Hearing and Heeding God’s Merciful Summons to Prayer, 1st Wednesday (II), January 13, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Hilary of Poitiers, Bishop and Doctor
January 13, 2016
1 Sam 3:1-10.19-20, Ps 40, Mk 1:29-39

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Pope Francis wrote in his Bull of Indication for the Jubilee Year of Mercy (Misericordiae Vultus) and has preached often that everything Jesus did was to communicate his merciful love toward us. Today in the Gospel we have a snap-shot of a “day in the life” of Mercy incarnate. He began by preaching and synagogue, which as any priest will tell you after a Sunday morning, must have been somewhat exhausting all-day work since people would return home normally only at sunset. Then he went to Simon’s house where he healed his mother-in-law. Soon after that, the whole town was at the door asking for miracles, and Jesus, as was his custom, would work with every sick person one-on-one. And after that, well before dawn in the next day, he went out to pray. In all of this he was expressing mercy. In his preaching and teaching in the Synagogue, he was relieving us of the suffering of ignorance. In his one-on-one healings, he was doing something far more than relieving physical suffering, but, as we see in his miracles of healing, bringing people into a relationship with him so that he could give them an even greater gift, salvation through faith. In his praying, he was continuing that work of mercy, doubtless praying to the Father for those who had come the previous day and those who would come in the day that was beginning. And there was an urgency in this work of mercy. When the apostles found him and said that everyone was looking for him, rather than rejoice in his “success,” he mentioned that they needed to be on their way, because he wanted to preach the Gospel in surrounding towns as well. “For this reason I was sent,” he said. As we see Jesus preaching, healing and praying, we need to ask ourselves how we’ll we are receiving these gestures of merciful love and then examine how we’ll we, filled with his mercy in these ways, seek to extend that mercy to others through our fulfilling the works of mercy of instructing the ignorant, caring for the sick and praying for the living and the dead.
• What I’d like to focus a little bit more on today, however, was Jesus’ prayer in the middle of the night. Even though he was exhausted, he still went out to pray. That was how much he desired that communion with the Father. There’s something particularly special about prayer at night, prayer, we can say, that triumphs over the body’s desire for sleep, because it really tests and strengthens the will to choose God over one’s appetites. Jesus was regularly praying at night not only because he was mobbed during the day but because that’s a time in which the distractions of each day are less and we can sense the light of God shining in the midst of the nocturnal darkness. This is likewise one of the reasons why many adorers who take the “graveyard shift” speak about how special it is. That’s one of the reasons why you get up so early in the morning to pray in this convent. It’s one of the reasons why monks and nuns for centuries in cloisters have arisen to pray matins at about 3 am. There’s something special about prioritizing God in the middle of night, about getting up before dawn to express our desire for God before the sun that symbolizes God rises.
• And we see in today’s first reading that God called young Samuel to prayer not in the middle of the day but while he was sleeping. There’s much we can learn about our prayer, at night and always, from today’s first reading. After Samuel’s birth, Hannah presented him in the temple and left him there to learn how to serve the Lord. And he would sleep in the temple close to the Ark of the Covenant. The text tells us that at the time “a revelation of the Lord was uncommon and vision infrequent,” something that implies that at the time of writing revelations were common and visions of God frequent, a change that is meant to continue into our present as God reveals himself to us and allows us to see his will in prayer each day. God calls out to Samuel in the middle of the night by name, but Eli, who had been corrupted over time and allowed his family to become corrupt, was slow to pick up on what was happening, and didn’t want to be interrupted in the middle of his sleep. Eventually he caught on and gave Samuel good advice, to see to the one calling, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And that’s precisely what Samuel did. In that prayer, we learn a lot. Often we can think about prayer as our work — the vocal prayers we say, the meditations we choose and do — but prayer is first and fundamentally about opening ourselves up to what the Lord wants to give us in his mercy. It’s more about God’s word than our words, his action than our action. I say to kids, “God has given us two ears and one mouth for a reason,” so that we’ll listen to him far more than try to hog the conversation. The ultimate purpose of prayer is