When you want something, do you pray to God for it? A lot of people in this country, even in these troubled times, do say that they “whisper a little prayer.” Excellent. Others put aside time each day for prayer or even for Mass. A number use the present web site to understand and pray about the readings for the coming Sunday.

Of course, in our secular culture, there are those who do not believe in prayer at all. So, when their friend is having an operation or is traveling or if the world situation is as bad as it is, they say, “we will be thinking of you.” This instead of “we will be praying for you,” as we used to say. Thinking? Do you sit alone in your house and think?

Others go all out. Years ago, a group of cloistered sisters, called “the Pink Sisters,” prayed many months for sunny clear days during Pope John Paul’s visit to St. Louis. Guess what. Sunny clear days the entire time. I was present when his plane lifted off for Rome and I watched the clouds gather afterwards and the rain begin to fall—afterwards but not before!

Abraham in the First Reading is an example of this kind of refusal to give up. Remember his visitors from last week? This week they went on their way to the city called Sodom while God waited—during which he told Abraham about his intention to destroy Sodom and its surrounding cities because of their depravity.*

Abraham, against all reason and expectation, began negotiating with God out loud.

Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it? (First Reading)

God agrees that he will not destroy the city if fifty innocent people can be found. Abraham slyly asks for more. What if only forty-five innocent people are found? God agrees. What about forty? Ok, God says. Abraham goes on and on until he negotiates down to the number ten. God replies, “alright, for the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it.”

As you may know, not even ten innocents lived in that city, so Sodom did get destroyed. But notice, God actually had granted each of Abraham’s requests.

Jesus in the Gospel recommends the same kind of shrewdness. He tells the famous parable about knocking at the door of a friend late at night to borrow some bread. The friend refuses because he and his family are all in bed. Jesus says, “if he does not get up to give loaves to the visitor because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of the visitor’s persistence.”

Fine, but why do we have to pray and pray over and over for what we need? Why must we haggle?

Because of love.

Like a good parent who cares for its child very much but will at times allow deprivation, allow what seems like a non-answer to pleading. Perhaps there is something even better that such a parent, or God, is trying to give us. The loving answer might be to sit beside our bed and suffer with us. This is true even in the midst of the violence now present in the USA! Look at Christ’s agony on the cross: God’s love will go to any lengths to give us what we most need and want, and that is: himself.