Learning to discern the Lord’s voice is a big part of our development as people of God and disciples of the Lord. There are many competing voices out there, and so it takes great discernment to know which of those voices is God himself. The way that we learn this is, of course, through prayer. When we practice often enough, we will gradually find it easier to hear the Lord’s voice, and then tell him, “Here I am, Lord; I have come to do your will.”
Tag: Prayer
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Thursday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
The Israelites wandering in the desert would seem to have had the spiritual life easy. How could they possibly miss God’s presence? There was a cloud to lead them to the Lord by day, and fire by night. But just like the stuff that ended up in the net in today’s Gospel, some people got it and some people didn’t.
The same is true for us. How hard can it be for us to see the Lord’s presence in our own lives? Even now, some people get it and some people don’t. And more than that, even the faithful among us sometimes get it and sometimes don’t. I often think it would be good to have something as hard to miss as a column of cloud or fire to keep me on the straight and narrow. Well, in a way – a much better way, actually – we do: we have the Church, the Sacraments, and the Word of God, prayer that beckons us by day and by night. But even that doesn’t always light the way for us. There are so many distractions.
The issue is urgent. The Kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us today, will be like the fishmongers sorting out the fish from the seaborne refuse. We don’t want to get thrown out with all that vile stuff. So, may God lead us all to be among those who get it, those who follow the way marked out for us. After all, we have something way better than clouds by day and fire by night, don’t we?
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Fifth Sunday of Lent
He had worked for the company for twenty-seven years, and the beginning of his association there was great. The job was energizing, he worked with great people, he worked for great people. It was a family business, and they treated the people who worked for them like family. They were paid well, had good benefits, and they all worked hard – it was an ideal situation. But, over the years, the brothers who ran the company retired, and sold the company to another in the same business. They were taken over a few years ago by still another company, and they started to joke that they should replace the sign out front with a dry-erase board so they could change the company name more easily.
So he found his job satisfaction decreasing day by day. The job was more hectic and drained him of his energy every single day. The people he worked with were in the same boat as he was – they were all so stressed that they hardly had time for each other. The great people he worked for were all retired. It wasn’t family any more – it was dog eat dog, profits were most important, and the quality of work and product wasn’t so important as was the next big presentation for the stockholders. Everyone was trying to get ahead, and they were cutting corners to do so.
Eventually he became aware that something was really off. What they were billing their biggest clients for, and what they were providing, were two different things. He’d seen the invoices and the sales orders and they didn’t match. And these were government contracts. He checked and re-checked, and there was no getting around it, the disparity was clear. As time went on, he knew he couldn’t live with what was going on. But if he blew the whistle, who was going to have his back? He had a family and needed the job and its benefits. Who was going to hire him at his age? Even when he found a job, he wouldn’t make what he was getting now. But his faith had informed his conscience and he knew he couldn’t just look the other way.
His hour had come.
Many of us have to face our own “hours.” A teenager says his friends are constantly getting drunk and he does not want to join them. As a result he loses those friends. A parent objects to athletic practices for her children on Sunday morning. As a result, her child does not make the team. Our hour comes whenever our identity is on the line, when we are called on to make sacrifice, when we must make a decision that will cost us. The “hour” often puts our choices at odds with others and we must decide if we will live out and, in a way, die for what we believe.
And so, maybe we can relate a bit to Jesus today. His hour had come, the hour for him to be glorified, sure, but it was also an hour that would lead first to his death. He knew this very well. In John’s Gospel, none of this is a surprise for Jesus – he is not arrested and dragged to his death, there is no Garden of Gethsemane moment where he begs for the cup to be taken from him. Instead, John’s Gospel has Jesus in full control. He knows why he came, he knows that the hour is at hand, and he freely lays down his life for all of us. But, even so, that hour does not come without some pause, even some dread – John’s Jesus is still fully human in that way.
