Prayer is Our Superpower

9 February 2026  1 Kings 8:1-7, 9-13

“The Lord intends to dwell in the dark cloud; I have indeed built you a princely house, the base of your enthronement forever.” (1 Kings 8:12-13) 

Solomon certainly got the thick irony of his situation.

Here he had built a magnificent place for God, “the base for your enthronement forever,” but God filled even this magnificent place with a dark cloud “so that the priests could no longer minister” (1 Kings 8:11).

Solomon had it in mind that prayers offered in the temple were more likely to be heard because they were prayed in the temple, but the Bible has never regarded temples as the preferred places to pray. Jesus always went to remote, desolate places to pray.

It appears that God wants us praying more on battlefields than in sanctuaries, places where we are more likely to be challenged by devils than places of refuge from them. In prayer we are on offense, and on offense we should be standing in front of our adversary rather than hiding from him.

The Israelites, after their deliverance from Egypt, wandered with Moses for forty years in the desert. They learned to love and follow God in wastelands. Thomas Merton once wrote that the wilderness was supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men:

The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness, and that they should always look back upon that time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 5).

In fact, the Israelites did learn to love God in the wilderness. They even made one of their largest festivals, Sukkoth (the Feast of Tabernacles), a remembrance of that special time alone with Him in the wasteland.

Of course, there are dangers in the wilderness, too. Wastelands are the region of madness and the habitation of the devil. Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness (cf. Matthew 4:1-11), and as the Desert Fathers knew, the devil seeks God in the wastelands also, not for the intimacy of repentance, but in malice and rage. The Gerasene Demoniac howled in the wasteland with his legion of demons until Jesus came and restored peace and quiet with the quiet of peace (cf. Luke 8:26-39). So those who seek God in desolate places must take care that they don’t wind up in thrall to devils who still seek the ruin of souls.

Wastelands and badlands are stretching out now – asphalt tundras glittering with places to spend money you don’t have to buy things you don’t need for purposes that won’t make you happy. These are the new desolate places where we go to pray for peace, do penance, and engage with demoniacs. It appears that God wants us praying more on battlefields than in sanctuaries, places where we are more likely to be challenged by devils than places of refuge from them. This is not to say that God does not hear the prayers offered in temples, or that we should not pray them there, or that prayers offered there are useless. It is to say only that in prayer we are on offense, and on offense we should be standing in front of our adversary rather than hiding from him.

Prayer is our superpower. Perhaps we should use it more like that.