THE ROOT OF PRAYER
SUNDAY, THIRTIETH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
Eccl 35:12-14,16-19; Ps 34:2-3,17-19,23;
2 Tim 4:6-8,16-18; Lk 18:9-14
Prayer forged in the Ashes of Humility
From our reflection on
the grace of God last week, during which we understood grace to mean the
presence of God given to us to accomplish His holy will, we take up prayer as
the corresponding response to God’s grace in our lives. The grace of God causes
prayer in us, as our adequate response and cooperation to God’s gift of
Himself. As we noted earlier in our reflection, every grace comes to us first
as a prevenient grace, enabling us to cooperate with God’s will and domesticate
it within us as actual grace in realising the divine will for us. Prayer is the
desire for actual grace for the accomplishment of the divine will that is revealed to
us. The divine will for our salvation, which is Jesus Christ, produces a pure
spirit within us, essentially a pure desire for the knowledge of the Father and
the doing of His holy will. The new spirit we receive through faith in Jesus
Christ is simply the meaning of prayer. The fact that our spirit joins with the
Holy Spirit in prayer confirms prayer to be a gift from God, enabling us to
cooperate with God to realise the divine will. So, because God’s presence gives
birth to prayer in us, prayer contains its own answer, which is God’s will.
Therefore, every prayer presupposes faith by which we encounter Jesus Christ,
hope by which we see the Father of all providence, and charity by which we are
animated by the Holy Spirit to desire and work for the fulfilment of God’s will
in us and in our lives. Every other thing is the perfection of the grace of
prayer in us.
The precondition for a
good prayer is the subject of the first reading from the book of
Ecclesiasticus. Since everything we possess comes from God, He does not respect
us or attend to us because of what we have received from Him, but because of
our disposition in receiving these gifts from Him. The sinner is ill-disposed
on receiving the divine gifts, because he does not realise they come from God.
In other words, the gifts failed to act as prevenient grace in the case of a
sinner. But the virtuous who is well-disposed, realises the gifts as coming
from God, and they cause him to turn in faith towards God. The gifts of God
cause the increase of faith and the beginning of prayer in the virtuous. The
profit God makes in virtuous souls attracts Him to invest more grace in them.
“The Lord is a judge who is no respecter of personages to the detriment of a
poor man, he listens to the plea of the injured party. He does not ignore the
orphan’s supplication, nor the widow’s as she pours out her story.” Notice that
we have not differentiated between pleasant and unpleasant gifts from God. They
are the same for the virtuous man, for he believes and accepts anything as
coming from God. These gifts increase his faith, hope, and love for God. “The
man who with his whole heart serves God will be accepted, his petitions will
carry to the clouds. The humble man’s prayer pierces the clouds, until it
arrives, he is inconsolable, and the Lord will not be slow, nor will he be
dilatory on their behalf.” The clouds the prayer of the humble man pierces are
the clouds of doubts and unbelief. When these clouds are absent, we see that
the desire comes with their fulfilment in God.
The reception of
spiritual desire, as an indicator or sign of God’s presence and operations
within us, creates an experience of emptiness or hunger, which we operate as
desire/prayer. The hunger or desire defines the spiritual poverty of the
virtuous man. Because the gift of salvation is spiritual, it exists as a spirit
or desire for God, which no material goods can satisfy. For this reason, the
virtuous man is called the poor man. “This poor man called; the Lord heard
him.” The Lord will answer the call of every poor man because the divine is the
cause of the call or prayer in the first place. We do not yet receive many
answers to our prayers because we have not really understood the nature of our
poverty or what we desire. This ignorance causes the Holy Spirit to come to our
aid in prayer. The purification of our desire happens through our life events
and circumstances as we discern the nature of the eternal goods that satisfy
our desire. We set out with a misunderstanding of the goods we desire to be material
or pleasurable due to our weak faith, hope, and charity. The infinite wisdom of
God uses the same transitory goods to purify us for the spiritual goods he
offers to us. Saint Paul has this to say when he attained the end of his
purification. “My life is already being poured away as a libation, and the time
has come for me to be gone. I have fought the good fight to the end; I have run
the race to the finish; I have kept the faith; all there is to come now is the
crown of righteousness reserved for me, which the Lord, the righteous judge,
will give me on that Day; and not only to me but to all those who have longed
for his Appearing.”
The longing for his
Appearance is the true nature of every genuine prayer. The lack of this desire
to encounter God makes any prayer a counterfeit. Our Lord teaches this truth in
the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, who went to the Temple to
pray. “The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, 'I thank you,
God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and
particularly that I am not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week; I
pay tithes on all I get.’ The tax collector stood some distance away, not
daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, “God,
be merciful to me, a sinner.” This man, I tell you, went home again at rights
with God; the other did not.” The Pharisee did not receive anything from God
because he did not desire anything; he did not desire an encounter with God.
So, did not receive the gift of His presence. He believed in himself and not in
God. He hoped in God for nothing. He loved and glorified himself for what he
believed he achieved by his efforts. Thus, he had stolen the grace of God along
the process and redirected it to himself by self-adulation. Thus, in praying to
God to increase our faith, hope, and charity, the Church is asking God to
purify our understanding of the good we desire in prayer, that we may realise
that only eternal and spiritual goods can satisfy our desires. These, the
Father has provided for us in Jesus Christ, our Lord.
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