6th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) – February 11, 2024

St. Paul – Lyons, KS

Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; Psalm 32:1-2, 5, 11; 1 Corinthians 10:31:-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

GET ALL MATERIALS FOR “RECONNECTING…” INCLUDING HOMILY HANDOUTS, DEEPER DIVE VIDEOS, AND DISCUSSION GUIDES HERE.

The Battle of Prayer

Welcome to week-three of “Reconnecting…”! We’re already in our third week of this great journey—and let me tell you, it’s pretty exciting! A lot of the feedback that I’ve already gotten has been helpful, very encouraging to hear, and just some of the great questions that you’ve had. And so I also just want to encourage you to keep going. Because it’s ten weeks long, and when you get to weeks eight and nine you’re like, “Alright, I got this, I can finish this out!” But in weeks one, two, and three you can easily say, “Well, I missed the first week…and, well, I’ll just get it next time, or something.” But no! Jump on board, it’s not too late, we can do this.

Last week we talked about those challenges to prayer: our sin, our life full of distraction, and our own ego. And I think it was a good reminder for us that prayer isn’t all sunshine and roses; prayer is a battle. And not a battle with God, but a battle against the Enemy and all the many pitfalls he places on our path, and a battle against ourselves and all the challenges within us.

And when we know that prayer is a battle, I think we start to see how easy it is to give up on the battle. Very easy! I’ve shared with you a very common conversation I have in town, pretty much every place I go: “Yeah, Father, I grew up Catholic, but I haven’t been in years.” So common; breaks my heart. I told you, close to 70% of the Catholics in the county—70% do not participate in the life of the parish anymore. And so much of that comes back to this battle of prayer. We give up on prayer, and so we give up on our relationship with God.

Today—you guys haven’t left, you’re still here (thank you for being here), but even though you’re still here, I’m willing to bet you’ve faced some challenges in your life of prayer, in this battle of prayer. And maybe you’re in that moment right now; maybe you’ll hit that in the future. So today, I want to address some of this. Specifically, what prayer is not, what we need for prayer, and what prayer truly is. Because when that’s in place, it’ll be possible for us to begin to develop a PRACTICE OF PRAYER that will lead to the experience of true prayer.

What Prayer Is NOT

If you lived the life I did, that means that at some point you had to discover the hard way that the microwave is really good at warming things up, but really bad at warming up the spoon you left in your coffee cup. It’s tough lesson to learn—but it’s entertaining to watch the microwave. Or another lesson I had to learn when I was a toddler: car keys don’t mesh with power outlets. True story! At the orthodontists office, sitting in the waiting room waiting on older siblings, playing with keys—and boom! Funniest part is that that happens, and it’s my mom who gets a bouquet of flowers from the orthodontist’s office, not me—anyway! Here’s the deal: a microwave makes a terrible fork-warmer, an outlet makes a terrible place to put a key. That’s not what those are for, that’s not what those are. When it comes to prayer, so often we get tripped up even before we get going…because we think we’re “doing prayer,” but we’re not. 

We can easily have some strange ideas or partial truths about what prayer is—we compare it to something we know and assume that’s what it is. For instance, some people think prayer is just a psychological activity, like meditation. Or it’s trying to empty our minds of all other thoughts, like some sort of Buddhism. Or—one that we fall into a lot—“prayer” is me “saying my prayers”; in other words, “prayer” is when I say the words, or I sit and stand and kneel, or any of that. And for some people, “prayer” is something I do, an activity, just another “to do” on the calendar—and so sometimes (what have we all said?), “I don’t have time to pray.”

And it gets worse (are you ready?) Not only can we have these strong ideas about prayer, we can also carry certain mentalities that are gonna blow up in our face—like a microwave—and these are the reasons we avoid prayer. For instance, as good Americans, we’re always concerned with a good use of time—and so prayer needs to be productive, a good use of time, I need to “get something” out of prayer. Another mentality is that something is good if it feels good—and if prayer doesn’t feel good I’m not going to do it.

