(Homily delivered on the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Readings: Gn 18:20-32; Ps 138:1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8; Lk 11:1-13)
These are great readings, and they are all about the importance of prayer. In the first reading, Abraham intercedes for Sodom, and the Lord listens to him and agrees to answer it on condition. And the Responsorial Psalm is: Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me. In the gospel, Jesus teaches the disciples the Our Father and he tells us that we must persist in prayer, to continue to pester God. And then he gives us very good news, a very consoling piece of information: He says: "Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."
That's pretty good news. The challenge here is to believe this, to believe in his promise. That's what faith is: believing in what Christ says, and the virtue of hope bears upon the promises of Christ, hoping for the fulfillment of his promises. If we do not believe what he says here, we will not hope in his promise, and then we will despair, and we will not be motivated to pray. That's why people don't pray, because they don't believe, and so they don't hope.
And when we stop praying, that's when things begin to go wrong.
You and I were created for prayer. Life is about learning how to pray. If the very purpose of human life is to know God and love God in eternity, then the purpose of life is prayer.
And the more we pray, the happier we become. The more we pray, the less anxious we become, and we are filled with a greater peace of mind and heart. The more we pray, the more we understand ourselves, for we come to know God more intimately, by experience and we really only know ourselves to the degree that we know God personally. The more we pray, we begin to see the hand of God in our day to day life, that is, we see Him acting in our life. We begin to see that He loves us, personally. That makes life so much more meaningful.
The most important thing is to acquire the habit of prayer. It has to become a habit. Without that, we don't have an interior life; we just have an exterior life. And when all we have is an exterior life, we become anxious, restless, and that leads to greed, the inordinate love of possessing. For we end up trying to secure our own happiness and to reduce our own anxiety, and when things do not go our way in life, we become angry, impatient, irritated, we lose the peace that we long for. And when we are at that point, it means we've taken our life into our own hands. But life is not meant to be lived out of our own hands. We are meant to be carried along by God, like a baby is carried in a car seat. We are meant to be carried along by divine providence. God is in control, not us, and we have to surrender to his control. When we do so, life becomes so much more exhilarating.
If we do not pray, we open ourselves up to deception. This is such an important point. Diabolical deception is so subtle, and we're just not intelligent enough to defend ourselves against the subtle deception of the Evil One. An angel is inconceivably superior, intellectually, to human beings, and the person who does not have the habit of prayer is open to all sorts of deceptions. And the goal of the devil in sowing lies and deception in the minds of human beings is to divide them, to create division and animosity. That leads to divorce, or broken friendships, mutual distrust, animosity in the family, or in a religious community.
The more we pray, the less anxious we become, and we are filled with a greater peace of mind and heart.
The only defence against that is fervent and persistent prayer, the lifting of the mind up into the presence of God. So much takes place during prayer. When we pray, we enter into the deepest region of the self where God alone dwells. No one is permitted to enter into that deepest region of your self, only God dwells there, and there He awaits you and me, individually, and it is there that He speaks to us in silence. When we enter into that region often, life becomes much richer, far less anxious; and life becomes much more tolerable. What happens is that we are given a new pair of eyes to see the world. The world begins to look differently. We begin to see the beauty of the world around us. And we begin to see other people from God's point of view, and when that happens, they begin to look better. And we see ourselves from God's point of view, and we begin to look better to ourselves and we feel better about ourselves.
But if we don't acquire the habit of prayer, old age is going to be one difficult and painful ordeal for us. If a person has an interior life, then life restricted to a hospital or an old age home is not such a horrible prospect, because that person's joy comes from communing with God in the very depths of his or her soul. Such souls are never alone, because they know intimately the God who dwells deep within them. They sense the presence of God within themselves.