Our prayers go to two places. Some, invoking the help of saintly intercessors, go to the Altar of God, are mixed with the incense burning there, and rise directly to God. The Lord’s Prayer, offered “directly” go there, as well.
Specific prayers, like “O, God, help me get this job.”, when not accompanied by a request for the guidance provided by a saint asked to intercede on their behalf, go to the Heavenly equivalent of huge boxes, spiritual versions of storage containers we have in our garages, basements, attics, and storage sheds. When the saints in Heaven have time on their hands, they go through them, sort them out, and assign them to the spiritual “in-boxes” of the appropriate saint so that they may be placed on The Altar before God. It may be imagined that this job falls most frequently to the most “Junior Saints”, who do it cheerfully, all the time wondering “Why don’t they do it right, and speed things up by directing their prayers to the proper department?”
The process is slower than taking advantage of the various spiritual prayer specialists and asking their help. Trying to follow that chain of command shows that we care enough to relate our own concerns with what we’ve been told about Heaven and its workings.
When we’re praying, for instance, for God to help someone thinking, saying, or doing something wrong, we should consider asking an appropriate Saint to request that an angel be sent directly into the mind of the malefactor to drive out the demons that have disordered it. If a person on live television, for instance, is saying something stupid, we might ask St. Thomas Aquinas to send an angel to straighten out the intellectual mess within. Once in a while, when we do this, we will notice the person get slightly off-track, indicating that if more of us made such requests, some such souls may be made aware of just how wrong their thinking is and be saved.
