Host: What is supplication?
Rev. McCloskey: Supplication is the only thing that nobody has to be taught. It is an attitude of prayer that we would be needy with God. If I’m going to be honest about my relationship to people, I’m always waiting to be needed. The greatest gift that anybody can give to another is to need them and that I would need this God of mine with my whole being, my whole life and my whole soul that I am made for heaven, that we have destiny of heaven that God wants us to be with him that's what's needy is all about.
If I am going to be willing to ask another for something, I am giving them power over me. The perfect love always generates the need of making reply and one of the things that I have to say again and again to the people that I am Spiritual Director for is, nobody can deserve love. We all need love. If God hadn't first loved us, we wouldn't know how to love. But how needy, how much do I need God's love and God's love is what life is all about. So how do I express my needs? Supplication. How deep is that need? It is the very breath of life that I need. How responsive is this God to this very breath of life that I need? He is constantly creating and recreating us. We wouldn't be alive if he wasn't actively involved in loving us. So how grateful can I be for being alive? I am as grateful as the ways in which I give my life away for the sake of people. How much do I adore God? Adoration. If I find my God in every brother and sister who comes my way, then I know how much I love. One of my great heroes of life is Mahatma Gandhi who said, "If I am praying for the person who kills me, I will know I died a peaceful person."
Martin Luther King said it even more powerfully that as far as I am concerned when he said, "The greatest of all the sufferings, the best of all the sufferings is undeserved suffering because that makes me more like Christ and if I need with all my being, my soul is crying out for you my God. If there is nothing about life that I don't need in Christ then supplication is the richness of my attitude towards God that I would be forever crying out to heaven for his love."
But it's a two way street because he needs to be needed. I need him in order that I can know myself as who I have loved and our gratitude is really the appreciation of how our so great need was fulfilled in his son, Jesus Christ.