We are in the “homestretch” of Lent right now. As Jesus approaches his defining hour, we are entering into the final full week of Lent, this wonderful season of grace and blessing. Lent itself ends on Holy Thursday just before Evening Prayer or Vespers. So we have about ten and a half days left. And the preparations are in full swing. The maintenance staff has been repairing and refinishing the pews so that the Church will look good for Easter. We’ve been stocking up on the candles and hosts and supplies that we will need for these incredible days. Liturgies are being prepared, readings are being practiced, music is being rehearsed. The Elect have taken part in all the Scrutinies and are eager for the Easter Vigil when they will receive what they have been longing for – new life in Christ.
So I think this is a good time for us to pause and see where we are and where we’ve been. Where has this Lent taken us? Did you participate in Forty Hours, in the Mission; have you come to the Stations of the Cross, did you eat at the Fish Fry? Have you found time for additional prayer in your life? Have you come to daily Mass? Have you fasted from those things which distract you from a full relationship with God? Have you given of your own time, talent and treasure to reach out to those who are not as fortunate as you are? Have you taken the time to confess your sins?
If Lent has not been as stellar as you’d hoped; if you’ve intended to do some things that haven’t actually taken shape, if you’ve been lax in some of your practices, well you have these ten and a half days to make it right. If you’ve failed in your resolutions, they are not dead; now is the time to revive them and make a ten-day effort to let them change your hearts, to let God change your hearts. We even have one final opportunity for the Sacrament of Penance, next Saturday, from 3:30 to 5pm, and all three of us priests will be available: me, Fr. Ted and Fr. Jude.
How wonderful it would be for all of us to enter into Holy Week with minds and hearts renewed, open to the grace of the Paschal Triduum. How wonderful it would be to pack this church on all three days of the Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil; all of us open to the celebration of our salvation through the cross and resurrection of Christ. The hour is nearly here, and our entering in to this hour enables us to face those other “hours” of our lives with more grace. So that when our identity is tested and our faith is on the line, we will know that we can take up the cross, confident in the resurrection.
Jesus tells us today, “Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” We confidently approach this hour of judgment with the prayer of the Psalmist today, “Create a clean heart in me, O God.”
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Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent
There are two things happening in the readings these later days of Lent. In the first readings, we have had the prophets complaining about the evil that is plotted against them and also them calling on the Lord God to be their help. In this they foreshadow what will happen to the Christ during his life: he too will be a prophet who is not welcome, who is not understood, who is treated with evil intent. He too will find his only trust in the Lord God, his Father.
The second thing that is happening is that, as we read through the later part of John’s Gospel, it’s starting to get a little dangerous for Jesus. The authorities aren’t sure what to make of him, and most of them would like his troublesomeness taken from them. They wish to arrest him and put an end to his prophecies and words of challenge. They begin to plot against him more and more in earnest. But, they are unable to lay hands on him because “his time has not yet come.” In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ life is not taken from him; instead, he freely lays it down, and he does it in the Father’s time, not his, not the Jews’, not anyone else’s.
So in our readings we are beginning to hear a sense of urgency. Our days of Lent are quickly coming to a close. Holy Week will be here before we know it. And so if we’ve had Lenten plans that have not quite taken hold or have been put off, now is the time to revive them in earnest. We need to confess our sins, to fast, pray and give alms, to ready our hearts and our spirits for the wonderful days of grace that lie ahead.
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Thursday of the First Week of Lent
Have you noticed that the readings for these early days of Lent have been teaching us how to accomplish the various disciplines of Lent, which really are the various disciplines of the spiritual life? Today’s discipline then, I think, would be persistence in prayer. In the first reading, we have Queen Esther, who is really between a rock and a hard place. The king does not know she is Hebrew, and worse than that, if she goes to the king without being summoned, she could well lose her life. But, Mordecai, the man who was her guardian and raised her as his own daughter, revealed to her that the king’s advisor had planned genocide against the Jews, and she was the only person in a position to beg the king to change his mind. So today, she prays that her life, as well as those of her people would be spared. Esther prayed for three days and nights that her prayer would be answered, and her persistence was rewarded. She received the reward that Jesus promised when he said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Then again, how many of us have prayed persistently to God that he would answer our prayer and have yet to be answered? I think most of us at some point or another have experience the exasperation of prayer unanswered, or at least seemingly so. We can be so frustrated when a loved one is ill or unemployed, or whatever, and God seemingly does not hear.
