In this video, apologist Jimmy Akin responds to a caller asking what specific prayers or practices he should use while praying for his suffering child.
Transcript:
Unfortunately, my daughter is ill and we couldn’t make it, and that’s part of my call.
I’m sorry to hear about your daughter, you know. It’s something she’s battled for years and years and years. When she was 18 years old, I swore she would not see the age of 20. She did. I found some things that worked, and she’s just having a kind of a relapse now in her later 20s. I prayed a Our Lady of Lourdes Novena, I’ve prayed a Jesus Novena for her health and recovery.
So, I’m kind of like almost at my wits end, but I think God told me to ask you how to heal my daughter, how to help my daughter. Like I said, I’ve tried some Novenas. Maybe there’s a, you know, my wife is doing a 54-day Novena instead of a standard 9-day Novena.
So, you want to know a spirit—you want Jimmy to give you a spiritual undertaking, something of that sort for your daughter. Is that what you’re looking for?
I’m hoping that since God told me to ask Him, He was hopefully maybe telling—maybe guiding Jimmy also to guide me in some way.
Well, I’ve already prayed to God to give me guidance in terms of what to tell you, and I can tell you several different things. I don’t know which one of them, or any of them, will end up being the one that most applies to your situation.
But the first thing I’d have to say, when you phrase the question, you ask, “How can I heal my daughter?” And the answer is, there may or may not be a possibility. I don’t know your daughter’s health situation, and I don’t know what her prognosis is long term. Even if the prognosis is bad, I don’t know whether God will do a miracle.
Essentially, be prepared for accepting God’s will, whatever it is. Be prepared for accepting your daughter’s healing, complete healing where she never has the problem again. Be prepared to accept God’s will for your daughter’s partial healing where, okay, she survives, but then the current flare-up, but this will be an ongoing concern in the future. And be prepared for the possibility of losing her, because those are all realistic possibilities based on what you’ve said. I can’t tell you which one is going to happen, so be prepared for whatever God ends up choosing to allow.
Now, within that framework, there are things you can do to encourage healing in your daughter’s case. Obviously, you want to get her the best medical treatment available. Since I don’t know her medical condition and since I’m not a doctor, I couldn’t advise you too much on that, but I would suggest you pursue all the conventional medical procedures that are recommended to you that you’re able to pursue.
Then there’s the spiritual side of things, which is what you asked about. I am not the most versed person in terms of the range of different devotional practices that are out there, like different novenas and things. You talked in terms of a more powerful novena or spiritual practice you can perform.
You will sometimes hear people describe particular prayers or practices as more powerful, but there’s not really a good basis for that. The Church—other than the Mass and the sacraments more broadly—are powerful spiritual practices. Get your daughter the anointing of the sick at appropriate moments in the course of her illness. That’s a good thing to do.
It doesn’t guarantee there’s going to be a miracle, but the anointing of the sick is a powerful ritual that is specifically oriented towards healing if it’s God’s will. That’s by far the most powerful such prayer or ritual.
When it comes to prayers, I would say don’t think of it in terms of what’s the most powerful thing I can do. There is no objective ranking of prayers. It’s not like Marvel movies where you can say, “You know, here is the whole good stronger than Spider-Man and Spider-Man is stronger than Captain America.” There is no ranking of how powerful prayers are.
So, I wouldn’t think in those terms because fundamentally, prayer is not magic. Prayer is about love. The whole reason that we pray and that God wants us to pray is so that we’re drawn out of ourselves. We’re not talking about giving God information. It’s not about finding just the perfect words that will get God to act.
The reason that God wants us to pray is because it encourages us to think about God, which encourages love of God and a recognition of our own dependence on God. It encourages us to think about our neighbor and love our neighbor by praying for their well-being—in your daughter’s case.
So, prayer is really about love, and I would focus on love and your daughter, which you obviously do, or you wouldn’t be placing this call. I would focus on love rather than trying to find exactly the right words because this is not magic. It is not computer code where you’ve got to write the syntax just exactly proper.
Jesus Himself indicated that in Matthew 6. If you won’t read it, when He gave the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6, He pointed out how different it is than the kind of prayers that pagans will say where they think they’ve got to wear down the gods by using lengthy prayers. Instead, He just gives us this little short one that touches on the basic human needs. He doesn’t mention sickness in that because sickness is not a daily problem.
But all you’re really needed to do is just say, “Hey God, my daughter is sick and I love her. Will you please help her?” And leave it up to God what form that help takes, whether it’s a form of help that results in a miraculous cure or whether it’s the strength she needs to get through a health crisis.
So, I would say, you know, have in mind those principles about prayer. Ultimately, it’s about love—that’s what God ultimately wants from us. He doesn’t need particular sets of words or things like that.
Now, that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with engaging in specific devotions, including novenas for the recovery or other assistance of your daughter. If you want some ideas for what you might do in that regard, I won’t say it’s the most powerful prayer ever, but you could do a lengthy one like your wife is doing. You could also do a shorter one. You could do a novena to the Son. You could do a novena to the Virgin Mary. You could do a novena to St. Luke, who is the physician.
I know there is a written novena to St. Luke, and if there wasn’t, you could just write your own. Depending on her medical condition, there might be other saints that are appropriate. For example, if she had cancer, St. Peregrine is a traditional patron for those who have cancer.
And you’re always welcome in any novena you’re saying to preface it by saying, “I also would like to pray for all saints and angels as I say this novena,” and that covers everybody. So, there are some ideas for particular novenas you might want to do.
There’s also another one which I’ll mention, which is known as the emergency novena or it’s also called the fly-in novena. You can get more information about it by just Googling “emergency novena” or “fly-in novena,” especially if you add “Mother Teresa.”
Because she was kind of the one who came up with this. Instead of doing a novena of nine days of nine prayers over the course of nine days, if Mother Teresa had an urgent need that she couldn’t wait nine days for, she would do her so-called fly novena or emergency novena, which was like nine iterations of the Memorare done immediately after each other, so it doesn’t take nine days, and then a tenth prayer, a tenth iteration in gratitude for God responding to the request, however He responds to it.
So, you might, if your daughter’s ever in an urgent situation where you don’t have nine days for a novena or something, you could consider Mother Teresa’s emergency novena or fly-in novena.
So, those are some of the things that occurred to me. Also, I would mention, you know, St. Paul in Romans 8 talks about how the Holy Spirit intercedes for us when we’re not even sure what we should pray for. So, that just underscores how we’re not bound to find the exact right word.
If we don’t know what we need to pray for, the Holy Spirit does—He’s omniscient. So, really love and trust are what prayer is all about.
Those are the things I would focus on rather than finding just the right words. It’s obviously good to pray, and you can pray different kinds of novenas, but being ready to accept God’s will, whatever it ends up being, and also just loving people and loving God and trusting Him to help your daughter get through this—even if she doesn’t survive, helping her just get through this phase in her life and helping you and your wife get through this phase in your lives.
All of that, I think, is focusing on that greater level of love and trust is where God would want your heart to be, as opposed to what are the exact words I need to use.
John, unfortunately, I have to take the break because I’m very late for it. I hope that that was helpful. I know many of our listeners are praying for you. We will certainly pray for you and your daughter, but we’ll be back with more Jimmy Akin on Catholic Answers Live.