Hence, we must never say that God has rejected our prayer; from the fact that our wish has not been fulfilled we must in no wise infer that God has turned His face from us or that our prayer has passed unheard. Rather we must assume that God knows better than we do about what furthers our salvation; that the ultimate intention of our prayer, our true happiness, has been realized precisely through God’s refusal, in this case, to grant our concrete request.

Nor is this all: even in the context of our earthly welfare we may often observe that something we deplored as a great calamity subsequently turns out to be highly fortunate for us. Who of us cannot remember occasions when he strove with all his might to attain a certain object, begging God to grant his desire, only to thank God, a while later, for having withheld from him an apparent benefit which he now sees would have involved him in disaster.

He who has the right confidence in God knows that his prayer is never condemned by God, whose merciful glance is always turned towards us; but he also knows that God alone can judge what profits us best and that, therefore, His answer is always the answer of omniscient charity.

Again—and more important, perhaps—he knows that the nonfulfillment of our request, though we may feel it as a heavy blow, must in reality accord with what is objectively more valuable: in other words, that we ought not to consider the decisions of God exclusively from the narrow angle of our life and our desires. On the contrary, it is the adjustment of our wills to the objectively good that we should care about: “Grant Thy peoples that they may love what Thou commandest and desire what Thou dost promise” (Collect of the fourth Sunday after Easter).

Prayers denied are nonetheless valuable as words addressed to God

This is not to say, however, that we must not pray except for the salvation of our (or other people’s) souls. We may, and should, pray for any legitimate good, and for the averting of evils, as does the holy Church: “From plague, famine, and war deliver us, O Lord.” The prayer of supplication, by which we humbly solicit His aid—expecting everything from Him—is pleasing to God. In his Second Homily on Prayer, St. John Chrysostom justly says: “Consider what happiness is conceded, what honor is accorded to thee; to hold speech with God, to have colloquy with Christ in thy prayers, to ask for what thou wishest, to demand what thou desirest.”

It may well be in a given case that God is willing to accord us a certain good if we confidently pray for it. All our entreaties, however, should be inspired by the spirit of the words of Christ on the Mount of Olives: “Nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).