5th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2012 

Today's Gospel presents us with a pretty busy Jesus with a pretty busy schedule: healing the mother of Peter's wife… then half the town's needy people, all drawing on him, until at last he gets to bed.  The bit that catches my attention, though, is: Long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there.  Jesus found it necessary to stop working, to take time out [not to watch the telly] and to pray.  Jesus felt the need to pray.

I sometimes feel that most people have been sold short when it comes to prayer.  Over the 2000 years of its life, the Church has developed a precious tradition, a deep wisdom, around the issue of prayer.  But we keep it a secret – as it were.  Most people can say prayers or read them from a book; but, for a lot of people, that sort of praying, after a while, doesn't lead them anywhere, doesn't deepen their relationship with God.

Jesus prayed.  How? The Gospel doesn't tell us.  A pin-up of mine, a wise woman who lived in the 16th century, Teresa of Avila – a feisty Spanish woman – wrote a lot about the experience of prayer.  In one spot she wrote: Prayer is nothing more than intimate friendly interaction and frequent solitary [one-to-one] conversation with the one whom we know loves us.  I would think that that was what Jesus was up to: … intimate friendly interaction and one-to-one conversation with the God who loved him - the God he called "Abba" [which is how family members called their father].  That is not complicated.

The same Teresa wrote: We have only to find a quiet place where we can be alone and gaze upon him present within us.  Gaze upon him … present within us ... God is within us.  Depending on our sense of God, we can be wary, even scared, of that, or we can be wrapped – or somewhere in-between

People's days [for many of you, at least] are full.  We consistently complain that there isn't time.  I've known of priests who thought that way.  With all due respect, and with perhaps some real exceptions, I think that that's nonsense.  But to give time to being regularly with God calls for discipline, for a change in priorities, for letting go of something else, possibly worthwhile.  And that's hard – changing our program, letting something important go, breaking free.

Some time back I read a book written by Mary McAleese, the recent President of Ireland.  She also lectured in Law at Trinity College in Dublin.  She would have been, probably, in her early forties.  She had a husband and three growing children.  She would meditate for two half-hours every day – not bad for a "youngish" mother, successful career woman and public identity.

Perhaps, in another age when the Catholic sub-culture was so strong, and so protective, personal prayer may not have been so crucial – though I'm not convinced of that.  But, today, it seems to me, without a disciplined, helpful prayer life, without a real relationship with the real God, it's hard to just sit on the fence any longer.  Almost inevitably, people, more and more people, fall off and finish up no longer connected in any real way with the believing community.

A catch is, if we have a go at prayer, at developing a real relationship with the real God, that it usually doesn't turn out the way we expect it.  That can throw us.  We can get disheartened.  We can conclude that we're not really cut out for it … so, instead, we'll make our work our prayer.  Early in the morning, well before dawn, [even] Jesus went off to be alone and prayed.

Because the experience can confuse us, because life can confuse and disappoint us, it can be helpful to have a talk, sometimes regularly, with someone walking the same journey towards the heart of God, someone more in touch than we are with the Church's wisdom.  If you want to have a go, or to have a go again, or to have a more focussed go at what Teresa called gazing upon the one present within us, the one whom we know loves us, I'm happy personally to walk with anyone on the journey, as best I can.  Feel free to ask me.