Receiving and Extending the Lord’s Saving Work, 1st Wednesday (II), January 15, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, Year II
100th Anniversary of the Birth of John Cardinal O’Connor
January 15, 2020
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: 

• Today as we mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Cardinal O’Connor, the founder of the Sisters of LIfe, we continue with the readings of Ordinary Time in which we examine the beginnings of the public ministry of Jesus and get a glimpse at an ordinary day in his life and how he was filling his full days preaching, healing, praying and sharing himself with others. The way Jesus behaved in Capernaum shows his perennial priorities. Cardinal O’Connor as a disciple of Jesus allowed Jesus to love him in these ways and as a priest, successor of the apostles, and founder of the Sisters of Life, sought to continue this ministry of Jesus in our day. Let’s first examine Jesus’ day and then take a glimpse at how that helped to define the life of the one who was born a century ago today.
• Jesus began this day in the Gospel by preaching for a long time in the synagogue on the Sabbath, 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, per his custom, would work with every sick person one-on-one, bringing people into a personal relationship with him so that he could give them an even greater gift, salvation through faith. And after that, well before dawn in the next day, he went out to pray. Finally, 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. Such was his passion to spread the faith that he wasn’t just looking for a few to receive him, but for all. Four activities: preaching, healing, praying and going forth.
• I’d like to ponder more extensively 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. Praying at night is not only praying at a time with fewer distractions but often it’s done when everyone else is sleeping, when no one else can notice. These two lessons — prioritizing the Lord in prayer and praying to him, for for the attention of others — are meant to influence our prayer at all times. In In Sinu Iesu, Jesus intimates in prayer to the priest author, “There are particular graces reserved for souls who keep watch before my Eucharistic Face during the night. Those who pray by night imitate My own night watches of prayer to my Father. How often I would keep vigil in the presence of my Father, conversing with Him in the silence of the night and taking up into my prayer the secret cares of a sleeping world and even the groans of creation. You will discover that there is a clarity and a peace in nocturnal prayer that I do not give to souls at other times. … Learn to adore me by night. … I prayed to my Father in this way and in so doing I gave my priests and all my friends an example to follow.”
• This lesson about prayer at night is similarly communicated catechetically we could say in today’s first reading. God called young Samuel to prayer not in the middle of the day but while he was sleeping. We know that 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. 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.
• Cardinal O’Connor was someone who, first, allowed Jesus to give himself to him in these ways. He listened attentively to his word. He allowed himself to be healed regularly through God’s mercy. He received the fruits of Jesus’ praying for him. And he was transformed by these experiences to become someone who preached in season and out of season as of the first importance the Gospel he had received. He went on out to share in the work of the Good Samaritan, caring for the sick and those in need, like he cared for his mother Dorothy when she was temporarily blinded, cared for so many children with Down Syndrome, cared for 1100 patients with AIDS, and many others in between, taking to them the healing balm of Christian love. He entered into Jesus’ prayer at all times of the day and night, allowing the Lord to speak to him so that through him the Lord could speak to us. And he brought the Gospel to the ends of the earth, particularly in his service as a navy chaplain and as a cardinal of the Church. And he founded the Sisters of Life in a particular way to make present Jesus’ continuous work of proclaiming the Gospel of Life, of hope and healing for women in difficult pregnancies or who have tragically ended pregnancies, of prayer and fasting night and day to expunge the evil one from the culture, and in going out to proclaim the Evangelium Vitae on college campuses, parishes, the public square, and so many other ways. Today as we mark his 100th birthday, we thank God for all of the graces he gave to him and to us through him, and we ask the Lord to give us the same passion, perseverance and fidelity to the work of proclaiming the Gospel, praying, and charity, particularly to those who are sick and wounded, as characterized his life.
• The same Lord who spoke to Samuel, the same Jesus who teaches, heals and prays, the same Good Shepherd who was the center of Cardinal O’Connor’s life, 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 as we go to other towns and people as well, because it’s to spread that faith in action that we, like Christ, have been sent! This is the mission of life that Cardinal O’Connor fulfilled as God’s good and faithful servant, that we have been called, for Christ, to continue.

The readings for today’s Mass were: