PRAYING WELL AND ALWAYS

SUNDAY, SEVENTEENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Gen 18: 20-32; Ps 138:1-3,6-8; Col 2:12-14; Lk 11:1-13

Praying for Enduring Things

All the readings the Church gives us to reflect on are on the subject of prayer; how to pray and what to pray for. A background to Christian understanding of prayer, which we have emphasised in our reflections, is that prayer is always a gift we receive, individually and communally, in which we cooperate with God. In other words, when God desires to offer us a heavenly gift, he sends his grace through the Holy Spirit to awaken our desire to receive the gift, which we express in prayer. So, both the desire or disposition for the gift, and the gift are gifts received from our heavenly Father. Are there prayers that are not gifts from God? The answer is no! But we have corrupted prayers, which are disordered expressions of the gifts from God. Every prayer is a gift from God because he is the origin of all emotions and motions. Since prayer is a spiritual motion towards an object of desire, the object of desire is the beginning or the source of the motion in the first place. Everything truly desirable is of God. Hence, God is the source of all prayerful desires. The enemies of our salvation corrupt our prayers when they substitute the objects of our desire for seeming desirable goods or objects. The substitution occurs when we pay less or no attention to the word of God, which proposes the real objects of human desires, which give us everlasting happiness and joy.

We offer corrupt prayers when the agents of darkness replace the spiritually delectable goods or objects that the word of God proposes to our attention with sensible delectable goods that are temporal. Our preoccupation with these lower goods in prayers corrupts our prayer, for we are not to desire them inordinately. Our first preoccupation must be with our greatest good, God himself. Thus, the Lord teaches his disciples to pray as follows. “Father, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come; give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we forgive each one who is in debt to us. And do not put us to the test.” We see the hierarchy of goods in the prayer of our Lord. Our greatest good is God himself, whom we must reverence every day, for the Father is the source of all things; having the right relationship with the Father assures our daily sustenance. Our daily sustenance is graded and constituted according to our triparted constitution: spirit, soul, and body. Our reverence for the holy Name of God gives us the enabling relationship for our daily sustenance, which brings his kingdom within and among us. If we reverence the Name of God, he will establish his rule within us and among us by doing his holy will, which he reveals through his word, then he gives us our daily bread, the Son who comes from heaven to give life to the earth.

The nonrecognition of God as our heavenly Father and non-reverencing of his holy Name will cause us to miss the coming of his kingdom here on earth. The absence of his kingdom implies that our daily bread is not assured. Since the holy will of God is our daily bread, the lack of it means we return to his permitted will, wherein God serves his justice with a minimum of mercy for those who have abandoned justice and mercy. The scenario in the first reading is illustrative of this understanding. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah abandoned God and abandoned genuine prayer. Their corrupted prayer was the adverse prayer against them. “How great an outcry there is against Sodom and Gomorrah! How grievous is their sin! I propose to go down and see whether or not they have done all that is alleged in the outcry against them that has come up to me. I am determined to know.” We all pray in the long run, both sinners and righteous alike; the sinners pray adversely, calling down God’s justice by their desires, the righteous pray genuinely for God’s mercy and establishment of his kingdom among us.

Abraham’s prayer is illustrative of the prayers of the righteous, and people of Sodom and Gomorrah illustrate the prayers of the sinners. Abraham could not succeed because more sinners were praying for divine justice than the righteous for the mercy of God. The Lord answers according to the volume of demands. “If at Sodom I find fifty just men in the town, I will spare the whole place because of them.” Saint Paul explains that the reason God sent his Son to die and rise again is that we all may learn how to pray genuinely. By our baptismal profession into the death of Jesus Christ, we are dead to the passing or temporal goods of this world, which generate adverse prayers; and our rising with him has endowed us with the ability to pray spiritually for the coming of the kingdom of God. “You have been buried with Christ, when you were baptised; and by baptism, too, you have been raised up with him through your belief in the power of God who raised him from the dead.” So, living a spiritual life is living in the presence of God and the angels, and praying in thanksgiving to God for his many wonderful gifts. “I thank you, Lord, with all my heart: you have heard the words of my mouth. In the presence of the angels, I will bless you. I will adore before your holy temple.” We prayerfully thank God, especially for the gift of prayer.

Let us pray: O God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us and grant that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold fast even now to those that ever endure. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.