But the discipline of prayerful persistence is not like wishing on a star or anything like that. There’s no magic to our words. We may or may not be rewarded with the exact gift we pray for. But we will always be rewarded with the loving presence of our God in our lives. In fact, maybe God’s answer to our prayer is “no” – for whatever reason – but even in that “no” we have the grace of a relationship that has been strengthened by our prayerful persistence.
The Psalmist prays, “Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.” This Lent, may the discipline of persistence in prayer lead us to a renewed and enlivened sense of the Lord’s will in our lives.
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Ash Wednesday
Today’s readings [from the Ash Wednesday Service of the Word]
Behold: now is the acceptable time!
Behold: now is the day of salvation!We have come here today for all sorts of reasons. Lots of us may still have the remnants of old and bad teaching that you have to come to Church on Ash Wednesday and receive these “magic” ashes or something horrible will happen to you. When you don’t come to Church on a regular basis, you lose contact with God and the community, and yes, that is pretty horrible, but not in a superstitious kind of way – nothing that we celebrate here is magic. The real reason we come to Church on this the first day of Lent is for what we celebrate on the day after Lent: the resurrection of the Lord on Easter Sunday. Through the Cross and Resurrection, Jesus has won for us salvation, and we are the grateful beneficiaries of that great gift. All of our Lenten observance, then, is a preparation for the joy of Easter.
Lent calls us to repent, to break our ties with the sinfulness and the entanglements that are keeping us tethered to the world instead of free to live with our God and receive his gift of salvation. Our Church offers us three ways to do that during Lent. First, we can fast. We can give up snacks, or a favorite food, or eat one less meal perhaps one day a week, or we can give up a favorite television program or activity. Fasting helps us to be aware of the ways God works to sustain us when we’re hungry. The lack of television provides us with a silence that can be filled by God’s presence. The whole idea of fasting is that we need to come to realize that there is nothing that we hunger for that God can’t provide, and to cut our ties with anything that keeps us from God.
Second, we can pray. We already must pray every day and attend Mass every Sunday, not to do so is seriously sinful. But maybe Lent can be the opportunity to intensify our prayer life, to make it better, to make it more, to draw more life from it. Maybe we are not people who read Scripture every day, and we can work through one of the books of the Bible during Lent. Maybe we can learn a new prayer or take on a new devotion. Maybe we can spend time before the Lord in the Tabernacle or in adoration, especially during our 40 hours devotion we’ll have next week. Maybe we can just carve out some quiet time at the end of the day to give thanks for our blessings, and to ask pardon for our failings. Intensifying our prayer life this Lent can help us to be aware of God’s presence at every moment of our day and in every place we are.
Third, we can give alms or do works of charity. We can save money for Operation Rice Bowl, or perhaps help to provide a meal at Hesed House, or join the St. Vincent dePaul Society. Maybe we can devote some time to mentoring a child who needs help with their studies, or volunteer to help in our school or religious education program. Works of charity might be a family project, perhaps volunteering at a soup kitchen together, or shopping together for items to donate to Loaves and Fishes. When we do works of charity, we can learn to see others as God does, and love them the way God loves them and us.
And none of this, as the Gospel reminds us today, is to be done begrudgingly or half-heartedly. None of it is to be done with the express purpose of letting the world see how great we are. It is always to be done with great humility, but also with great joy. Our acts of fasting, prayer, and charity should be a celebration of who God is in our lives, and a beautiful effort to strengthen our relationship with him.
It is my prayer that this Lent can be a forty day retreat that will bring us all closer to God. May we all hear the voice of the prophet Joel from today’s first reading: “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart!”
