Persevering Prayer Together With Our Lady, 27th Thursday (I), October 7, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
October 7, 2021
Mal 3:13-20, Ps 1, Lk 11:5-13

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus continues to respond to the question of yesterday, to teach us how to pray. Yesterday, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he began by teaching them that the secret of prayer is to approach God as a loving Father. Once we do, almost everything flows. We begin to seek the glory and sanctification of his name and the building of his kingdom not only because we love Him but also because we know that, as his sons and daughters, we share that name and are heirs of that kingdom. Once we relate to him as a Loving Father then we trust in his providence to give us each day what we need and in his mercy to forgive us when we err because he loves us more than he detests the sins that hurt us and wound our relationship with him. When we relate to him as a Loving Father, we trust him not to put us in a position in which we’ll fail the ultimate test but rather to challenge us and help us to meet those challenges that are beyond what we think are possible.
• Today Jesus continues his responding to our request to teach us how to pray by illustrating for us how to persevere in prayer. He gives us a parable based on middle eastern customs of hospitality. Especially during the summer months when the sun is particularly brutal, many Jews would travel at night and so it was not unheard of that a guest would arrive at your home — in the days before phones, texts and emails and also before affordable and efficient postal systems — unannounced at night, famished after a long journey. Because bread was baked normally in the morning, it’s possible that all the bread had already been eaten. That’s why you’d go to your neighbors to ask if they had anything to share. The second thing to understand about middle eastern culture is that their doors were open all day long but when they were shut and locked, that meant that the entire family and all their animals had gone to bed. They’d sleep together in an interior part of the house to stay warm during the typical nocturnal middle eastern radiational cooling. To get up to answer the door when a neighbor was knocking at midnight meant that one would likely be stepping on one’s children and animals and waking everyone up. It’s understandable that one would want to wait to share bread until the morning. But Jesus says that because of the perseverance of the neighbor, “I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence.” Jesus mentions this as a lesson in prayer precisely in order to contrast that motivation with one of God. He was saying, “If a neighbor would eventually give in because of harassment, think about how God will respond out of love?”
• That led Jesus to say, “I tell you, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives, everyone who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened.” It’s an incredible promise that we should receive with faith. Everyone who asks receives. Notice that he doesn’t say that one will receive, find or have the door opened immediately. He also doesn’t say that one will receive and find exactly what one expected to find. But he does promise God will respond, precisely because God is a loving Father who always responds first and foremost by giving himself. That’s why Jesus said, “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” God sends the Holy Spirit not just to those who ask for the Holy Spirit but to those who ask, seek, or knock for anything, and he does so precisely because he loves us and provides what we really need beyond what we desire or explicitly request. God always responds to our prayers by giving us himself.
• The question we need to answer, however, is why, if God loves us, he doesn’t answer our prayers immediately. Why does he want us to persevere in knocking like a neighbor at night for bread? Why does he want us to spend hours, days, months even years seeking in order to find? He does so precisely so that we may learn how to persevere in life. Pope Francis spoke several years ago in an Angelus meditation about why God wants us to pray with perseverance. “God invites us to pray insistently not because he is unaware of our needs or because he is not listening to us. On the contrary, he is always listening and he knows everything about us lovingly.” But because we pray as we live and live as we pray, he wants to develop in us through prayer the type of perseverance we need to remain faithful in life. “On our daily journey, especially in times of difficulty, in the battle against the evil that is outside and within us,” Pope Francis continued, “the Lord is not far away, he is by our side. We battle with him beside us, and our weapon is prayer which makes us feel his presence beside us, his mercy and also his help. But the battle against evil is a long and hard one; it requires patience and endurance. … Indeed persevering prayer is the expression of faith in a God who calls us to fight with him every day and at every moment in order to conquer evil with good.” Persevering prayer helps us to learn the persevering faith we have to have to fight the good fight so as to win.
• This is important for us to understand today’s Psalm and first reading. There’s a contrast between two types of people. For the Prophet Malachi, it’s between the faithful and those who think it’s “vain to serve God,” to do penance, to keep the commandments — because those who are proud, who do evil, who tempt God all prosper, it seems, whereas those who serve God don’t. But God through Malachi reminds the people that those who trust in his name, who fear him — who persevere in their faithful relationship with God — will receive his compassion on the day of judgment. They will see the eternal sunshine and receive the healing of the Sun of Justice. Similarly in the Responsorial Psalm, there’s the contrast between those who follow the counsel of the wicked and insolent, who are like chaff that will disappear after being burned, and those who meditate perseveringly on God’s law “day and night.” The latter will be like a tree near running water that is always evergreen and prospers. These readings show us something really important about prayer: prayer is heavily influenced by our desires. If what we want is this-worldly prosperity, pleasure, money, health, fame, then we will probably envy the rich and famous of the world. If we’re really seeking those things, then we probably will easily quit on prayer, especially if God doesn’t grant us those things. If, on the other hand, we really want God’s name to be hallowed instead of us, his will to be done, his kingdom rather than ours — if, in other words, we really love God and want what he wants — then we’ll persevere, because it’s through prayer God gives us himself and makes us more and more like him.
