Word to the Wise
Friday, January 9, 2009 - Christmas Weekday
[1 John 5:5-13 and Luke 5:12-16]The report about [Jesus] spread all the more, and great crowds assembled to listen to him and to be cured of their ailments, but he would withdraw to deserted places to pray.
The past few days I have been making a "retreat" in Tucson, AZ. This has been a feature of my life at this time of year for many years. It is also a requirement in the constitutions of the Dominican Order. We are not alone in this requirement. It is a fairly universal thing. (I count on that since one of my principal ministries is to conduct such retreats!) However, for most clergy and religious and even for some laypeople, this is an ANNUAL thing. The expectation is that this will suffice for the next year. It won't. No retreat can substitute for regular personal prayer. In our pragmatic and action-oriented Western society, we place a high premium on "being on the job." Even "time off" is supposed to be given to some "productive" project. The regular withdrawal of Jesus from his ministry to spend time in prayer would be seen as "counter productive!" Some church employers would say, "Sure, we give people a week to make a retreat each year, but any other prayer experience should be on their own time and not on the job!" Thus personal prayer becomes separated from ministry, a kind of "compartmentalization" of the life of faith! Jesus demonstrates in the gospel scripture today that ministry and prayer are not separate things in the sense that the latter must be privatized and "gotten in" somehow so that ministry is not obstructed! Since I conduct retreats for priests, I am aware of the problems they encounter trying to "say the breviary" during a busy day of ministry! Some of them give up on it altogether and try to find a minute here or there in the church to pray. Others follow the good custom of the personal "holy hour" before the Blessed Sacrament. But if we look at the amount of time given to ministerial activity as compared with prayer (outside sacramental services) there is no question but that personal prayer will take a back seat. They're not alone. Lay persons have the same, if not a greater, difficulty. A Mom with small children, a professional with a demanding stressful workload, a parent holding two or three jobs to make ends meet.......they're lucky if they can make it to church on Sunday, let alone spend regular time during the day in prayer. It seems to me that this is one more example of how we allow our secular culture to deprive us of an essential spiritual need in the name of productivity. The old saying, "The family that prays together stays together!" has some profound truth in it. My own retreat experience simply reminds me that allowing "prayer" to be shoved aside by "ministry" means that both will suffer and I will suffer and so will all those whom I want to serve. AMEN
config
view
logs
4096.0 KB
66 ms
4