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St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr
St. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostles. He is known to have accompanied St. Ignatius of Antioch to Rome to confer with Pope Anicetus concerning the celebration of Easter, which was quite a controversy in that time. He was known to be a man of faith and wisdom, that wisdom of which our first reading speaks: “He has poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing according to his bounty; he has lavished her upon his friends.”
It was wisdom that allowed him, at the age of 86, to accept martyrdom with the peace of a life lived with integrity and in the faith of Jesus Christ. Having been placed in the pyre for his execution, he prayed: “I bless You because You have granted me this day and hour, that I might receive a portion amongst the number of martyrs in the cup of Your Christ unto resurrection of eternal life, both of soul and of body, in the incorruptibility of the Holy Spirit. May I be received among these in Your presence this day, as a rich and acceptable sacrifice, as You did prepare and reveal it beforehand, and have accomplished it, You that art the faithful and true God. For this cause, yea and for all things, I praise You, I bless You, I glorify You, through the eternal and heavenly High-priest, Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, through Whom, with Him and the Holy Spirit, be glory both now and ever and for the ages to come. Amen.”
It is said that the flames did not even scorch him, that instead they formed a dome around him, and from it there was a pleasing aroma, like fine incense. He was later executed by being thrust through with a lance, with the praise of God on his lips. I’m not sure I could do that! Like the demon in the Gospel reading that could only be expelled by prayer, a martyrdom that horrible could only be accepted with prayer. And the glory that comes from that sacrifice is life eternal in the kingdom of God. The Wisdom of God leads us to prayer today; may that prayer bear fruit in our lives beyond anything the world can offer us.
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Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time
One of the graces that I have here at the parish is that whenever I go to parish meetings, we always pray through the Gospel for the coming Sunday and discuss it. The Spirit works through the community, and more often than not, I’ll start thinking about the readings in a different light than I might have all by myself. This week I met on Monday with the finance committee, and so as we prayed through this Gospel, I had my finance committee thinking cap on. So my first thought was, well, the place where Jesus is meeting is too small by far, so we’re going to have to initiate a building campaign, and that’s going to be a lot of work. The second thought was, great, they’ve cut a hole in the roof and now we have to pay to have that fixed! I did not share those thoughts out loud and, thankfully, the Spirit was working in the folks on the committee, who expressed much more pious thoughts!
There’s a lot of paralysis going on in these readings. In the first reading, it’s the whole nation of Israel that is paralyzed. They are in captivity in Babylon, and their oppression is pretty cruel. They longed for God to come and rid them of their exile, as he had when they were slaves in Egypt. Where are God’s mercies of the past? When will their exile come to an end? Isaiah speaks to them words of consolation today. God will not just lead them back to their land, making a way through the desert and a river through the wasteland. But he is also doing something new: he will deal with the root cause of their paralysis: sin. It was sin that led them into slavery in Egypt, it was sin that led them to captivity in Babylon. So if they are to be truly freed, truly healed of their paralysis, they need to be forgiven of their sins. And it is only God who can do that, so he takes the initiative to do that new thing among them. Praise God!
The paralysis in the Gospel is more literal, but also works on the figurative level here too. The center of attention might seem to be the paralytic, but really it’s Jesus. Jesus has the crowds captivated, preaching words that have them spellbound. So much so, that he can hardly move, for all the crowds around him! Seeing this, the paralytic’s friends take bold action: they haul him up onto the roof, make a hole in it, and lower him down, right in the midst of Jesus and his hearers. You have to imagine that the crowds are on the edge of their seats – except there probably wasn’t room for any chairs – and they were just waiting with eager anticipation to see what Jesus would do now. Who could heal a paralytic? Jesus speaks curious words: “Child, your sins are forgiven.” – What on earth can that mean? Who has the audacity to say he can forgive sins? Why doesn’t he just heal the man as the man had hoped for?