• There are several forms of persevering prayer that are given to us in the school of prayer in the Church. There’s the Liturgy of the Hours, in which we persevere in praying the Psalms that Christ and Mary prayed, for the needs of the Church. There’s work, which is a real setting for persevering prayer, as we offer what we’re doing as the sacrifice of Abel to God. There’s suffering, in offering up our pains and hardships for the conversion of the world. There’s Mass, the greatest prayer of them all, in which until the end of time, from the rising of the sun to its setting, we share in Christ’s eternal prayer for the Upper Room and the Cross. But on this October 7, the Memorial of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. Mary is the great teacher of persevering prayer. She is the model of those who “fear the Lord” and “trust in his name.” She is the one who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on that law day and night, the fruitful tree in every season with unfading leaves, the one who, because she never ceased to ask, seek and knock, was overshadowed and filled perpetually by the Holy Spirit such that she was full of grace. The Rosary is the school in which she teaches us the art and love of persevering prayer. St. John Paul II, in his beautiful 2002 exhortation on the Rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, described the method of the Rosary as one of persevering faith, hope and love: “Meditation on the mysteries of Christ is proposed in the Rosary by means of a method … based on repetition. This applies above all to the Hail Mary, repeated ten times in each mystery. If this repetition is considered superficially, there could be a temptation to see the Rosary as a dry and boring exercise. It is quite another thing, however, when the Rosary is thought of as an outpouring of that love which tirelessly returns to the person loved with expressions similar in their content but ever fresh in terms of the feeling pervading them. … If we needed evidence for this from the Gospel, we could easily find it in the touching dialogue between Christ and Peter after the Resurrection: ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’ Three times this question is put to Peter, and three times he gives the reply: ‘Lord, you know that I love you’ (cf. Jn 21:15-17). … None can fail to recognize the beauty of this triple repetition, in which the insistent request and the corresponding reply are expressed in terms familiar from the universal experience of human love. To understand the Rosary, one has to enter into the psychological dynamic proper to love. One thing is clear: although the repeated Hail Mary is addressed directly to Mary, it is to Jesus that the act of love is ultimately directed, with her and through her. The repetition is nourished by the desire to be conformed ever more completely to Christ, the true programme of the Christian life. …  When we repeat the name of Jesus – the only name given to us by which we may hope for salvation (cf. Acts 4:12) – in close association with the name of his Blessed Mother, almost as if it were done at her suggestion, we set out on a path of assimilation meant to help us enter more deeply into the life of Christ” (26, 33). For this repetition to work, however, we have to focus not on the words but on the prayer to which the words lead. St. John Paul II wrote, “The Rosary, precisely because it starts with Mary’s own experience, is an exquisitely contemplative prayer. Without this contemplative dimension, it would lose its meaning, as Pope Paul VI clearly pointed out: ‘Without contemplation, the Rosary is a body without a soul, and its recitation runs the risk of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas, in violation of the admonition of Christ: ‘In praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think they will be heard for their many words’ (Mt 6:7). By its nature the recitation of the Rosary calls for a quiet rhythm and a lingering pace, helping the individual to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life as seen through the eyes of her who was closest to the Lord. In this way the unfathomable riches of these mysteries are disclosed'” (27). We see this persevering prayer in the origin of the Feast, when on October 7, 1571, as Pope St. Pius V and the Christian people were perseveringly praying to Mary in Rome during the Battle of Lepanto taking place in the Adriatic, Mary helped them ask, seek and knock for what the Christian sailors who were fighting against the Muslim Turks needed, which helped the win the victory against great odds.
• Today we ask Mary to persevere in interceding for us that we and the whole Church might become like her in persistent prayer. And in response to the Church’s petition from the rising of the sun to its setting, God the Father gives us not three loaves of bread, but himself: his Son the Living Bread come down from heaven and the Holy Spirit who seeks to make us one body, one spirit in Christ.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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