PRAYER, A PERSISTENT NEGOTIATION.
July 24, 2022.
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – C.
“Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.”
Luke 11:1
A British proverb says: “Prayer knocks till the door opens.”
And an Albanian proverb adds: “Prayer is food for the soul.”
As Christians, we live by the theological virtues of faith,
hope, and love. Our life is called to be an act of filial obedience to God,
searching for His Divine Will in everything we do. This life, however, is a
relationship with the Lord. There cannot be true obedience to God's will
without a relationship. Religion in that sense is a relationship with the
Divine, from the Latin root, "RELIGARE", linked, attached... The
substance of religion is prayer. No one can be firm in his faith without
prayer. No one can keep a strong hope without prayer. And no one can truly love
without the support of prayer. Thus, the Catechism can say, “The acts of faith,
hope, and charity enjoined by the first commandment are accomplished in prayer.
Lifting up the mind toward God is an expression of our adoration of God: prayer
of praise and thanksgiving, intercession, and petition. Prayer is an
indispensable condition for being able to obey God's commandments. " (We)
ought always to pray and not lose heart".” CCC 2098.
The readings of this 17th Sunday in the Ordinary Time C are
teaching about prayer. From Abraham to the Lord Jesus, we learn what prayer is
and the special place it must hold in our lives and our relationship with the
divine.
In the first reading, we are given to meditate on the long
and somewhat stubborn negotiation and dialog of Abraham with the Lord about the
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here we are brought to see the first element of
prayer as NEGOTIATION. To pray is to plea tirelessly and insistently.
Abraham made intercession, not for himself, but the two
cities, for the possibility that they could be some few little innocents amidst
the guilty. And the Lord, in his great mercy decided to spare the innocents if
he found some. So, the second element of Abraham's prayer is selflessness. It
was not for him he was interceding but for a whole city and its guiltless. Here
are two main elements that must be found in our prayers too: Insistent
Negotiation and Selflessness.
In the Gospel, the Lord Jesus is presented as a man of
prayer. Luke starts saying, "Jesus was praying in a certain place."
Seeing him praying, his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray. And then
to their quest, the Lord gives the inner of every prayer: the Our Father. A
prayer of filial relationship with God. A prayer of dependence. A prayer of
thousands of petitions. A selfless prayer.
In this lesson on how to pray, the Lord comes to put a
particular accent on consistency. We are told that prayer is not only a
sporadic action. It must also be consistent, persistent, and insistent. It asks
for boldness. Prayer is a ‘Holy Stubbornness’. Praying, the Lord says, is about
Asking, Seeking, Knocking. It is only at the cost of constancy and persistency
that we reach the perfection of prayer. The example of Abraham pleading for
Sodom and Gomorrah must be vivid in our minds.
Many are Christians who recourse to prayer only when there
is a fire in their lives. For them, God is like a firefighter whom you call
only when it is burning when situations are out of control. When everything
goes well, no one bothers a firefighter, do we? So too, do they do with God.
While the truth is, our lives should be in continual relationship with God.
Don't pray only when you have no other option. We should make prayer the vital
element of any and every option. Constancy and consistency should be keywords.
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