Word to the Wise
Thursday, October 25, 2012 - Thursday in the 29th Week in Ordinary Time
[Eph 3:14-21 and Luke 12:49-53]I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with the fullness of God.
It would be very difficult to match the power and beauty of this prayer from the Letter to the Ephesians! When I preach retreats, the first conference is always on "prayer," and I read this prayer as an opening inspiration! The portrait of prayer here places it squarely in the "inner self" and that it is "rooted and grounded in love." It can enable us to "know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge" and to be "filled with the fullness of God." What an amazing and challenging prospect! How many of us can feel this majestic? Do we relegate this only to those whom we call "holy?" Is this vision accessible to all of us? To these last two questions, I say, "Yes!"
Yes, we do tend to think that a life of prayer is possible only for those who have the "leisure" to pray! My response to that is sometimes expressed in the very mundane image of brushing one's teeth! If we can make prayer as much a part of our life as we do the brushing of our teeth, then we would not think of living a day without prayer! "Holiness" is simply a way of expressing our relationship with God. And YES, the vision of prayer in Ephesians is very possible for all of us, but it does require some effort to be fruitful, because those things that become "second nature" to us can also become unthinking and automatic. So, on a retreat I challenge the retreatants to ask themselves how they pray. What words, thoughts, actions, postures, etc. do they use? What does this tell them about their relationship to God, to Christ, to the Holy Spirit?
We Catholics have a very rich tradition of written prayers that we can find in books of collections! We have, of course, the ultimate Catholic "comfort prayer," the Rosary! On a retreat I call attention to the way we Catholics tend to "rocket" our way through the Rosary without thinking at all about the words we are saying, or even the power of the "mystery" that is being celebrated in each "decade" of beads. It becomes a comforting but mindless way of "praying." I call attention to the Book of Psalms, which, after all, are prayers that were part of Jesus' life as a devout Jew! I mention a picture on the wall of my room which shows a boy in a field trying to throw a rock in the sky in the hopes of hitting God! He is enraged with God but he is also "engaged" with God! His prayer comes from the depths of his sorrow and anger. The psalms show those same feelings! I share the "Merton Prayer" (just type those words in your browser and you will find it) which is a prayer for anyone lost and looking for a way to pray. Yes, we do sometimes leave prayer to others whom we consider devout! Yes, what those people have is also available to us if only we make an honest effort. The "fullness of God" awaits us! AMEN
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