Persevering in Prayer Together, 29th Sunday (C), October 16, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Consecrated Women of Regnum Christi, Dallas, TX
Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 16, 2016
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 today’s homily: 

Jesus’ haunting question

Earlier today in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, Pope Francis canonized seven different saints, exemplary models of the Christian faith for Christians today and always. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, the great French Carmelite whose writings on their indwelling of the Holy Trinity remains an extraordinary model for us all; José Sánchez del Río who died a martyr at 14 in Mexico; Brother Solomon Leclercq, a Brother of St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle who gave the supreme witness to faith during the French Revolution; Bishop Manuel González García of Spain, dubbed in his lifetime the “Saint of the Tabernacle,” whose pastoral plan was to “Eucharistize” his people; Fr. José Gabriel del Rosario Brochero, who traveled throughout the mountains of Argentina to evangelize as Pope Francis’ greatest exemplar of a pastor with the “smell of the sheep”; Fr. Louis Pavoni of Italy, who founded the Sons of Mary Immaculate to evangelize the young; and Fr. Alfonso Maria Fusco of Italy who founded the Congregation of the Sisters of St. John the Baptist to teach poor children. All of them show us, as every saint does, an example of heroic virtue, of persevering faith, hope and love in living the Christian life, and their lives not only inspire our own but continue at Jesus’ right side praying for us that we may emulate what is imitable in their lives and come to share their eternal joy.

Their canonization frames today’s readings, because, sadly, not everyone seeks to live our faith with the constancy and virtue these seven did. In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks the haunting question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” The question seems to be more than rhetorical. Jesus asks it, it seems, because he’s not convinced that when he comes he’s going to find the type of faith we see in these saints. The test of faith, he indicates by the parable of the persistent widow, is whether when he comes he will find us persevering in prayer. Prayer is faith in action. If he’s going to find us faithful, he’s going to find us praying, not necessarily on our knees, of course, but seeking to unite our whole day and life, our mind, our heart and our soul to God. If he doesn’t find us praying and living in conscious communion with him, however, it’s likely that he’s not going to find us living by faith. Jesus today wants to teach us about the “necessity” of “praying always without growing weary,” 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 united to the Lord in a prayer not merely of our lips but of our lives. Jesus asks the question at the end of the parable because he knows many do not pray like the inopportune woman. Many Catholics don’t persevere in prayer. We’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 they think they don’t have time to pray, 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. They have lost or perhaps never had the heart to pray always. Many priests and consecrated just get their prayers in as a duty, but don’t persist tenaciously in growing in communion with God in prayer. Today Jesus is speaking to all of us 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.

The point of perseverance in prayer

But we can ask a prior question: Why does Jesus want us to pray with the type of heroic perseverance he describes today? It’s not that he wants to hog all our attention. It’s not that he wants us to ask for something 70 times 7 times as a pointless exercise, especially given that God already knows what we need before we ask. 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 always hears and knows all of us, with love. In our daily journey, especially in difficulties, in the fight against evil outside of ourselves and within us, the Lord is not far away, He is at our side; we fight with Him beside us, and our weapon is prayer, which makes us feel His presence alongside of us, His mercy, even His help. 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.” Because we need to persevere in the fight for God and against evil, and because we can’t win that battle on our own strength, we need to be praying constantly to the Lord. 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 his strength to confront and overcome the challenges we face each day to live a life apart from him. When our hearts, however, grow weary and our hands fall, when we distance ourselves from the Lord, when we either try to do things on our own and lose heart and give up the good fight of faith altogether, that’s when we fall. 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 the Mass. They give up on the Sacrament of Confession. They give up on fighting sin. They give up on their marriages. They give up on suffering. They even give up on their vows or priestly vocations. That’s why the virtue of perseverance is so important in everything in general. 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). But for us to have that type of holy endurance, we need never to give up on God and on his help at every moment. We need to pray — and to pray with perseverance. Life is a marathon, but one in which God wants to run right alongside of us helping and sustaining us along the way. Prayer is the conversation we have along that marathon. Today’s seven new saints show us that this perseverance is possible, and beautiful. Just like a marathon runner, if we’re ever going to finish the race to the heavenly Jerusalem, we need to train. We can’t go from barely praying to praying always overnight. We need to make a commitment in spirit but then we have to train our weak flesh. As we talked about yesterday with St. Teresa of Avila, we are called to grow in prayer, even if we convert to it late in life. There are various aspects to that training we ought to ponder. And today to train us in perseverance through our prayer, we will take … eight.

