Praying to or through Saints?

 I had a question about praying to Saints, which I will include here: 

Hello, why am I reading on here, that some Catholics are praying to Mary and certain saints , instead of God the Father..I've not read in the Bible anywhere that you pray to Mary and Saints instead of God. So some Catholics pray to Mary and there chosen saints first above God and Jesus..I'm looking into the Catholic faith and I'm finding this very confusing I know some people will say , we are not praying to them but asking them to pray fir us and intercede for them , but I actually read that some Catholics are actually praying to them above God the Father and Lord Jesus Christ and I don't feel comfortable with that. It's like they are believing that the prayers to them will help them, but why not pray to God the Father who is the creator of us all..I'm not a Catholic but one who's looking into the faith but now losing hope in bothering now , because I'm reading people putting there faith in Mary and Saints over God the father and Jesus Christ himself, and that to me is idology (sic)..

Thank you for the question. Reading through it, I notice a few things that I would point out for your consideration:

1. First of all, we need to talk about what we mean by prayer. We are talking about the power of prayer and intercession, and any such power comes from God. Without God, prayers are just words like any other words. Prayer can be asking for God's help, yes, but it is ultimately an act asking for our will to be conformed to God's ultimate will. We ask, for example, for God to heal us of a particular illness. We often have in our minds when we pray for healing that God will make us physically whole again as if the illness never had occurred at all. God can heal, yes, but healing might not always be what we envision. God might ultimately heal us by calling us home because our work here on the Earth is finished. God might be using that illness to make sure we have our house in order before we go that we might not otherwise have done without the illness. We are not inclined to ask for forgiveness with a relationship that has become estranged until such time as a serious illness makes us realize that maybe we handled things badly in days of yore and maybe it's time to make amends with the time we have left. The healing we pray for might not be the full "take up your mat and walk" physical healing like Jesus does in the Gospels, but it is a healing where our will is ultimately conformed to the Divine Will for our lives. 

2.  Now, with that understanding of what prayer is, let us turn to the idea of praying to Saints. No one is putting the Saints above God. The Saints are not magic totem spirits. In critiques of Catholicism and Catholic practice, there is always this framing of the "praying to Saints" as if we are putting the Saints at loggerheads with God, as if they are somehow operating independently. It's almost like we are framed as pagans praying to Neptune but we can't pray to Athena because the two are at war or something. It is not that we think the Saints are above God or apart from God or somehow operate independently from God with their own power. Any power the Saints have comes from Christ because they are part of the Church that is the Bride of Christ.

A bride can write a check from the joint checking account she shares with her husband. Even if it is all the money he earned from his job, both of their names are on the account. The bank must honor any check signed by the bride because her name is on the account. This analogy breaks down really quickly if you over analyze it, but it is a good thought experiment. Let us assume for sake of argument the bride and groom are completely in agreement here on all things. In this perfect scenario, the bride will not do anything to hurt or overdraw the account. The two are working as one for the good of all. Again, this is not often a real life scenario, so don't over think it. 

The Saints in heaven operate in this way. God has given them the power to intercede, perhaps in a limited way to even physically interact with the physical world for good, like when the spirit of the Prophet Samuel appears to King Saul in the Witch of Endor incident, though that is theologically debatable. But whatever power they have, they are given by Christ with Christ's full approval because they have been morally perfected at that point. They are no longer affected by sin or greed.

3. Now, we also have to take into account verbiage. Words are all we have to communicate specifics, and words are limited. Even the best authors can fail to convey certain deep truths because sometimes words fail us. Words change. Words morph. And humans tend to be lazy when speaking. We don't always use perfect grammar. We get in a rush and don't always use precise razor sharp verbiage. We get caught up in Churchspeak and assume people know what we mean when we say things, which is not always the case. Sometimes Catholics say things like "pray to Saints" and "ask the Saints to intercede for us" interchangeably, and maybe we should be more precise when we say such things.

As such, when we pray to Saints or through Saints or however you want to word it, because, again, words are limiting, we are asking for the Saints to intercede for us. We do not mean we are bowing down to some golden calf as if the golden Saint calf has power to cast spells and act apart from God's Will. God and the Saints are all on the same team. They are working in perfect unity to affect God's ultimate Will because all prayer is to bring our will into complete alignment with the Father's Will. The Saints' will is already in alignment with God, which is why they are with God in heaven. As such, asking for this perfect prayer from perfected saints to add to our own prayers is to help us to make our will conform to God's Divine will. By joining with the great cloud of witnesses that surround us, God will ultimately bring all things back unto Himself in the Ages of Ages when Eden is restored and all sin is finally conquered, as it talks about at the end of the Book of Revelation when Christ finally proclaimed, "Behold, I make all things new..."