Persevering Faithfully in Prayer and in Life, 29th Sunday (C), October 20, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Sylvester Church, Medford, NY
Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 20, 2019
Ex 17:8-13, Ps 121, 2 Tim 3:14-4:2; Lk 18:1-8

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

The following text guided the homily: 

Today Jesus asks a truly haunting question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” The question seems to be for him more than rhetorical. Jesus asks it, it seems, because he’s not convinced that when he comes he’s going to find faith. We are living in an age and culture in which many seem to be drifting away from the faith. Three days ago the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey that shows that in 65 percent of American adults say that they’re Christians, down 12 percentage points in just the last ten years. Those who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” are now at 26 percent of the population, up from 17 percent in 2009. Catholics are just now 20 percent of the adult population, down from 23 percent a decade ago. We have all seen the consequences of these trends, which have led to the shuttering of some Churches, schools, convents and seminaries. We’ve seen it among our family members and friends whom we know and love who are no longer practicing. We see it in empty seats in almost every Catholic parish, including here at St. Sylvester.

This is all a result ultimately of spreading secularism in our culture and within our homes. Secularism, as Pope Benedict once incisively defined it, is living etsi Deus non daretur, living as God does not exist. One may still believe in God, but one lives like everyone else, like those who do not believe. We watch the same programs and listen to the same podcasts. We make the same choices on Monday through Saturday, and eventually start making them on Sunday, too. We start making them at the beginning of life, at the end of life, in the middle of life. And even though we never consciously made a choice against God, our life is structured almost entirely without him.

That’s why Jesus’ question is so timely: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Jesus’ point in asking the question is certainly not to get us afraid of the future or frightening of his ambushing us unawares at a moment we least expect. It is meant to help us never to take our faith for granted. Faith is a gift of God but it’s also a virtue, a moral muscle, we’re called to exercise and make stronger. Jesus wants to fortify our faith. Today he shows us how to buttress it in the parable of the persistent widow. The real test of whether he will find faith in us, he indicates, is whether when he comes he will find us persevering in prayer. That does not mean necessarily we’re going to be on our knees, or fingering the Rosary, or here in Church. It means that he is going to find us seeking to unite our whole day and life, our mind, our heart and our soul to God. Prayer is faith in action. We live as we pray and we pray as we live and if we’re going to be found faithful, we will be found prayerful. That’s why Jesus teaches us today not about the “suggestion,” or the “helpful idea” of “praying always without growing weary,” but about the “necessity” of doing so. He seeks to show us how to “cry out to God day and night.” He wants to train us to live that way so that no matter what time he comes we will be an existence-made-prayer, united to the Lord in a prayer of our whole life.

The reality is that many people do not pray with the grit of the importune woman in today’s Gospel crying out for justice. Many Catholics don’t persevere in prayer. They’re content on praying “a little,” saying a Hail Mary or two at the beginning or the end of the day. Others would like to pray more but think they don’t have time, because they’re prioritizing so many other things in life to a life-changing time with God. Others, because of a bad experience or other reasons, stop praying altogether as an ordinary activity of life, only turning to prayer in times of crisis. Even priests and religious sisters and brothers can sometimes begin cutting the corner on their prayers, just getting them in as a duty, and eventually not getting them in at all except at times when they “professionally” have to pray as “bureaucrats of the liturgy.” In short, many Christians don’t persist tenaciously in growing in communion with God in prayer. To all of us Jesus is speaking about the persevering faith he wishes to find in our prayer, hoping to open us up to receive his graces precisely so that we can pray in that way.