But Jesus is doing something new too. These last several weeks, we have been hearing about Jesus healing all sorts of people, including a leper just last week. And through it all, he’s been telling them to keep it quiet – not that they did! – because he wasn’t healing people just be known as a wonder worker. He’s trying to get at the root cause of the people’s paralysis, the real disease and not just the symptom. And that disease is, of course, sin. “Child, your sins are forgiven.” Those are the words he speaks to the paralytic, because he insists on healing the man from the inside out. The physical paralysis was nothing, the really paralyzing thing was sin. Sin paralyzes us all from time to time. It affects our prayer life, our vocation, our relationships. It holds us back, it keeps us from moving on to what God intends for us. When we are paralyzed by sin, nothing good can come to us, nothing good can even be seen in us or by us. Sin is quite literally deadly. And so, yeah, Jesus can heal a man’s paralysis, but whoa, he can even heal the sinfulness of the whole human family. Now that’s a wonder worker! Healing the world of sin was the whole reason for Jesus being here in the first place. Praise God!
We are here today on the precipice of a new season of the Church year. This Wednesday is the beginning of our Lent, the beginning of that time of year when we all have the opportunity to turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel. It’s a forty-ish day retreat for us; we can take stock of those sins that have held us back, and bring them to our Jesus who came that they might be blotted out. And we know that, as good as our lives tend to be, as faithful as we try to be, we have, on occasion, blown it, both individually and as a human family. We have missed opportunities to be of service. We have held on to grudges and past hurts. We have broken relationships through the distractions of lust in its many forms. We have taken what belongs to others, maybe not giving an honest day’s work for our pay, or taking credit for work that was not ours. We have stolen from the poor, either by not making an effort to reach out to them, or by wasting resources. We have deprived God of the worship due to him, either by missing Mass for yet another soccer game, or by being inattentive at Mass or forgetting our prayers. We have taken the lives of others by allowing abortion to continue its pandemic spread through the world, or by not caring for the sick, or by allowing racial bigotry to go unchallenged. We have dishonored our parents and ancestors by allowing the elderly to die alone, or by allowing the cost of health care to be beyond what people can pay. You get the idea – our personal and communal sins have been myriad, and they have paralyzed us for far too long.
But our Lent is a gift to us. Our ashes remind us that we will not live forever, so the time to open ourselves up to change is now. We will have these days to concentrate on fasting, almsgiving and prayer. This is a gift, but also a responsibility; it is likewise sinful to ignore the opportunity completely. Our fasting might be food, or it might be something else that consumes us, like television or the internet. Our almsgiving can consist of any or all of the traditional ways of time, talent, and treasure. Our prayer can be communal or personal, devotional or reflective, whatever it is that is going to lead us face-to-face with Christ. This is also a time to rid ourselves of the sin that binds us, to hear those wonderful words spoken to us as well: “Child, your sins are forgiven.” We have so many opportunities planned for the Sacrament of Penance, that if you cannot find a time to go to Confession, you’re just not looking hard enough!
But if it’s the length of time since you last received that sacrament that is paralyzing you, then you need to hear what I always tell people about the Sacrament of Penance: Don’t let anything stop you. When you go into the confessional, tell the priest: “Father it’s been years since my last confession, and I might need some help to do this right.” If he doesn’t welcome you back and fall all over himself trying to help you make a good confession, you have my permission to get up and leave and go find a priest who is more welcoming. Because it is my job to help you make a good confession, it is my job to make sure the experience is meaningful for you, it is my job to make you want to come back, and I take that very seriously. I know that Fr. Ted does too.
The important thing to remember in all of this is that you cannot let anything stop you from being healed of what paralyzes you. If need be, make a hole in the roof so that you can end up right at the feet of Jesus. Lent is our gift from God, that opportunity that he initiates to do something new among us. Let’s not ever turn away from that gift. Our staff had a retreat day this week, and in it we heard these words from the Rule of St. Benedict which I think tell us everything we should learn from today’s Liturgy of the Word: “Let no one follow what he thinks profitable to himself, but rather that which is profitable to another; let them show unto each other all … charity with a chaste love. Let them fear God, … and prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may He bring us all together to life everlasting. Amen.”
