Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Rober Leo Sevensky, OHC
Br. Rober Leo Sevensky, OHC
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 12 A - July 26,.2020
Was what I
did then, as a 16-year old, prayer?
As I walk
around here, I am always talking to myself audibly—it's true, my brothers tell
me so—and I occasionally sigh and say out loud, “Oh God.” Or I echo my
godmother and say in Polish: Matko Boska. Is that prayer?
Or when I
sit outside and finally stop and look at the River for a few minutes or pause
before the Blessed Sacrament or set up for another church service or mop the
dining room floor. Prayer?
I have been
around churches a long time, but I must admit that I have seldom heard a sermon
about prayer. I've been encouraged to pray, of course, and occasionally there
has been some brief explanation of the Lord's Prayer offered from the pulpit.
But pretty much the topic was avoided. Perhaps the nuts and bolts of prayer are
better left to retreat addresses or adult forums after coffee hour or
inspirational tracts on sale in the narthex. But the cry of the disciples
“Lord, teach us to pray” had pretty much not been a part of the homiletic
tradition or even of the parochial tradition in my experience.
I don't
think this should surprise any of us. Whatever prayer is, it is intimate and
relational, touching on our vulnerabilities and neediness and desires and
hopes. Prayer is fire, and like all fire, it must be treated with a certain
respect.
Mindful of
that old saw that says, “Those who can do; those who can't teach,” I feel a
certain reluctance to speak at all about prayer, especially here, before you
with whom I live and move and practice praying... practice being perhaps the
operative word in this regard. But today's readings are critical for an
understanding of at least some of the dynamics of prayer in our own lives and
in the life of the world. And I am encouraged in this regard by our community faith
sharing earlier this week. Nothing here will be new to any of you, of course,
but I believe it needs to be heard again and again. Or at least, I need to say
it again and again, over and over, if only to convince myself.
In our first
reading from I Kings, we hear the story of Solomon's prayer for wisdom. The
young king pleases God by asking for a wise and discerning mind to lead his
people, and God grants his prayer. But we must not gloss over too quickly how
this story begins. God appears to Solomon in a dream and asks him: “What should
I give you?” Or to put it another way, God asks Solomon: “What do you want?”
This is not a rhetorical question. It is a question inviting each of us to take
a good look at ourselves and see what it is that we really want right now. Not
what we think we should want, or what we think God wants us to want, but what
we actually do want, or at least what we imagine we want. And that is generally
not quite as pretty or noble or as “spiritual” as Solomon's desire for a
discerning mind. But then I'm not Solomon, nor are you.
As so often
happens in the healing narratives of Jesus, the process begins with our Lord
asking his conversation partner: What do you want me to do for you? Do you want
to be healed? Do you want to see again? Do you want to be made whole? Do you
want me to do something for someone you love...or perhaps for some you may feel
a little ambivalent about? What is it that you desire?
There is a
rich literature about the role of desire in the spiritual life. In a nutshell,
it comes down to accepting that we must begin where we are, with our true
desires or perceived wants or needs, however quotidian or petty they might
appear. We begin there. And though we may begin there, most of the time we
don't end up there. The naming of our desires and longings before the face of
God and in the light of God's own dreams and desires for us and for all
creation leads to a merging of horizons and a melding or a transformation—I'm
tempted to say, transfiguration—of our desires. It is said that prayer changes
things, and perhaps the first thing it changes is us. Prayer has the power to
refine our hopes, widen our interests, kindle, or rekindle love, reorient our
passions and open new vistas, however narrow, where the light may break
through. “What should I give you?” Prayer begins there, with the question God
asks of Solomon and of us all.
Our second
reading is perhaps even more important to those who aspire to live a life of
prayer. It contains of course those words from the 8th chapter of
St. Paul's Letter to the Romans: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we
do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs
too deep for words.”
We do not
know how to pray. We really don't. Which doesn't mean we can't or
shouldn't try, though the painful truth is that all our attempts, insofar as
they are ours alone, will be imperfect and probably unsatisfying. But St. Paul
tells us that we are in fact not alone, that the very Spirit of God is praying
in and through us at the most fundamental level of our being, at that very
center point of our existence that we call our soul. Right now. All the time.
What we can
offer, maybe all that we can ever offer, is our intention and attention. First,
we offer our intention to draw into deeper union with what English Benedictine
theologian Sebastian Moore enigmatically termed the I know not what, an
experience that all people have, potentially if not actually, of being touched
by an attraction toward the God who desires us into being and sustains us in existence.
It is our responsive desire for union with the mystery which is at the source
of all, which is the All. It is, in short, the foundational religious
experience.[i]
And secondly, we can offer our awakened attention
to what God is already doing in and through and around us right now. Intention
and attention. Beyond that, however, the
rest is God's business, not ours.
I remember
as a novice meditating at length on the words of Jesus to his disciples on the
night before he died as he led them into the garden of Gethsemane: “Sit here
while I pray.” (Mark 14:32). This was good advice not just to those first
disciples, but also to me. Just sit here and let Jesus pray in and through me.
That was for me a liberating word. But it's not an easy word, as most of us
know. For it's the very simple sitting, which is to say pausing, stopping,
noticing, that becomes the challenge. But that too is part of prayer, isn't it?
And even that, in the end, is more about God's work in us than it is our work
for God.
The late Sr.
Wendy Beckett, the televised art nun, once wrote: “Prayer is the last thing we
should feel discouraged about...[it's] the simplest thing out.” My first
reaction on reading this was: “Well, maybe for her.” But I'm beginning to
believe that she was right. Many people, good Christians and countless others,
feel discouraged about prayer and praying, though they need not be. Neither do
we. If we offer God the tiniest bit of our longing desire or our wandering
attention or our dedicated action, small though it be—tiny as a mustard seed is
tiny—God will work with us and through us, bringing it all to maturity, to that
happy issue mentioned in the novena prayer. It may take time, maybe a long
time—as my experience of St. Ann's intercession did so many years ago. Indeed,
sometimes it takes a lifetime. But as one of my Jesuit professors used to ask: Quid
hoc ad aeternitatem? What is that in the light of eternity? We have an
eternity. And we've only just begun. And really, God is not in a hurry. Still,
imagine what might happen if we seize this one present moment, this holy
pregnant Now, filled as it is with never to be repeated opportunities and
untold possibilities, and with interior desires and cultural longings and societal
groanings ripe for transformation. This is the time for fervent prayer. It is
always the time for fervent prayer. So then, friends, let us pray. Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Amen.
[i]
Barry, William A., S.J. Finding God
in All Things. Notre Dame, IN: Ave
Maria Press, 1991. Pp. 34-37.
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