developed compounds such as 5-mercaptopurine which has transformed leukemia from a death sentence to an over-all survival rate of 95% for childhood leukemia.

About a third of our medicinals come from plants. There is a plant called the Madagascar Periwinkle. Chemists have isolated a series of compounds from this plant and several of these compounds has been found to be very effective against a variety of cancers. God has answered our prayers but maybe not in the way that we expected. He called on us to join in the search for medications that are there in nature against this disease. He calls on us to carry our research and develop new treatments. He call on us to be active in answering the cry for a cure.

We are complex and unique creatures because of the nature of the human genome, which contains copying errors and which sometimes lead to genetic illnesses, some of them quite terrible. But, without these errors, there would not be the mutations that give rise to new species resulting eventually in homo sapiens. Without mutations – no disease, but again, no humans.

We now know, especially through the discoveries in physics, how slender and narrow are the limits within which a universe could have emerged, let alone life. To seek a world without floods and droughts, diseases and deaths is to seek a world that could not be. This question has been addressed through what is called the Anthropic Principle in physics. What this says is that the constants – which are crucial in defining how the universe operates on the physical level – and are in the equations used in physics, have extremely narrow limits and once the limits are transgressed, no viable world can come into existence. I don’t want to get into the mathematics of it but I will try to illustrate it with the following generalized picture.

You have all heard of the Big Bang theory which states that the universe that we have before us started out as a dot of unbelievably small size. For some unknown reason this dot started to expand. Now, if this expansion occurred too rapidly, no galaxies, no stars, no planets could have formed. We need matter to coalesce and form planets, stars and other bodies but a too rapid expansion would not allow this to happen. Consequently, no life would have come into existence.
If the expansion were too slow, the whole thing, because of gravitational forces, would have collapsed back to the initial dot. Again, no life. The difference between too slow and too fast is unbelievably small. So you see, when we make demands as to how the universe should be, we should keep in mind that there are serious limitations as to what can and cannot be if at the same time, the freedom of creation is to be respected.

So, one of the reasons why evil exists is because we exist as free beings in a physical world with all of the accidents of matter and the pain of mortality. It is not easy to live in a world like this and some have raised their voice in protest.

“You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed” cries out Jeremiah (Jer. 20:7.), the prophet Jeremiah who was eventually murdered by his fellow citizens.

It reminds me of St. Therese of Lisieux who was travelling somewhere to do charitable work and she kept running into various obstacles. Eventually, when the axle of her wagon broke, she got off, looked at the heavens and said: if you treated your friends a bit better, maybe you would have more friends.

All that I have said thus far is a pre-amble to my concluding reply to the question that has several answers possible and I offer them for your consideration.

1. God answers but we sometimes do not hear His answer or His answer is not what we expect
2. We are called on to be God’s answer
3. Our suffering plays a mysterious but necessary role in the redemption of creation.

I will consider each of these points in the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas