October 10, 2016
Editor’s note: Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C) on October 12 and 13, 2013, at then-Blessed John XXIII University Parish in Knoxville, TN. The homily is based on the day’s readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17; Psalm 98; 2 Timothy 2:8-13; and Luke 17:11-19.
We’ve spent a lot of time with the gospel of Luke in the past 10 months. As we’ve discussed before, Luke is – among things – the gospel of women, the gospel of the Holy Spirit, and the gospel of social justice. But for the next three weeks, another theme comes to the fore: Luke is the gospel of prayer.
Christians are always talking about prayer, but to me, most of the talk is not that useful. Our public discussion about prayer seems to revolve around three topics:
(1) Prayer is really important.
(2) You should pray more than you currently do.
(3) I have a specific way of praying that works for me, so you should pray the same way.
But it seems as if we rarely talk about how to pray… which is an absolute shame, since the Church has a remarkable variety of prayer traditions.
One of my personal missions is to help people become more comfortable with prayer. I’m always glad to meet with someone to help them figure out how prayer can become more natural for them and less of a burden. If you’d like to get together to talk about this with me, just call the office or send me an e-mail.
For the next three weeks, my homilies will revolve around different aspects of prayer. Today, both the first reading and the gospel tell of people being cured of leprosy, but I don’t think that’s the main point. Let’s concentrate on the idea of gratitude. Both stories point out that gratitude and faith are inseparable from one another. Let’s take a moment to express our thanks to God for his mercy.
Somehow, I received a lightning-bolt call to consider becoming a priest when I was twenty-seven years old, but I didn’t learn much of anything practical about praying until I was thirty. When I was thirty, on that first night of the first personal retreat I ever made, my director invited me to keep a journal, and he introduced me to a short article about how to pray with Sacred Scripture. That was the start. In the next few years, I went out of my way to learn more about various ways to pray. I found myself a spiritual director. Two Paulists – Vinny McKiernan and Bob Moran – taught me centering prayer. I participated in groups that prayed through lectio divina, the rosary, and Eucharistic exposition. I had the opportunity to observe one of the country’s best liturgical choreographers. I studied the spiritualities of several of the Paulist patron saints, especially Francis de Sales.
I don’t have a whole lot of books on my shelves regarding prayer, and most of the ones I have are slim, less than 100 pages. And the pages to which I refer in those books are few and far between. The titles might give you a sense of how eclectic I am: The Spirituality of Imperfection, Praying Our Experiences, When God is Silent, The Dark Night of the Soul, The Holy Longing, Living Simply In an Anxious World, The Paulist Prayer Book, and of course, Christian Prayer For Dummies. Other spiritual books that have influenced me include The Wounded Healer, Creative Ministry, and God and You. After years of searching, I’ve finally found two books of daily devotions that speak to me.
I tell you this for the exact opposite reason for what you may expect. I’m here to tell you that prayer is NOT complicated; it’s extremely simple. The founder of the Paulist Fathers, Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker, said that with practice, prayer should become as easy as breathing.
The key to prayer is to show up. Woody Allen once said, “Showing up is eighty percent of my life.” I don’t usually look to Woody Allen for spiritual advice, but he’s onto something here: in prayer, “showing up” is at least ninety-five percent of the work. Matthew Kelly, a well-known Catholic motivational speaker, says that there are two secrets to having a profound spiritual life. The first secret of prayer is to have a routine: “show up” to pray at the same time every day. Don’t be a superhero: pick the easiest time of the day for you, a time when you’re available to yourself, a time at which you usually have energy.
As long as we “show up” to pray, it’s pretty hard to mess things up. There is only one thing that can really sabotage our time in prayer: and that’s trying to evaluate how “well” we’re praying. Once we start evaluating HOW we’re praying, we’re no longer praying. This is where Matthew Kelly’s second secret comes in: have a routine within your routine. That is, when you show up to pray, have a few prayer techniques to choose from. Just settle in to the routine, and don’t judge how well you’re doing it! These days, three of my main prayer practices are journaling, the Ignatian examen, and something that therapist Bob Wicks created called the Idealized Christian Self-Image.
We do a lot with prayer with the twelve men and women considering becoming Catholic through our RCIA process. Two weeks ago, we invited parishioners Bill and Cathy Toth to come to RCIA to talk about the basics of prayer. Cathy put it this way: prayer is a practice; it’s not about waiting around for the Holy Spirit to inspire us. It’s about setting up a discipline: praying for a few minutes every day.
One image about prayer that speaks to people is having a conversation with God in a similar way to having a conversation with a very close friend. That’s a great analogy, if we follow through. With good friends, you keep in regular contact. In each individual conversation with your good friend, you don’t need to check in every three minutes to ask if the other person is listening; you know that they’re listening. And sometimes, with the best of friends, words are not always necessary. We can often strengthen our friendships just by sitting in silence. So it should be in prayer, in our conversations with God. We don’t need to demand extraordinary revelations from God; we just need to spend time with God.
At this point, you may be wondering how I’m going to relate this to our gospel today. Rest assured, here it comes. In the United States, this passage is read in most Catholic parishes on Thanksgiving Day… which is a big clue to its main point.
The engineer and rule-follower in me had always struggled with this gospel passage. The other nine men with leprosy didn’t do anything wrong, did they? They followed the directions of Jesus and the Torah: go show yourself to the priest to be declared clean.
Here’s the catch: there was nothing in the Torah, or in what Jesus said, that insisted that the men with leprosy were to do nothing else before they went to the priest. The Torah only required them to go to the priest before they could return to living with the rest of the community. But Jesus was passing by the town. If they didn’t stop what they were doing right then and return, they would never have a chance to express their gratitude to him.
Gratitude only happens when we place something besides ourselves at the center of our concern. And the only way we can gain the ability to stop fixating on our own concerns… is to have faith. The ability to be grateful is a sign of having faith. Faith and gratitude are inseparable. Both require us to have humility, to realize that our concerns are secondary to God’s concerns.
Faith prompts us to pause from our worldly concerns to make time for God. Hmm. What’s another word for “pausing from our worldly concerns to make time for God”? Prayer. If you still feel that you don’t know how to pray, here’s an easy way to start, in two simple steps:
- Schedule five minutes a day, at the same time every day, to be with God.
- For those five minutes, give thanks to God for all that you have received.
If we would simply express our gratitude to God on a regular basis, our prayer would soon become as easy as breathing.