22nd Sunday Year A - Homily 2

 Homily 2 - 2008

I remember reading a book years ago written by a Benedictine monk.  It was on prayer.  He wrote that his relationship with God only took off when he found himself exasperated enough to say to God: This is boring! God, you’re so boring! Jeremiah, in today’s First Reading, didn’t call God boring. He went further, and said indignantly: You have seduced me! and I have let myself be seduced! The lonely Jesus trusted enough to cry out to God on the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me! Often enough, when we pray, we can feel, as the psalmist put it in today’s Responsorial Psalm: like a dry, weary land without water.

The common thing with the Benedictine monk, Jeremiah, Jesus and the Psalmist was that they were honest with God: they responded from where they were at; they named it as it was for them. It wasn’t a prayer, but it reflected the same dose of reality, when Jesus, in today’s Gospel, was able to say to Peter: Get behind me, Satan! Hardly polite, but straight. To be honest, brutally honest, with God can sometimes take a bit of courage. We can feel a strongly conditioned pressure to be on our best behaviour whenever we pray to God – to revert to a sometimes infantile state and try to be a good boy, or a good girl.

If we are not real, God can hardly touch us. Genuine intimacy, with anyone, can happen only between people who are mature enough to be real to each other. Trying to be courteous, to be “nice”, to people, when that is anything but what we feel, might sometimes be the best we can manage, but it keeps them, and us, a thousand miles from each other, from any real contact. No wonder that at times God seems so distant, if all we can bring is ourselves on our best behaviour. Another wise author, in a book on prayer, gave the obvious advice: Pray from where you are, not from where you are not! – at least if we really want to engage with God.

Relating to God, praying, can be surprising, hard, and sometime scary work at times. When it is, it is. Pray from where you are, not from where you are not! Jeremiah would get so fed up with God at times that he would say to himself: I will not think about him. But at the same time, he recognised: there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not bear it.

We can get tired of people who are always trying too hard to be nice. Perhaps God can, too. There’s nothing there to relate to. No one’s at home! God loves real people. And intimacy can grow only between real people.