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Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
A while ago now, I was working at my home parish, St. Petronille, on the staff as a youth minister. I remember the parish secretary well, she was a very nice woman named Dorothy. Whenever you’d ask Dorothy how she was, she’d always say, “Busy, busy, busy!” And I’m sure that she was busy, but it was almost like she was defending her job or something, afraid anyone would find her sitting around. In truth, she was the last person anyone would suspect of slacking off.
We have some strange readings today. Part of the issue is that St. Mark’s Gospel is kind of weird. As you may know, it’s the shortest of the four Gospels we have. And so when we read it, we find that everything is packed in a very short space. Our teens have to read a Gospel for their Confirmation project, and many of them pick Mark because it’s the shortest. The bad news is, that it’s so short, and with so much packed in, that it can sometimes be a lot harder to understand than the others.
And so as we approach Mark’s Gospel, we almost feel a bit breathless. The story moves so quickly, and Jesus appears to be a lot like Dorothy: “Busy, busy, busy!” The man can barely find some time to relax with his disciples, or spend some time in prayer before the crowds are hemming in around him, banging on the door, a whole town’s worth of them, bringing Jesus their hurting and ailing and broken friends and loved ones. And even though Jesus sympathizes with them, even though he certainly gives them what they ask for, he doesn’t want to be known as the “wonder worker.” His message is a lot more complex than that, a lot more important than even saving someone’s bodily life.
And the disciples are part of the problem for him. They don’t get it yet, so they rapidly get caught up in the frenzy. “Everyone is looking for you,” they tell him, almost as if they too can’t wait to see what Jesus will do next. And so Jesus becomes a mirror of Job in our first reading, who gives himself to the drudgery of what’s expected of him, without any rest in sight.
Do you feel the weariness? Do you identify with the frenzy?
I think maybe a lot of us are there right now. It’s been a long winter, and well, it’s just February, so it could go on another couple of months. We’ve come through the frantic Christmas season, and just have a couple of weeks to go before we’re into Lent. Parents, priests, pastoral ministers, all of us are in the middle of frenzy almost all the time. It can be easy to identify with Job who doesn’t see an end in sight, or at least to feel the frustration of Jesus as he longs to have some quiet time, some time away, to recharge the energy and fill up the reservoir of the Spirit. And yet it always seems like that time never comes, right?
So I’m not going to stand here and tell you that you have to take some time to be connected to God or to pray more or to have some peace and quiet. You know that. You’d probably give anything to experience it. You probably even know that that quiet, recharging time would make you a better parent, a better employee or employer, a better teacher, a better doctor, a better whatever it is that you do. We all have obligations imposed on us, just like St. Paul was obligated to preach the Gospel, and just like Jesus had the care of his flock given to him by the Father. And just like Jesus, when we sneak away – even rising before dawn to steal away for some quiet and prayer – all too soon everybody is looking for us and it’s time to move on to the next thing, and the thing after that.
And we know the problem with all of this. The problem is that when we run on empty for too long, when we lose track of the last time we had an opportunity to recharge, well, then life becomes a drudgery for us. And it doesn’t matter that our life is blessed beyond imagining. It doesn’t matter if we have a dream job, or a wonderful family, or if we’re the smartest kid in school, or live in the nicest house on the block. If we’re depleted of our joy, then even those blessings are drudgery for us. Job was right about that, he’s right about a lot of things, and we would do well to read him closely.
So what do we do with this? How do we make our life less of a drudgery, more spiritual, more connected with Jesus the source and summit of our faith and the source of the energy we need to make our world what it needs to be? Well, I don’t know that I can give you a recipe. But I will make some suggestions, and you are free to do with them what you will.
First, make a commitment. You’ll never do it if you don’t make a commitment right here and now. So make that part of your offertory today. As the gifts are being collected, offer a gift of commitment to spiritual growth as a gift to God and yourself.