not an exchange of words or ideas but an exchange of persons, and God in grace makes the first move. That’s why we must begin with an attentiveness to his voice, to his presence, to his self-giving. This type of receptive prayer is essential. The text tells us, “At that time Samuel was not familiar with the Lord.” Even though Samuel was raised from his earliest days in the Temple, even though he doubtless had learned to recite the Psalms and the Torah, even though he was a “minister to the Lord” already, he was “not familiar with the Lord,” he didn’t know God as a Father, he didn’t see himself as a member of God’s family, he didn’t have a personal relationship with him. That type of personal relationship happens through prayer, the one-on-one dialogue we have with God. God wants us all to be familiar with him in this way through the existential dialogue of prayer. And God mercifully will give himself to us in that way, in the middle of the night when we can perceive him more clearly, so that we can also see more clearly how he’s giving himself to us in the middle of the day. God wants to give us the same gift he gave Samuel, to “wake us up” in the middle of our sleepiness to his presence, so that just as “Samuel grew up, and the Lord was with him, not permitting any word of his to be without effect” and he was known “from Dan to Beersheba … [as] an accredited prophet of the Lord,” so we will continue to grow conscious that the Lord is with us and allow the word he implants with us to bear 30-, 60- or 100-fold fruit, making it possible for us to announce the Lord to others by who we are even before we open our mouths.
• Someone who lived this mystery of God’s merciful interaction in life and who becomes a very efficacious prophet of the Lord is the saint we celebrate today. St. Hilary of Poitiers was born into a very well-off pagan family. Eventually through study and following an ethical conscience, he saw that polytheism was untenable, that there could only be one God. He began to study the alternatives. Eventually he found the Bible and was fascinated by God’s self-description to Moses at the burning bush (“I am who am”) as well as the sage advice God gave throughout his interaction with his people. When he got to the New Testament, he was won over by Jesus and asked for baptism as a married adult and father of a daughter. After his baptism, he continued his study and prayer to get to know God better. Four years after his baptism, incredibly, he was asked by the people of Poitiers to become their bishop, even though he would need to be continent with his wife, even though he would need to leave what he was doing, even though he would need to receive the sacramental triple crown of the three grades of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. He tried to refuse the office not considering himself up to the task, but those who had chosen him only grew in admiration of his humility. So he assumed the office. It was a time when the Church was in chaos because of the Arian heresy, which was very popular in France. He took to study, writing, preaching and prayer to combat the heresy, and he did it so effectively that he was banished by the emperor Constantius from France for three years to Phrygia. In Phrygia, however, he didn’t wallow. Instead he prayed and wrote, and those treatises in defense of God’s divinity are still essential for us today. In just 18 years as a bishop, in just 22 years as a Christian, he incredibly became a doctor of the Church. And one can only become a doctor when one is “doctus.” One can only because a teacher when he is first taught. And because in prayer and through the continuation of prayer in study of Sacred Scripture, St. Hilary had repeatedly said, “Speak, Lord! Teach, Lord! for your servant is speaking,” he became truly learned with the Word of God that he fearlessly and persuasively announced to others. He said that he wanted to use all his faculties to pass on to others the truth of God so that they come, like he had, to true love of Him. His life was a commentary on how one, having received the Lord’s mercy, is moved from within with a desire to share it, and he shared not only in Christ’s great care and love for the poor, sick and needy, but also for those in ignorance and error. He taught — and through his hallowed writings, teaches still.
• Today as we come here to Mass, we recognize that it is the same Lord who spoke to Samuel, the same Lord who called and emboldened St. Hilary, the same Jesus who teaches, heals and prays, who has called us to this encounter. He teaches us in Sacred Scripture. He heals us from the inside by what St. Ignatius of Antioch called “the medicine of immortality” (the Eucharist) and he prays for us, so that, so healed and strengthened by him, we may use our health, like Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, to serve God and others, seeking to use all our faculties as St. Hilary did to pass on to others the truth of God’s mercy and help them to learn how to receive God’s merciful love and love him in response.

The readings for today’s Mass were: