Thursday of the First Week in Lent

Lectionary: 227

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, blessed are you.
Help me, who am alone and have no help but you,
for I am taking my life in my hand.
As a child I used to hear from the books of my forefathers
that you, O LORD, always free those who are pleasing to you.
Now help me, who am alone and have no one but you,
O LORD, my God.

More than forty years ago I was sent into a migrant/ethnic neighborhood to do a religious census. I met a lot of people who told me they didn’t know how to pray. After growing up in a Catholic home and seventeen years of Catholic education, I found that unimaginable. How could anyone not know how to pray? All you have to do is open your mouth and say what’s on your mind!

I supposed they meant they didn’t know the Our Father, Hail Mary or Glory Be. Perhaps they did not know the English responses to the vernacular Mass, or when to stand up, sit down, and kneel at Church.

But there was more to it. Although most of that neighborhood had been baptized they didn’t know the history of their relationship with God. They had heard of Jesus but not of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They didn’t know Moses or King David, much less the Apostles Peter, James and John, or Saint Paul. They knew of the Blessed Virgin Mary but not her relationship to Jesus. They knew “Tony, Tony, come around, something’s lost that must be found,” but nothing about Saint Anthony of Padua. They did not the story of our faith; they didn’t know how to pray.

In today’s first reading we meet Queen Esther; she knows how to pray. Despite her being orphaned, exiled, drop-dead gorgeous (with whatever dangers that entails) and selected as the king’s consort, her Uncle Mordecai will not let Hadassah (her Hebrew name meaning, myrtle) forget her people or her roots in Judah and Jerusalem.

This ineradicable heritage signals her vocation in God’s sight. Nothing happens by chance and she has been placed in the royal palace, precisely at this time, to intercede for God’s people. First she will pray to God for mercy; then she will boldly enter the royal chamber where no woman goes without a summons. She is like the Syro-Phoenician woman who entered the house where Jesus was hiding to demand a healing of her possessed daughter. She is like Mary whose prayer is always heard.

In today’s gospel Jesus urges us to pray with confidence. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find….” We can do that if we know who we are, spiritual descendants of Abraham and heirs of the promise. The Holy Spirit acts as our Mordecai, urging us to enter the chamber of God with courage and confidence.

For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.