Jesus wants to help us learn to pray with persistence because he knows that is the best means to form us to persevere heroically in life. Pope Francis once explained that Jesus’ words about the necessity of praying always without giving up “leads us to deepen a very important aspect of the Faith. God invites us to pray with insistence, not because He doesn’t know what we need, or because He doesn’t listen to us. On the contrary, … He is at our side. … But the fight against evil is hard and long, it requires patience and resistance… There is a struggle to carry on every day; but God is our ally, faith in Him is our strength, and prayer is the expression of this faith. … If the faith goes out, if prayer goes out, and we walk in the darkness, we will be lost on the journey of life.” We can’t win the battle to remain faithful on will-power alone. We need to be praying constantly to the Lord. And God wants to train us to recognize that, because the stakes can’t be bigger. Just like the Israelites discovered with Moses’ prayer in the first reading: when his arms were lifted in prayer, the Israelites had the upper hand against the Amalekites; but when his hands fell because of fatigue, the Amalekites began to prevail. Likewise, when we persevere in prayer, when we regularly turn to him for help, when we’re conscious of his desire to live in communion with us, then we open to receiving and responding to his help to confront and overcome the challenges we face each day. When our hearts, however, grow weary and our hands fall, when we distance ourselves from the Lord, when we try to do things on our own and grow weary, we’re at risk of giving up the good fight of faith altogether. To persevere faithfully in life we first must learn how to persevere faithfully in prayer.

This is so important for us to grasp, because we live in an age in which many people give up. They give up on fighting sin. They give up on doing good. They give up on the Mass. They give up on the Sacrament of Confession. They give up on their marriages. They give up on suffering. They even give up on their religious vows or priestly promises. That’s why the virtue of perseverance is so important in everything. Never to give up. Never to stop running the race, to fighting the good fight, to keeping the faith and growing in faith. Jesus told us in the Gospel, “He who endures to the end will be saved.” (Mt 24:13). Life is a marathon, and prayer is the conversation of life we have along that marathon with the God who runs alongside.

One of the biggest reasons why people give up on the faith is precisely because they’ve never learned how to pray, how to hear God speaking, how to receive his light and strength in their daily life. Many have never learned how to encounter God whispering to them in quiet mental prayer, how to meet him during Mass as he teaches us with his wisdom and feeds us with his body and blood, how to contemplate him in Sacred Scripture, how to experience his mercy in Confession, how to recognize and love him in others, how to keep conscious of him at work, in school, and on the streets. They give up these practices because they were never trained how to find God in them in the first place. When I was a Catholic high school chaplain, when students would tell me that they had stopped going to Mass because they found it “boring,” I asked them whether they really knew God was there. In general, they didn’t. They didn’t think the reading had anything to do with God. They didn’t think the singing had anything to do with God. They didn’t even think that they were in God’s presence in receiving Holy Communion. They came to Mass, for years, but never really understood that they were meeting the God who created them, entered the world to save them, died on the Cross for them, rose to give them life, and now journeys alongside of them to make them holy. They similarly didn’t know that prayer was more than “saying prayers,” but a loving dialogue of life with God who is alive and madly in love with them. They were doing all of the right things but not finding God, and they drifted from the practice of the faith because they intuitively grasped that without God these activities all lose their meaning.

So one of the most important things we need to learn in life is how to pray, how to find God and enter into continuous conversation with him. And we shouldn’t expect this to be easy. If we were out of physical shape and started going to the gym, it wouldn’t be enough for us only to do some bicep exercises with five-pound barbells. We would need to exercise our legs, our stomach muscles, our cardiovascular system, our shoulders. There’s a similar regimen to exercises our souls. It’s not going to be enough for us simply to do the form of prayer we like the most or find easiest. We need to push ourselves to the championship. We need to take the guidance of the trainers God has given us. Just like top athletes wouldn’t be able to succeed on the field without putting in the hard work in the gym, so we will not persevere in life without putting in the hard work of various forms of prayer. Today we can focus on several of the means God has provided to train us.

The first is practice is what the saints have called mental prayer. We need to make quality time for God each day, to engage in quiet, one-on-one conversation, treasuring that time as the most important appointment of our day. I write in my iCal “God,” in the morning and in the afternoon, and keep that appointment just as I would any other important commitment. Many people say they don’t have time to pray, but that’s one of the worst lies flowing from the Father of Lies. Sometimes, we know, life is chaotic. Sometimes emergencies come up. But the average American spends about 30 hours a week watching television or other diversions on our devices. Most of us have plenty of time to pray. But even on our truly busiest days, we could all stop for a solid minute, block out of the chaos around us, recognize God is there, that we’re not alone, that he wants to strengthen and help us. As my friend Matthew Kelly, founder of Dynamic Catholic, likes to say, it’s harder to go from no prayer to one good minute, than it is to go from 1-5, or 5-15, or 15-30, or 30 to a Eucharistic Holy Hour. And we all know we can give God one minute! St. Josemaria Escriva, a great 20th century saint who specialized in helping lay people become holy through the ordinary events of every day, said that making time for mental prayer is like starting a fire in a fireplace. It may take some work at the beginning to get the fire started, but once the fire gets going, to keep it going, all you need to do is add other logs. Mental prayer is like starting the fire of loving communion with God that can last all day provided that we continue to add “fuel” later with some vocal prayers we say — short aspirations like, “Stay with me, Lord,” prayers like the Angelus, or prayers in our own words. The first practice is making time for the intimate conversation one-on-one with God. If we’re not making one, or five, or 60 minutes for God, we will never pray always without growing weary.

