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FIFTH Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Saturday, 03 February 2024

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Daily Prayer Is an Essential Ingredient in the Life of Every Christian

My dear brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ was God-become-man to enable the fallen human race to find its way back to God. His human nature was infused with the power of his divine person.

We see this, for example, in his miraculous cure of Simon Peter's mother-in-law, and in his many other miracles and casting out of demons. Jesus was true man, but his humanity was perfect, sinless, without any tendencies to selfishness, laziness, or pride.

His character was balanced and flawless, firm as the mountains and gentle as a mother's caress. His mind was beyond brilliant, filled with the radiance of divine light and understanding. He had no emotional scars from a difficult family upbringing (Mary was without sin too, and Joseph was a saint), no personality disorders or imbalanced self-esteem - no lacks, no wounds, no imperfections at all.

And yet, despite all that, over and over again in the Gospels we see him go off to be alone in prayer, just as he did in today's Gospel passage. Christ was perfect, God from God and light from light, and yet he still needed to reserve time just to be alone with his Father.

He needed to go off and pray. He even had to get up early to make time for it. Some-times he had to stay up late to make time for it. But he always did it, even on the very eve of his crucifixion, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

If he, who was perfect, needed prayer in order to fulfill his life's mission, what does that imply for us, who are so imperfect, so weak, so vulnerable to every sort of temptation and wounded by every kind of sin? If disciplined, daily prayer was essential for Christ, it must be even more essential for Christ's less-than-perfect followers.

Cardinal Van Thuan's Prayerful Endurance

The late Cardinal Francis van Thuan gives a good example of this. As coadjutor Archbishop of Saigon, Vietnam, he was arrested on August 15, 1975, soon after South Vietnam fell to the Communist regime.

He spent the next 13 years in prison, moving between forced residences, reorientation camps, and nine years of solitary confinement. As a prisoner, he not only maintained his faith and his sanity, but he also secretly wrote and distributed three books, converted a series of prison guards, and gave millions of Catholics in Vietnam something to hope for.

How did he do it? How did he find the strength, the love, the power? By being a man of prayer. For months at a time he was confined to a prison cell too short to stand up in and too narrow to lie down fully extended in. It had no windows and the only ventilation was a rusty, centipede-infested drain in the floor.

At times the cell was so stifling that he had to put his face against the drain to breathe, despite the crawling vermin. Throughout his ordeal, prayer was his light and his strength. His prayer became very simple. He would just repeat short phrases from the Bible repeatedly.

Some of his favourites were:

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
I am the servant of the Lord.
Lord, what do you want me to do?
Lord, You know everything, You know that I love You.

He would feed his soul on these inspired words, mulling them over, letting them sink in, using them to make sense out of his sufferings, letting God speak to him through them. He explained later: "I who am weak and mediocre, I love these short prayers... The more I repeat them, the more I am penetrated by them. I am close to You, Lord." Prayer was his lifeline, as it was for Christ, and as it should be for us.

Overcoming the Fear That Stifles Prayer

We have all at some point made a personal commitment to a more disciplined and deeper prayer life. And so, we all know how hard it is to keep that commitment. One thing that makes it so hard is fear. Because of our fallen human nature, we have difficulty trusting God. Subconsciously, part of us is suspicious of God; we are afraid that if we agree to follow him more closely, he will make us miserable.

We are afraid that if we let Christ be the King of our hearts, he will take all the fun out of life. We are afraid that we will end up like Job in today's First Reading: oppressed, depressed, and distressed. That fear holds back our prayer life, because prayer involves an attitude of docility, saying to God, "Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done." Developing a mature prayer life involves facing and overcoming the fear that inhibits us from saying that with our lips and with our hearts.

Jesus can melt that fear away if we let him. Just contemplate the crucifix; it is a guarantee of Christ's love for us. Look at the Eucharist, another proof of his love - he is always with us, always giving himself to us. If he loves us that much, that selflessly, he is trustworthy; whatever he asks of us will always be what is best for us. There is no need to be afraid; the Good Shepherd is on our side.

And Job didn't end up in suffering and misery. He passed through some temporary suffering and misery on his way to a deeper, wiser, more glorious and everlastingly joyful relationship with his Creator and Redeemer. Jesus wants to lead us to the same goal; daily, disciplined prayer is necessary food for the journey.