Eight ways to grow in perseverance in prayer

First, we need to make the commitment to set aside some fixed times for a one-on-one appointment with the Lord each day for our “mental prayer,” a time in which we spend time with God, quietly listening to him speak to us and responding to him with faith. The key is to make the appointment and treasure it as the most important appointment of our day if we’re ever going to pray always. St. Josemaria Escriva, a great 20^th century saint who specialized in helping lay people become holy through the ordinary events of every day, said that mental prayer is like starting a fire in a fireplace or a fire pit. It takes 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 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.” In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to us, provided that we learn how to pray Sacred Scripture to hear his voice, and it will train us in holiness. To pray Sacred Scripture is something different than to study Sacred Scripture. It begins by asking what God is actually communicating in the text, the same object of Scripture Study, but praying it leads us to ask what God is trying to say to me in my own life and circumstances. 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.

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 Mary’s, but each week meditating anew on the same mysteries, 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, as well as we can under each day’s circumstances, then we learn also how to persevere in communion with God in good times and bad, in sickness and in health.

Fourth, the Mass 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 important that we persevere in praying the Mass and living a Eucharistic life. We should hope that the vast majority of times we come to Mass, it’s not a feat of perseverance, but rather a joy and the highlight of our day or week. But on those occasions in which we’re impatient at Mass, it’s an opportunity for us to learn how to persevere in prayer and life.

Fifth, praying for loved ones and their needs is a tremendously helpful training ground for perseverance in prayer. 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 with perseverance, we will be transformed, like we see in the life of St. Monica, with her husband Patricius and her son St. Augustine.

Sixth, our daily work is a great training ground. 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. That means we need to learn how to pray our work, to pray our studies. That involves, first, offering everything we do to God, as an acceptable sacrifice of Abel. We can unite our work to Jesus on the altar. We should never forget that Jesus’ whole life was a persevering prayer that saved us. It wasn’t just the enduring agony of Holy Thursday and Good Friday. It wasn’t just his three years of public ministry. But it was his entire life — the vast majority of which was spent in a Nazarene carpentry shop — that he was giving to God the Father for us and our salvation. Jesus is therefore the great model of how to pray our work by uniting it to God. How do we do this at a practical level? First, we can start off each hour with a small consecration of that hour to God. We can pray a Hail Mary or say a prayer in our own words. We can ask for God’s help to pray that work or study well by doing it in union with him. But that will help us to remain conscious of God’s presence and help. Second, 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 on my phone who ask me to pray for them, but I also use the prayer list in the bulletin. The more I recognize that I’m offering that work for someone in need of prayers, the better work I do and my work becomes a very powerful prayer to help others. 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 vocations. On this World Mission Sunday, we need to remember to pray perseveringly for the missions. 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. God will respond to our prayer, but that prayer needs to be constant. There is a shortage of vocations to the missions today because, frankly, we’re not praying enough. We are called to persevere not just in prayer for missionaries, but for all those who will hear the word of God through them, that they may respond with faith. Likewise, as we see in St. Matthew’s Gospel, right after Jesus told the disciples to pray for laborers for the harvest, he called 12 of them to be his apostles, 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 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 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 without losing heart, and ask to pray with them. To pray with those who pray with perseverance trains us to pray with perseverance. Likewise, we need to look around us, too, and see those who do not have the faith to pray with insistence and try to help them. It’s not enough, in other words, for us to pray alone, because that would be like hiking Mt. Washington alone. We’ve got a much better chance if we hike with someone else, or with a whole group. Pope Francis mentioned this aspect of prayer in his homily this morning at the canonization. “There is an important message in this story of Moses,” he commented. “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.

Opening Ourselves to Jesus’ Help

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? This Jubilee of Mercy 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 against evil and for Him. We ask the Lord to help us to pray with living faith today, so that when he comes on this altar, he may find us full of faith, ready to persevere in prayerful union with him through the valleys and mountains of life all the way until, God-willing, we join the eternally persevering prayer of the heavenly Jerusalem.

The readings for today’s Mass were: