We Do Not Know What We Should Pray For As We Ought

The words of St Paul, “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” I know, ring a bell with all of us Christians. When we are faced with situations that are beyond our grasp and capacity to control, we find ourselves without knowing what we should pray for as we ought.

I remember my experience of what it means to be found in a situation without knowing what I should pray for as I ought. It happened in June 2017 when my father was lying critically ill, unconscious, and on life support, in a Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit in Sri Lanka. Because I am a priest, I was entitled to sit at his bedside at any time of the day. For two weeks, I sat by his bedside, held his left hand, and read Psalms, which cries for help from God, without knowing how or what to pray at such a critical time.

The wishes of the family for my father and everybody else who loved him to recover were loaded onto my shoulders to pray for.

After a beautiful life of 81 years of his life, deep down, I knew it was his time to return Home. I prayed for my father, family, medical staff, and many others. However, there was this awareness in me that I didn’t know how or what to pray for at that time.

In my ministry as a chaplain to public hospitals (in Auckland, Wellington, and Melbourne), I have prayed for patients as I make my visits. Prayer is at the centre of my life, and I pray daily. But on this occasion, I didn’t know how or what to pray for. It is not that I didn’t pray, but I was aware that I didn’t know what to pray for as I ought.

As the first week passed by with this awareness that I didn’t know what I should pray for as I ought, I had an experience at the hospital.

Each day, I was the first to go to the ward to be with my father, and I had to walk past several other wards of the hospital to reach the ICU. One early morning, as I walked past the Children’s Ward, a young mother ran up to me crying. She asked me to help her twelve-year-old son, whose condition had deteriorated overnight. She prostrated at my feet and held onto my feet, and I couldn’t move. The attention of everyone walking down the corridor fell on the mother and me.

In Sri Lanka and South Asia, identifying a Christian priest in public is easy. The Anglicans, Romans, and Methodists wear a white cassock. Think of the white cassock version of the famous British Television detective story series character Father Brown. That is how Christian clergy are attired in Sri Lanka. Over there, to be identified as a member of the clergy of any religion offers many privileges that are not provided in the secularised West anymore. For example, in Sri Lanka, the clergy of every religion (especially Christian and Buddhist) have reserved seats in all public and private transportation services. Clergy also has all-hour access to hospitals, emergency services, the police, prisons, government departments and politicians.

Now, back to the young mother who had fallen prostrate before me and veiling. I bent towards her, unclenched her hands from my sandals, lifted her, and asked how I could help her. She cried loudly and said, ‘Father, come see my son, and do something to heal him”.

She dragged me into the ward and to the room where her son was lying in bed, extremely ill. Because of me, the Paediatric Registrar hurriedly came to the room as a gesture of respect and courtesy. Once the nurses calmed the women down, the Registrar spoke to me in English and explained that the boy was in an advanced stage of Bacterial Meningitis. He said the prognosis was bad. The boy had shown neurological damage, hearing loss, memory lapses, gait problems, seizures, and kidney failure, and the chances of his survival were slim.

The poor mother didn’t understand a word of what the Registrar told me but only knew that her son was dying. He was her only child, and she was a widow. Her husband had died of an accident two years ago, and now she was faced with the possibility of losing her only child. The woman was crying and inconsolable.

When the Registrar and the nurses had left the room, I explained to the woman that my father, too, was critically ill and that I would like to get to him soon after offering a prayer for the son. And I added that she also must pray without ceasing.

The woman gazed at me with a complete blankness on her face and asked me, " Prayer, WHAT is that, Father?” I said, “I will pray to God asking that He heals your son and that you, too, should pray for him.” The woman replied, “Father, I am a Buddhist, and I do not know how to pray.”