Anti-Magic: On Mercy, Manipulation, and Letting God Be God
I’ve been wrestling with a question about Divine Mercy lately. Or maybe less about Divine Mercy and more about what I’m actually doing when I pray.
At what point does devotion become superstition? When does confidence in the promises of a private revelation become something closer to treating God like a vending machine? Put in the right prayers, get the right graces.
How do I keep from becoming too “devotionist”? Especially for someone like me, whose prayer life is so tangled up in chaplets, icons, novenas, and all the other beautiful clutter of Catholic life.
Am I praying because I love God, or because I’m afraid of what might happen if I don’t?
That’s an ugly question to ask yourself. Uglier still when you suspect you already know the answer.
I do treat prayer like magic. We all do at our worst: in a panicked grasp at control, in fear, in selfish tantrum. But then we don’t. We persist in the habit, and He persists in persisting with us. And when I catch a glimpse of His sheer delight, when I take in a sweet whiff of the fruit of agape, in those fleeting moments that can’t be held onto, I begin to pray the Chaplet. Then it’s the antithesis of magic. It’s anti-magic.
Even the fear isn’t necessarily wasted. The Church calls contrition born of fear imperfect, but still a gift of God (CCC 1453).
In magic I say, even if only in some deep corner of my subconscious, “If I do xyz, I will get what I want or what I think is best.” Prayer is lifting your innermost being to YHWH and pleading, “I do xyz because You are all good and deserving of all my love, and I want You to do what You will, because Your will is love and mercy itself.”
As for private revelation, my mechanic neighbor once watched me fight a simple repair with a wrench and a socket set. He offered his power tools. I had already stripped two bolts. I could have politely said no. The basic kit gets the job done. But his tools are faster, and he’s watched a lot of people strip a lot of bolts. Private devotions are like that. Nobody is bound to use them, and they can’t add anything to the faith, only help us live it (CCC 67). The Church has tested this one and handed it over. Everything in the Chaplet is already ours: the Son offered to the Father, and mercy begged for the world.
I think the Chaplet and the spirituality of the Jesus Prayer are closely linked. In begging for mercy we aren’t just asking not to go to hell. We’re asking to partake in the origin of life itself. So many times in the Gospels people belted out in faith, “Have mercy on me,” because they had needs: blindness, demonic oppression, exclusion, brokenness. That is us. We cry out for mercy because it’s the answer to everything.
In the Jesus Prayer it can feel like we’re asking mercy for our little old selves. But not so, at least not below the surface. If I were what God meant me to be, I’d save countless souls. Or rather, Christ through me would. So asking mercy for myself is asking it for the whole Body. That’s even more true in the Chaplet. We ask for the whole world, with a confidence that consoles the wounded Sacred Heart, and the Father looks on us with the same paternal love He has for His only Son.
Shakespeare got there too:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
