Thursday of the First Week of Lent 2011

Saint Patrick
at the friars' entrance
at MSF

Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.

During these first days of Lent the Church reflects on our practices of fasting, prayer and almsgiving. Today’s readings encourage us to pray.

Persistent prayer, as the Lord recommends, is a stern discipline. It doesn’t just happen. It takes effort and energy, time and commitment. It changes everything in a person’s life and often seems to appear as an aura around one's face.

A woman once asked me about centering prayer and listened patiently as I briefly explained the practice. When I finished she said, “My cats would never let me do that. They would scratch and claw at my bedroom door until I came out to them.” I let the conversation go elsewhere.

Ask and it will be given to you;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.

There are three directives here and we know by the number three that this teaching is urgent. If we introduce ourselves as Christian or Catholic, it means we pray daily and urgently. Our first response to every crisis and every opportunity is prayer. When something wonderful happens we thank God; when something dreadful happens we turn to God for help. It makes no difference to us whether the incidents are personal, local or international. The daily newspaper and the evening news urge us to prayer.

Prayer is a persistent presence with God, who is persistently with us. Bishop Saint Irenaeus has written:

God is rich, perfect and in need of nothing. The reason why God requires service from man is this: because he is good and merciful and desires to confer benefits on those who persevere in his service. In proportion to God’s need of nothing is man’s need for communion with God. This is the glory of man: to persevere and remain in the service of God.

To know yourself is to know the bottomless abyss of human need. If we are images of God, it’s because we are empty vessels with the precise, albeit infinite, shape of God. The addict’s desire, the alcoholic’s thirst and the lecher’s lust are disordered, but each reflects our intense craving for God. Turning their lives over to God and recovering their sanity they often become deeply spiritual persons. 

As we pray we feel this urgency. That’s precisely why so many refuse to pray. It’s almost unbearable! But there is nothing more disappointing than to turn to prayer and not feel the agony. The disappointment of prayer is its own reward, leaving us thirsty for more. Alcoholics Anonymous has a phrase for it, "Once is too much and a thousand are not enough.” 

Turning to prayer we become addicted to the presence of the Heavenly Being who finds us utterly irresistible.  


Happy Saint Patrick's Day
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