Interactive Prayer

Rafael Andrés SJ

'Interactive' is a newly coined adjective which signifies the active intervention of a person towards the result of something which depends on others.

For example, TV watchers can intervene in the development and outcome of a program which is open to various results. With their votes or telephone calls they can change the ending of a TV serial. And this interaction, this return ticket, this boomerang which is thrown and returns to the sender, not only can but must be practised in prayer.

Interactive prayer consists in operating in tandem with God in the following manner: we ask of ourselves what we are asking of God.

Let us take the example of the model prayer of the Our Father. Praying interactively consists not only in asking the Father for 'our daily bread' for everyone, but also asking ourselves, who are praying, to do everything possible for our bread to reach everyone, no one excluded.

This disposition to ask of ourselves what we ask of heaven completely changes prayerful passivity into creative activity. It is a spiritual revolution in our prayer habits.

However this is not an innovation, it is the recovery of a practice Jesus taught us. When he says, 'Ask the Master of the wheat field to send harvesters to his field', he immediately adds, 'Let us set out!' Jesus clearly warns us that it is not enough to ask God to send others; we must ourselves be the first to go. Otherwise the prayer would be hypocritical; we would be irresponsibly dodging the issue and shifting all the work on to God.

Jesus proposes another eloquent case of interactive prayer. When he has us ask the Father to forgive us our offences, he asks us to promise to forgive those who have offended us. We ask ourselves to forgive our brothers and sisters with the same forgiveness we ask of the Father for us.

The same interactive principle can be applied to all the petitions in the Our Father, and all our prayers of petition. And so when we ask the Father that God's name be hallowed, we also ask ourselves to hallow his name of Father by living as God's adoptive children and as brothers and sisters of each other.

And when we ask God that his kingdom come to us, we ask to do everything possible for its coming here and now in the circle in which we operate. Actively praying is asking God to bring about his kingdom and at the same time being 'the first to seek the kingdom of God and his justice'.

When we ask God not to allow us to fall into temptation, we ourselves also avoid temptation, otherwise we would be hypocrites. Jesus tells us to both 'watch and pray in order not to fall into temptation'. Finally, when asking the Father to deliver us from evil we also ask ourselves to free ourselves from the moral evil which enslaves us.

Even the 'Amen' with which we end the prayer of the Our Father and all our prayers to God in the liturgy is interactive. This is because saying 'Amen' is not only an act of faith that God will grant what we have asked for, it is also be a statement that we will accomplish our part in that process.

If we pray in this way one can accuse our prayer of being merely passive, since it is a fruitful activity. The popular saying, 'Pray to God and get to work' sums up interactive prayer in a nutshell. It is not lack of confidence but collaboration. It is Saint Ignatius' doctrine applied to prayer: 'To pray as if everything depended on me, knowing that everything depends on God'. When all is said, our free will is also a gift of God but he asks us to use it as our own, which it is.

To sum up, interactive prayer is an application of our co-responsibility with God, a firm commitment to work side by side with him. Interactive prayer is similar to Newton's law of action and reaction—a force proportionate to the one applied is generated in the opposite direction. In asking God we must ask ourselves for what we are asking for as forcefully as we are asking God for it.

Interactive prayer is best exemplified in the following dialogue: 'Do you pray to God?' 'Yes, every night.' 'And what do you ask God for?' 'Nothing. I ask God whether I can help him in any way'. This is interactive prayer in its pure form.