The second means of training is by learning how to pray Sacred Scripture, so that we are able to tune in better to God’s voice and say, with the young Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful …for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” To pray Sacred Scripture is something different than to study it. Praying it begins by asking what God is actually communicating in the text, and thaen asking what God is trying to say to me in my own life and circumstances. Praying it provokes us to speak back to God to ask him for the help we need to live by what he’s indicating to us. It involves envisioning ourselves living by that word and making a resolution to put it into practice. Then it culminates in our acting on that word. This is the whole process that’s called the “sacred reading” (lectio divina) of Sacred Scripture. God has given us this book of love letters to help train us to become like him. This is the textbook on how to grow to be his image and likeness and fully human. To read the whole Bible would only take 75 hours, about 12-15 minutes a day for a year. How much stronger in faith we would all be if we made that type of commitment!

The third means is the Holy Rosary. In this month of October, dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, we focus on this great tool of prayerful perseverance. What is the Rosary if not a prayer of perseverance, not only praying 53 Hail Marys, but each week meditating anew on the same mysteries from the life of Christ, Mary and the Church, seeking to penetrate their depths, imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise? When we make the commitment to pray the Rosary each day, we recognize that some days we feel like praying it and many days we don’t, but if we pray it anyway, then we learn also how to persevere in communion with God in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. I am so grateful to my parents that we prayed the Rosary as a family when I was growing up. It taught me perseverance in prayer, not to mention so many things about the Lord Jesus. I would urge everyone to take full advantage of this gift and enroll in Mary’s school of prayer.

The fourth means is the Mass, which is the great persevering prayer of the Church. It began during the Last Supper, continued on Good Friday and has continued all the way down to the present day. It’s one continuous sacrifice, as Eucharistic Prayer III has it, “from the rising of the sun to its setting.” But it’s not enough just to come to Mass. We have to persevere in praying the Mass and living a Eucharistic life. Sometimes praying the Mass can be a challenge. We can, like today perhaps, wonder when the priest is finally going to end his homily! The music — not here but in other parishes — may not be to our taste. The Church might be too warm or too cold. But when we learn to persevere in praying the Mass even when it’s hard, when we learn to stay through the very end of Mass, when we continue to thank God for the privilege he gives us in coming to meet us here so that we’re not in a rush to get it over, we are learning super valuable lessons about how to persevere in prayer and life.

The fifth training ground for perseverance in prayer is praying insistently for loved ones and their needs. Sometimes one of the greatest things that can happen to us is to have a family member in need of prayers, because if we pray for them with loving perseverance, we will be transformed. We all saw this in the life of St. Monica, who prayed for 17 years for the conversion of her pagan husband Patricius, not knowing that soon after he accepted the faith and became a Christian he would meet the Lord Jesus who would find him with faith on earth. As soon as he died, though, her son Augustine, began to live promiscuously, shack up with a woman, have a child, stay far away from home, and give his life over to vanity. But, with many tears, she prayed. And 15 years later, she had the joy of seeing his conversion. He became a Christian, a monk, a priest, eventually a bishop, and one of the greatest saints of all time. Without her persevering prayers, however, not only would Patricius and Augustine probably remained outside of the Body of Christ, but their wife and mother would likely never have been called Saint Monica. Sometimes the Lord permits us to have our own Patricius and Augustine, not just so that we can help them by our prayers, but that God can make us holy precisely through praying for them.