Don’t the commitment a huge one right away. Many times people will tell me, “Father, I’ve made a commitment to start spending an hour in prayer every night before bed.” They may certainly make that commitment, but there is no way they’ll live it. Forget an hour – I mean it. If you’re starting from zero, give yourself five minutes. Or even two minutes if that’s all you can do. Either before your feet hit the ground in the morning, or right before you close your eyes in sleep at the end of the day. Then let that amount of time grow as the Spirit prompts you.
Make prayer a part of it. You have to connect with the Lord, and prayer is the way to do that. But make it the kind of prayer you can live with. You don’t need to read a book of the Bible every night before bed, maybe a few verses is what you can do. If you don’t like to pray the rosary, then don’t promise to do that. (And I’m not suggesting that you don’t pray the rosary, by the way, I think it’s a very good prayer, and I myself like it, but if it doesn’t work for you then it’s not prayer at all.) Pray in a way that makes sense to you.
Make quiet a part of it. Quiet is the part of prayer when we can hear the voice of God or notice the prompting of the Spirit or even just calm things down for five minutes. Turn off your cell phone (now would be a good time for that, by the way, if you haven’t already), close the door, it’s just five minutes and you and God deserve that quiet time. You might not hear anything the first 50 times you do this, but you will, when the time is right, when you’ve learned to really listen.
If you mess up and miss a day, don’t beat yourself up. Just give it a shot again tomorrow. Eventually, you will find, I guarantee, that you cannot live without this time and you’ll not be able to close your eyes in sleep until you’ve done it.
Be grateful. Thank God for the two minutes of quiet, or the hour, or whatever it is. Take note of the blessings that come from it. Know that all of it is a gift from God and is meant to make your life more powerful and beautiful.
Lent is coming up in a few short weeks. That’s a good time to recommit ourselves to receiving the gifts God has for us by spending time in prayer. Some of the energy for doing that has to come from us, we have to make a commitment to God in some way. But the rest of it will come from God, this God who knows how important it is for us to steal away for a few minutes, even when everyone is looking for us, before we get up and go on to preach in the nearby villages, or take the kids to soccer, or get to the next business meeting, or come to a meeting at church, or whatever the next thing is that’s in store for us.
Our lives are complicated and busy, busy, busy. But, as the Psalmist says, our Lord longs to heal all of us who are brokenhearted, if only we give him a minute or two to do it.
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Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
We are in many ways a nation of “doers.” We spend a lot of time measuring productivity, looking for results, documenting procedures, making things happen. I think that many of us, myself included, if we were asked, just want to get things done. I think of the old Nike commercial: “just do it.” Call it the American work ethic or whatever you’d like, but our motto very often is, “don’t just stand there – do something!”
Today’s Liturgy of the Word flies in the face of all that kind of thinking. And because of that, some of us, myself included, are going to squirm just a little bit today. Because today’s Scriptures don’t call us to do anything. Instead, they call us to listen, to wait, and to be. And none of that is going to come easy for us anxious doers.
Samuel received the call to listen. We’re told he didn’t really know the Lord just yet; he would have been too young. His mother, childless, prayed that she would be able to give birth, and promised to dedicate that child to the Lord if she did. She received what she asked for and when Samuel was weaned, gave him over to the Temple to be in the Lord’s service, under the care and mentorship of Eli, an aged prophet. And so it is while Samuel is living in the Temple that he hears, with the help of Eli, the call of God for the first time. When they both finally figure out what’s going on, Samuel gives the reply that Eli had instructed him to make: “speak, Lord, for your servant is listening!”
And that whole “your servant is listening” part is key. Because it’s not like the Lord doesn’t speak to us ever. Instead, I believe he’s speaking all the time. It’s just that most of the time, we’re not listening. It’s kind of like having a radio but not turning it on. Just because it’s not on doesn’t mean that radio stations aren’t broadcasting. It’s just that we’re not listening. The same is true for God. Just because we haven’t tuned in doesn’t mean that God isn’t calling, directing, consoling, answering, or loving. It’s just that we can’t notice it because we haven’t taken the time to stop talking ourselves and listen.
