OUR PRAYERS BEFORE GOD LIKE INCENSE

 

SATURDAY, SEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP 

James 5:13-20; Ps 141:1-3,8; Mk 10:13-16

Let my Prayer come before you like Incense

We ascertain the spiritual health of a Christian through the quality of his prayer life. As we have stated many times in our reflections, prayer is the first operation of the spiritual life. Hence, prayer commences as a vital activity of our new life in the Holy Spirit. Just as St. Paul wrote that nobody can say Jesus is Lord without the Holy Spirit, nobody can pray without the Holy Spirit giving him the faculty or power to do so. Prayer is a spiritual exercise that requires our being alive spiritually before we can pray. When we receive spiritual life from God the Father through the merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, we reach out to God in prayer as a newborn baby does for its mother’s breast. The Holy Spirit nourishes us on spiritual milk that belongs to Jesus Christ; he is our spiritual food or bread from heaven. It is impossible to sustain a spiritual life without prayer. 

The tenderness with which Jesus Christ receives and nourishes us is demonstrated in his reception and blessing of the children in the gospel. “People were bringing little children to Jesus, for him to touch them. The disciples turned them away, but when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” Spiritually, we are little children before the heavenly Father who brought us into his own life through the redemptive work of his only Begotten Son and the gift of the Holy Spirit in our souls. Subsequently, the primary work of the Holy Spirit in our soul, after giving us a new spiritual life through which we participate in the life of God, is to help us grow in spiritual life through prayer and the cultivation of a sound prayer life. The spiritual life is synonymous with prayer because it is the interior life lived before God. A well-developed prayer life is like an incense continuously burning before God in spirit. The desire for such a deep spiritual life is what the Psalmist expressed when he said: “Let my prayer come before you like an incense, O Lord.”

For our life to be like an incense continuously offered to God, we must be docile to the purification work the Holy Spirit is sent to do in our lives. We must grow daily in our desire to accomplish the will of the Father in our lives. This desire is what our Lord, during his earthly ministry, called his food which his apostles did not know about. Using the expression our Lord used in the gospel this week: the more we are salted by fire, the more our life becomes pleasing to the heavenly Father. When a Christian family or community grows in its prayer life, the more the presence of God is experienced among the members. The experience of such abundance of grace is what St. James described in the first reading. “If any one of you is in trouble, he should pray; if anyone is feeling happy, he should sing a psalm. If one of you is ill, he should send for the priests of the church, and they must anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord and pray over him. The prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up again.” The individual prayers of Christians are nourished by the life and activities of the family or community and flow into the communal prayers. They are like small streams welling together into a river and growing into a sea impossible to cross, for they become one with the mystery of God. One who becomes one with the divine mystery wields the power of God as Elijah the Prophet did through prayer. 

Let us pray: Grant us, heavenly Father, the grace to truly long for what is truly yours in prayer, that we may develop a sound life of prayer and spiritual health, so as to be well pleasing to you as your children.