Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Volumes have been written about the essence of prayer:
+its meaning
+its necessity, and
+its centrality in human life.

So, to attempt to treat this topic in a seven-minute homily might seem daunting, but here we go:

Last week’s message about openness to God’s miraculous intervention in our lives spoke of three necessary virtues:
+humility
+trust, and
+gratitude

This week’s approach to prayer is more pragmatic, offering, instead of virtues, three elements important for prayer:
+necessity
+frequency, and
+persistence

To speak first about Necessity: Saint Luke writes: “Jesus told His disciples a parable about the need for them to pray always without losing heart.” The Lord’s Parables are all insightful stories about essentially human realities that connect us to the divine. Hence, the divine insistence about prayer’s necessity, coupled with insight into the human struggle to pray. Saint Luke’s description of this Parable teaches that prayer is not a luxury, but a necessity. Human life without prayer would be empty, meaningless and disjunctive.

The story of Moses in the First reading rather proves the ancient adage, “Prayer changes things.” We heard, “As long as Moses kept his hands raised up, Israel had the better of the fight.” Having one’s arms raised is an ancient sign or symbol of human prayer: raising our arms to God as a child would raise his arms to his parent, hoping to be raised up and held closely. This is a gesture the priest uses while praying in the sacred liturgy.

It also speaks to us of prayer’s necessity. It presents the reality of spiritual combat: our need for God’s intervention and Grace as we fight against temptation, spiritual complacency and sin. As long as we keep our arms raised, or, as our catechetical definition of prayer described it: “raising our hearts and minds to God,” we, too, will have the better of the fight.

Necessity in prayer is our’s not God’s, yet He is constantly attempting to break into our consciousness, with His Grace, His mercy and His love, in order to assist us. So, prayer comes about not at our initiation, but as a response to God’s initiative. The human soul needs prayer, even if the the human mind is unaware or convinced of the opposite.

This brings us to the notion of Frequency.
How frequently should we pray? Saint Paul says, “…whether it is convenient or inconvenient.” and Saint Luke says, simply, “Always.” The Church prescribes:
+Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation
+Morning and Night Prayer
+Grace before meals
+A daily Rosary
+In time of Temptation

What, then about Persistence?
Saint Paul writes: “Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it.” This introduces virtues that are by-products of prayer:
+trust in what God has in store
+patience that God will answer our prayer in His time, not in ours
+hope that God will, indeed, answer

How will this persistence look? The 16th-century theologian Lorenzo Scupoli, in his book, “Spiritual Combat” outlines six points for strengthening our prayer by way of persistence.

1) Try to stir up in ourselves a sense of the greatness, majesty and beauty of God. Humility in this context is not daunting, but re-assuring.

2) We should pray with a lively faith and deep confidence. This is not a vague sort of optimism, but belief that God will give us everything we need to enable us to do what He wants. This brings persistence through bouts of dryness.

3) We should learn to pray that God’s Will, and not our own, will be fulfilled. This we do frequently when reciting the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Will be done…” Scupoli writes, “Your intention, in short, should be to unite your will to the Will of God, and not to draw His Will to yours.”

4) We should make sure that our prayer is accompanied by good works, enacting not only thoughtfulness and generosity, but self-discipline and self-sacrifice.

5) Our prayer should contain an element of thanksgiving for divine mercies in our past.

6) We should persevere in prayer with great confidence. This sounds like a re-iteration of the second point, but one of the purposes of apparently unanswered prayer is to go on when things seem to be dark and unhopeful.

Writing 300 years later, Cardinal Newman would say of prayer’s necessity, frequency and persistence: “He who does not pray does not claim his citizenship with heaven, but lives, though an heir of the Kingdom, as if he were a mere child of earth.”

At the end of today’s Gospel passage, Our Lord links prayer with lived faith, wondering aloud: “When the Son of Man returns, will He find any faith on earth?” There is something of a symbiotic relationship between faith and prayer, which means that faith will urge us on to prayer, and prayer, necessary, frequent and persistent, with its attendant Actual Grace, will strengthen and renew our faith. Our soul’s desire for eternal life cannot survive without it.