Taken from L’UMANO SOFFRIRE

Etymology connects prayer to precariousness. Illness, which makes man feel the precariousness of his existence, dominated by forces which bear down upon him and his condition of being a threatened body, is a situation where at times non-believing man also sees arise in him an openness to the transcendent, a prayer or at least a linguistic activity that has a ‘god’ as its recipient both of supplications and of invective, invocation and blasphemy.

     For Christians, prayer is the search for integration between the whole of life and all existential situations, and thus illness as well, and God revealed in Jesus Christ. Where prayer is the eloquence of faith, illness which forces the psycho-physical integrity of man into a state of crisis, also constitutes a test of faith, of the image of God that a sick person nurtures, and marks the beginning of a journey to restore the broken unity of one’s personal life and the image of God, between faith and life. What else is prayer, indeed, if not a journey in which a believer, starting with the trials of his or her own life, purifies and converts his or her images of God by placing them in front of the crucified Christ, the full and definitive revelation of the face of God? The example of Paul is important. Afflicted by a ‘thorn in the flesh’ which in all likelihood was an illness, be prayed intensely to the Lord to free him from his suffering, but his prayer met with this answer from the Lord: ‘My grace is all you need, for my power is greatest when you are weak’ (2 Cor 12:9). Paul’s prayer remained unanswered, but it was not ineffective: indeed, it led Paul to accept the will of God and to change his image of God, seeing himself more conformed to the image of God – the crucified Christ.

Christian prayer helps the conformation of the believer to the crucified Christ. We here have an important criterion of Christian prayer and prayer involving a request in particular. Prayers expresses a filial relationship and expresses the trust with which a son addresses the Father: in this relationship everything can be requested, even – obviously enough – healing, and not only the strength to bear a trial. For that matter, when man prays he brings all of himself into prayer, also the wish for fullness of life, also the people with whom he lives or has lived, also his past history and his yearning for the future. The Old and New Testaments are full of requests for healing addressed to God and to Jesus, and Christian tradition forged the image of ‘Christ the physician’ to which very beautiful prayers have been addressed and on the basis of which Ambrose wrote: ‘Christ is everything for us. ‘If you want to heal a wound, he is the physician; if you are burning with fever, he is the font of water; if you need help, he is strength; if you fear death, he is life’. At the same time the relationship of being a son expressed in the prayer to Abba, finds for the Christian a norm-making example in the prayer of the Son, Jesus Christ. And the prayer of Jesus at Gethsemane asks for the chalice if possible not to be given to him, but immediately adds: ‘Not what I want, but what you want’ (Mk 14:36), ‘Not as I want, but as you want’ (Mt 26:39).

Here there is a way and a content that represents the limits within which Christian prayer with a request must always accept: a way and a content that are summarised in the cross of Christ. Christian prayer does not ask God to do the will of man, but, rather, leads man to discern and to subordinate himself to the will of God. The prayer of a sick person is thus also a struggle in which he or her can come to give the name of the cross to his or her own illness that does not get better. In this hard pathway, the prayer of psalms should certainly be advised to a sick person. Indeed, the psalms constitute a reserve of extremely rich language for modern men who are unable to ‘tell about’ suffering, to ‘tell about’ their own body (a sick person who prays in the psalms always reads and tells about his or her own body, thereby demonstrating that to pray is to read his or her own existential situation in front of God in order to live in obedience to God’, and to say this ‘in front of God’. The psalms, where often the praying person prays starting with a situation of suffering, are at the same time a testimony and a model: the testimony of a person who is ill or has gone through illness; a model for those today who are living a similar experience and, through appropriation, finds in the words of a psalm the words with which to tell about his or her situation.

It is certainly the case that illness brings out the quality and the measure of prayer to which we were habituated: if one has never prayed it will be difficult to invent prayer during more critical moments. But also when one does not know how to express, or one does not manage to express, a prayer with spoken words, because of a lack of strength, because of powerlessness, faith recognises that a sick person, in his or her weakness and frailty, is a living supplication addressed to the Lord; he or she is prayer. The person who accompanies, who has listened to the sick person for a long time, can come to discern whether it is possible to offer to the patient joint prayer, to listen together to the word of the Lord contained in Holy Scripture, in the gospels. And, whatever the case, the person who accompanies can always pray intimately, in his or her heart, when the sick person he or she is accompanying is not ready to do so. Certainly, the person who accompanies is called to be near to the patient even when distant from him or her, and this through intercession. In intercession, when remembering the patient in front of the Lord, the person engaging in prayer obtains as a gift a renewed and purified outlook on the sick person, an outlook more in conformity with the outlook of God Himself. And one should never forget that prayer for a sick person and with a sick person can only have an ecclesial dimension: a local Christian community that comes together in prayer around a sick person recognises in his or her person the sacrament of Christ who edifies the community with the power of his or her weakness.