July 29, 2022
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) on July 24, 2022 at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:12-14; and Luke 11:1-13.
Of the four gospels, Luke by far has the most to say on prayer. We focus on Luke’s theme of prayer in today’s gospel passage, and we’ll return to the theme for three weekends in October.
Before we hear the gospel passage, I’d like to make one comment about the middle portion, which bothers a lot of people. Jesus talks about a grumpy neighbor that we wake up in the middle of the night to ask for bread to feed unexpected guests. Jesus says, “if [the neighbor] does not get up to give [you] the loaves because of [your] friendship, [the neighbor] will get up to give [you] whatever [you] need because of [your] persistence.” Is God like a grumpy neighbor? No! That’s not the point of Jesus’ analogy! The point is that we should be persistent in our prayer.
We continue to ask, to seek, and to knock, trusting that Almighty God knows what we need better than we do. Let us thank our Father in heaven for providing all that we need, including the great gift of mercy.
I received a lightning-bolt call to consider the priesthood when I was 27 years old. This was all the more remarkable because I didn’t really know much of anything about praying. I had heard a lot of talks about prayer, but frankly, most of the speakers had focused on three themes that weren’t very useful to me. I’ll summarize them as:
- Prayer is really important.
- You should pray more than you currently do.
- I have a specific way of praying that works for me, so you should pray the same way.
This is tragic, because the Catholic Church has an incredible wealth of practical advice on prayer, written by saints with a variety of temperments, from a variety of cultures. No matter our personalities, no matter our images of God, there are likely many forms of prayer that will connect with each of us, if only we knew about them and gave them a try.
I have no pretense that I am the expert on prayer in the Paulist Center Community. Nevertheless, I’d like to offer some of the hard-won insights that this engineer-turned-priest has learned over the past 21 years. These are not unique revelations, but maybe I’ll say something in a different way than we’ve heard it before.
First of all, why should we pray? When it comes down to it, our attempts to pray acknowledge that we have some belief – tenuous though it may be – that God exists. No matter whether we come to God in joy or in sorrow, in certainty or in doubt, prayer always has the potential to change us and to change our relationship with God. By opening ourselves up to the divine presence, we have the potential to get in touch with a greater reality. We may receive insights from the Holy Spirit to better understand our current circumstances, our relationship with God, and a wider range of possibilities available to us.
Second: for so many of us, our biggest downfall in praying is that we want to wait until we feel inspired to pray. That’s not a good way to have a robust prayer life. Consider the advice that the great science fiction writer Octavia Butler gave to aspiring authors. She said, “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” Or as some very spiritual friends of mine say, prayer is a discipline, like going to the gym. You show up, and you give it your best shot. At the gym, most of us don’t think that we need to break personal records every day. No matter how the individual workout goes, it’s not time wasted. It’s the same with prayer. Any time spent trying to pray is time well spent. Or, as a famous movie director once said, “Showing up is eighty percent of my life.” In prayer, I think at least 95 percent of the work is simply showing up!
Third, prayer is conversation with God. That means that we can’t do all the talking. If we just tell God about our concerns or desires and then walk away without listening to God’s response, that’s not really a conversation. How often do we ask God for a stone or a scorpion, when God might suggest that we will be more nourished by an egg or a fish? I think the best parts of Abraham’s prayer with God in our first reading today were the awkward pauses. We need to give God a chance to speak. Even if we catch our minds wandering as we’re trying to listen, that’s no reason to get mad at ourselves. We just need to gently bring ourselves back to the present moment and listen again. And like in any other loving relationship, there will be moments when we’re worried that God isn’t listening to us. But if we keep praying, we’ll work through this in our relationship with God.
Fourth and finally, as long as we endeavor to bring our most authentic selves to our conversations with God, there’s really only one way to “mess up” prayer. The one thing that can sabotage our prayer time is to start evaluating how well we’re praying. Once we start evaluating, we’re no longer praying. Prayer is a relationship with God. Except on first dates, when we’re constantly evaluating if the other person likes us, is paying enough attention to us, or finds us sufficiently charming, funny, smart, and good-looking, we don’t usually stop in the middle of conversations with other people to evaluate how they’re going. So why should we stop in the middle of prayer to evaluate how well we’re relating to God?
There’s so much more to say on the basics of prayer, but I’ll leave you with these words from my buddy Mike. After reading a draft of this homily, he suggested that I say the following: “Prayer is not something to be mastered; it’s a practice used to cultivate a habit. And habits change people! … Cultivating a habit of prayer ensures that we actually pray. Someone who says [that] they pray every day understands prayer much more than someone who says that they know how to pray.”
There’s nothing to hold us back in our praying. Let’s just get in there and do it!