Sometimes in our faith life, to be quite blunt, we need to shut up and listen. We ourselves talk a whole lot. And all that talking is an obstacle to real prayer. Whether we’re talking to the person sitting next to us, or talking on a cell phone (at the same time as we’re eating breakfast, reading the newspaper and driving to work – don’t laugh, I’ve seen it!), whether we’re emailing, or instant messaging, or texting – we’re talking all the time. And all that talking can really drown out the still, small voice of God that is speaking to us and trying to lead us in the everlasting way. We have to be honest today and admit that most of us really need to stop all that talking and say with Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
It’s the Psalmist today who urges us to wait. Psalm 40 is a very beautiful prayer, so I hope you’ll all go home today and mark it in your Bibles and read it all during the week. There is so much of it that can become our own personal prayer in the days ahead. The first verse of today’s selection from Psalm 40 says, “I have waited, waited for the Lord.” That seems harmless enough, but let me read it another way: “I have waited … waited for the Lord.” That’s the reading I think the Psalmist is getting at; there isn’t any other reason in Hebrew that the word would have been repeated. And I think we can all identify with that sentiment at one time or another in our lives.
How often have we prayed for someone or something, and prayed, and prayed and prayed? How often have we seemed to wait and wait and still not get a response? This, in large part, is cultural for us too. We are a people who expect all life’s problems to be sorted out and fixed in a half hour or hour during prime time, minus, of course, the many commercials. But that’s not how God works. God’s time is not our time, and so often that’s really frustrating.
But our waiting has to be a trusting wait. It has to be a wait imbued with the real hope that God will stoop toward us and hear our cry, as he did for the Psalmist. This might mean realigning our hopes and dreams with what God wants for us. It might mean that God is calling us to go in a new direction. It might mean waiting until we are ready to hear and accept the way God is answering that prayer of ours. It might mean waiting until the time is right. As the Psalmist goes on to say, God doesn’t necessarily want our sacrifices or sin-offerings. Instead he is looking for us to say “Here I am, Lord, here I am, I come to do your will.” God is willing to wait for us to be able to say that. Are we willing to wait too?
In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to be. Not to do anything, just be. To live, to follow, to be with him. When John the Baptist’s disciples begin to seek out Jesus, he says to them, “What are you looking for?” It’s a question, I think, that takes them a little off-guard. They don’t have a ready answer – they may have had hopes and dreams of what the Messiah might be like, but here he is in the flesh. What is it that they’re looking for? They respond with a question too: “where are you staying?” For them, it’s enough to get near Jesus, to see what he’s up to. And so Jesus extends the invitation: “Come and you will see.”
He doesn’t give them the itinerary. He doesn’t list his goals and objectives. He doesn’t offer a resume or prospectus or promise he will do anything for them. He just asks them to be: “Come and you will see.” Because it’s in the living that the plan will unfold. We have to be with Jesus to see the Gospel come to fruition, to take root and spread. If all we’re concerned with is checking things off our to-do list, we will miss Jesus entirely, this Jesus who broke all the rules of divinity to come and be with us.
Now, please understand, I’m not going to tell you that getting things done isn’t worthwhile and necessary. I get that. Sometimes, I get that a little too much. But spiritual growth doesn’t happen very well if that’s all we’re concerned about. And so, as much as it makes a lot of us, myself included, squirm, the spiritual life is about listening, about waiting, and about being. We have to quiet down, slow down, and just be if we want God’s Spirit to take us to places we never thought we could go.
So maybe this week is a time to make a renewed effort to do that – as incongruous as that may sound. It will be a real effort for us to quiet down and slow down and just experience life. But it will be worth it. Maybe that will give some of us the opportunity to spend time just being in front of the Tabernacle this week. Or maybe in listening to God’s word in Scripture, or even just being more present to what God is doing in our lives. The rewards are all there in today’s Liturgy of the Word, too: Samuel’s words – every one of them – were effective; the Psalmist had God stoop toward him and hear his cry; the apostles witnessed the greatest act of love in history.
And we can too. All we have to do is to listen, wait, and be.
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