The sixth exercise is praying our daily work. To pray always means that we need to turn all we do into a prayer, into an exchange of persons with God, when we receive his help and live in his presence. To pray our work involves, first, offering everything we do to God, as an acceptable sacrifice of Abel. We can unite our work to Jesus on the altar, just like all of Jesus’ life, the vast majority of which was spent in a Nazarene carpentry shop, was united to what he offered in the Upper Room and on Calvary. How do we do pray our work at a practical level? A good practice is to start off each hour or project with a small consecration of that time to God, by saying something to him in our own words. That will help us to remain conscious of God’s presence and help. What helps me very much to pray my work is when I explicitly offer it up for someone who has requested my prayers. I have a list of people I keep on my phone who have asked me to pray for them or those they love and I offer that hour or work or that task for that intention. I’ve never ceased to be amazed at how many prayers God hears when I offer my work for people. I’d encourage you to pray your work in a similar way.

The seventh training ground I’ll mention is prayer for laborers in the Lord’s vineyards. Today is World Mission Sunday and we need to remember to pray perseveringly for the spreading of the Gospel. Jesus told us, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” He gave us these verbs in the present tense because he knew that there would always be a need for us to pray for laborers for the vineyard. That’s one of the reasons why St. Therese Lisieux is a co-patroness of the missions. St. Francis Xavier, the other co-patron, is an obvious choice, because he was the great missionary to India and Japan and died on the shores of China. St. Therese never left her cloistered Carmel in northwestern France, but she never ceased praying for missionaries. Likewise, we should never stop praying for them either. There is a shortage of vocations to the missions today — as well as to the priesthood, the religious life, even married life! — because, frankly, we’re not praying enough. God wants us to persevere in praying not just for laborers for his mission but for all those who will hear the word of God through them, that they may respond with faith. And when we are praying to the Harvest Master for laborers, we’re also praying for our own faithful response to Jesus’ call. We member in St. Matthew’s Gospel that right after Jesus told the disciples to pray for workers for the harvest, he called 12 of them to be those workers, and because of their prayer, they were more capable of saying yes to that call. So as we pray for the missions, we also recognize that we, too, are called to be laborers, bringing the Gospel to those around us just as much as missionaries bring the Gospel to far away lands.

The eighth and last training ground is praying with others. For us to pray unceasingly, we often need help, and similarly need to give help to others. That’s why it’s important for us to pray together, because we can help each other persevere. Moses, as we see in the first reading, had the help of Aaron and Hur to hold his hands up. We need to look around us and see those who have the gift of faith to pray perseveringly and ask for the grace to pray with them; they will help us to learn how to pray without growing weary. Likewise, we need to look around us, too, and see those who have never learned how to pray, or who have given up on prayer, or who don’t pray as well as we might, and try to help them. We can grow in prayer by helping, for example, our kids and grandkids, our friends, those who going through a hard time, those enrolled in the RCIA program and others. As Pope Francis once said, “Commitment to prayer demands that we support one another. Weariness is inevitable. Sometimes we simply cannot go on, yet, with the support of our brothers and sisters, our prayer can persevere until the Lord completes his work.” In life, to pray always, we’re often going to have to pray one-on-one with the Lord. But Jesus incentivized very clearly praying with others, telling us that when two or more of us gather in his name, he will be in our midst. He taught us to pray not the “My Father,” but the “Our Father,” to encourage us to come together. The more we pray together with others, the stronger our prayer will be and the strong our faith will be in life.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? This Sunday is a grace-filled opportunity for us to recognize that God will give us all the help we need to respond to his love. He will give us the grace increase our prayer, to persevere in our prayerful union with Him so that we may persevere in the good fight for his kingdom. He will give us the help to make time for prayer, to hear his voice in Sacred Scripture, to enter Mary’s contemplative school of the Holy Rosary, to pray the Mass the way he did the first Mass, to pray for those in need, to pray our work, to pray for vocations to continue Christ’s mission, and to pray with others. Today the Lord has come to pray with us to the Father. God the Father wants to send the Holy Spirit so that we may pray with living faith, so that when Jesus comes from heaven to this altar in just a few minutes, he may find us truly faithful, ready to persevere in prayerful union with him through the valleys and mountains of life all the way until, God-willing, we join St. Sylvester in the eternally persevering prayer of the heavenly Jerusalem! God bless you!

The readings for today’s Mass were: