After learning last week that, despite all the preliminary indications and expert predictions to the contrary, my cancer in fact had progressed to my intestines, I walked the block and a half from the Center for Lymphoid Malignancies in New York to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I found my way to a pew in the Lady chapel and prayed like I never have before. A little later I thought of a line from the Polish poet Anna Kamienska, quoted in a beautiful 2016 essay by Christian Wiman: “I want only with my whole self to reach the heart of obvious truths.” I felt like maybe I was starting to approach one such truth: It is good to pray to God for help. And not just for help of a general and spiritualized sort; my prayers that day were very specific, my desires entirely concrete and this-worldly. Don’t let those lovely children grow up fatherless. Spare my wife an early widowhood. Don’t ask my parents to bury their only son. Restore me to the work I love. Cure me of this damn disease.

Many good people have been fervently praying just these kinds of prayers on my behalf for the last eighteen months or so, but it’s only very recently that I’ve started praying them myself, at least with anything like the intensity of that hour in the cathedral. It’s hard to say why; after all, I’ve been a believer for most of my life, and there have been other moments when things looked nearly as desperate as they do now. But somehow prayers of petition, pleas for definite and especially temporal goods, just never felt right to me. I’m not sure the deepest source of resistance was especially intellectual—more on that in a minute—but I suppose I did think it either beyond God’s power or beneath his dignity to answer them. Beyond his power because, whatever I have professed to believe, my pre-reflective habits of mind even now tend toward the naturalism assumed by most people in my demographic. Beneath his dignity because, a bit like Groucho Marx not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member, I wasn’t especially keen on worshipping a God so pliable that his will could be turned by my little requests.

Now, some part of me no doubt realized that a God who creates the world from nothing could easily pull off a far humbler feat like, say, ensuring the efficacy of my next round of chemo. I must have known, too, that my (Groucho) Marxist objection to prayer depended on taking it in crudely anthropomorphic terms. Surely the Church Fathers or the great medieval theologians would have some way of reconciling God’s eternity and immutability with a belief in the efficacy of prayer. They do, of course, but I never bothered to seek it out, an incuriosity that persisted even after I’d acquired a taste for philosophical theology in general and for the sober syllogizing of Thomas Aquinas in particular. (My earlier enthusiasms, like those Wiman claims in his essay, had tended exclusively toward the mystical and poetic; Augustine, patently God-intoxicated but no less rigorous for it, was my gateway to the hardcore systematic stuff.)

It was many months after cancer, then, and years after I had started to read Thomas with pleasure, admiration, and even a kind of awe, that I finally had a look at his treatise on prayer. I still wasn’t praying much myself—not in the petitionary mode at any rate—but I was starting to wonder why I’d been able to take such comfort in the knowledge that countless others were praying for me. That I should be pleased to matter to so many people wasn’t hard to understand, but it seemed to go deeper than that. Was it possible that I thought the prayers—and, who knows, maybe even the positive vibes and healing energy my secular friends professed to be sending my way—might actually work? And if so, was it maybe a good idea for me to spend a little more time on my knees, doing for myself what so many had been doing for me?

It was questions like these that I brought to Thomas, certain that if anyone could square the ordinary believer’s confidence in the utility of prayer with the philosopher’s distaste for all-too-human conceptions of God, he would be the guy. And he does pull it off, I think. I’ll spare you the argument, which I’m far from having mastered anyway. I’m not sure I even want to recommend it: the truths he teaches are universal, but the Angelic Doctor’s high-scholastic style is definitely not for everyone. And it’s not as if he thinks our plodding pilgrim minds could ever comprehend just how God answers our prayers. (A surprisingly strong apophatic current runs throughout his thought.) But it is possible to believe that he answers them, and to believe it, Thomas shows, without having to think the unworthy if not idolatrous thought that our special pleading could bend the eternal mind, causing God to repent of his original intentions for us. “Divine providence disposes not only what effects shall take place, but also from what causes and in what order these effects shall proceed,” he writes. The basic idea is that our prayers, some of them, at any rate, could very well have been providentially ordained from all eternity to be the secondary causes by which some of our needs and desires should be fulfilled. (As with many of the other thorniest theological problems—the reconciliation of free will with divine predestination, for example, or of evolution with design—the trick here is to see that an infinite, primary cause need not compete on the same plane with a finite, secondary one but can instead empower the latter to do its work.)

The effect that reading all this had on me was a bit like the one Pascal intended for his famous wager. The point there is not to argue us into a faith that can only come by grace but rather to show that, whatever it is in us that refuses to believe, it’s probably not, in the final analysis, our reason. Similarly, Thomas’s careful logic didn’t bring me immediately to my knees, but after reading him on prayer I did begin to suspect that my reluctance to ask God for help (except of the most general and spiritual sort) was rooted less in sound theology than in sub-rational, no doubt sin-inflected habits of thinking and feeling. What made these especially intractable in my case was that I could pass them off to myself as signs of spiritual maturity. If I preferred non-petitionary and even non-verbal forms of prayer, I could tell myself it was because I was too advanced to be bothering God about my particular needs and wants. Better just to sing his praises, savor his scriptures, or silently “consent to the presence and action of God within,” to quote the guidelines of a contemplative discipline I’ve followed off and on for years.

Wiman, like me a father of young children, and one who suffers from his own intractable blood cancer to boot, reflects on Jesus’s final prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. “Not my will, Lord, but yours. It’s difficult enough,” he writes, “to pray a prayer like this when you’re thinking of making some big life decision. It’s damn near impossible when your actual life is on the line, or the life of someone you love, when all you want to pray is help, help, help.” I suspect he’s right when it comes to really submitting to God. But I’m also pretty sure that I have at least parroted thy will be done more often than I’ve cried help, help, help. Jesus on the eve of his death prays both prayers, of course, renouncing his own will only after having begged the Father to take the cup from him.

With that example before me, I probably should have come sooner than I did to doubt my motives in skipping the preliminary step. Implicitly confessing his total dependence on the Father, begging for the help he knows might never be granted, Jesus lays himself open to the risk of having his most urgent appeal met with nothing but deafening silence. His final words from the cross in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, his searing cry of dereliction—My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?—scream out with a vulnerability far more radical than any I wanted to acknowledge in myself. So I stuck to a safer course, keeping my petitions to the one prayer (if it even was a prayer) that can not possibly go unanswered, the one wish (if it even was my wish) I could express without fearing disappointment. In a spirit more Stoic than Christian, I asked for nothing in particular from God, deploying the formula thy will be done as a kind of shield against the painful shock of his silence.

If I can’t pray like that anymore, it’s not because I’ve made any great strides in the spirit but simply because my need has become so desperate. I just have to be cured of this cancer. I just can’t leave those children without their father. If I do still try to say not my will, Lord, but yours be done, I don’t say it right away, and I don’t say it with anything like the freaked-out fervor of my help, help, helps. As a result, my prayers these days feel less exalted but also more honest. It is good to pray to God for help.

I don’t know if my petitions will be answered. This cancer might kill me. The statistics say it probably will. My faith in God’s providence requires me to believe that, if he has in fact ordained for me an early death, this will not be incompatible with my final good, nor will it do any ultimate harm to my widowed wife and half-orphaned kids. Oh, but how long the roads to those final ends! How many tears to be shed before he wipes them all from our eyes! Dear God, holy and loving Father, spare me, spare them, at least some of those tears. Cure me of this damn disease. Amen.