Sometimes, we just feel like we’re failing at prayer; our prayer isn’t “working,” and so we stop praying because we feel like we failed. For example, “If my prayer is dry, well I must be doing something wrong”—so I quit. “God didn’t listen to me”—so I quit.

And all of this lead to one common question: “What good does it do to pray?” So do you see? When this is what we think prayer is—just “saying our prayers” or “getting something out of it” or “prayer isn’t ‘working’”—when this is what it is, it blows up in our face! And we can easily give up. Maybe we look for new techniques, or prayers to pray, or something someone else “guarantees” will work—but no matter how hard you try, the microwave ain’t gonna warm up your fork and the outlet isn’t going to hold your key.

What Is Needed for Prayer

I think a lot of people give up on the battle of prayer because they’re not even fighting the right battle. Listen: prayer is simple. We make it too complicated. Prayer is simple. For prayer, we just need three things: humility, trust, and perseverance. I mean, look at this leper in our Gospel today. This guy comes to Jesus in humility—he’s an outcast, totally rejected because of his disease—he comes in humility but with utter trust. What does he say? “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Not a doubt in his mind. BUT—but notice—but he isn’t demanding, he just trusts that Jesus can do it. And then he waits: in steadfast perseverance, he waits.

The battle we have to fight is to grow in humility, trust, and perseverance. If you listen close to my homilies, you’ll notice this is pretty much all I talk about, so I’m not going to beat this dead horse much dead-er. So much of our life is about growing in humility: recognizing that the world doesn’t revolve around us, that we need conversion, that we don’t see as clearly as we think we do, metanoia, meta nous. So much of our life is about growing in faith: entrusting more and more of our life to Christ, “getting in the wheelbarrow,” not my plans and dreams and demands but his, all that good stuff. And so much of our life is about growing in perseverance: my number one saying is (what?), “Little by little”; Dory from Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming.”

It’s like me playing cello, I’ve told you this before. I couldn’t just grab a cello and declare, “I can play the cello.” I couldn’t ask my friends for the quick way of being a concert cellist. What did it take? It took humility: weekly I would grow in humility by listening to my teacher tell me how terrible I was (ha!). But seriously: I had to admit, “I don’t know how to do it.” And so I needed faith, trust: I had to entrust myself to Quinn, to my teacher; I had to have faith that by following her guidance (painful as it might be) I would get to where I wanted to be. And finally? Perseverance: you do not get good at cello overnight—guaranteed! It took years of training, day after day after day giving time. And what happened? Exactly. Humility, trust, perseverance: that’s what we need if we have the desire to grown in prayer.

What Prayer IS

So what is prayer, then? The million dollar question. So, when I was at Conception Seminary College, I played on the soccer team. And the team was just a rag tag group: people that had played college level soccer, all the way down to us that could run and kick a ball but had never played soccer. And turns out we were really good! But we always needed reminded on one thing. We would be playing, and then a call wouldn’t go our way, or the other team would score a goal and we would start doing too much and making mistakes—and that’s when one of the experienced players would start yelling one thing, one word at us: “Composure!”

Prayer is God’s work—remember, it always begins with God, God always goes first, we are always, always, always responding to God’s initiative—Prayer is God’s work, His presence, His voice within me to which I respond, to which I attend. And since prayer (ultimately) is something God does, my part is to attend. There are 101 different “kinds of prayer” and “methods for prayer,” but they all have one thing in common: “composure of heart,” (CCC 2699), a vigilance, an attention.

I know this sounds a little looney! But think: if your whole life you’ve been told that prayer is just “saying our prayers” (for example), then yeah! This is gonna sound pretty crazy! But prayer—our girl Ruth Burrows says it well, when we think about prayer it is easy to think of it as “something we do” But no, she says! “Prayer is essentially what God does, how God addresses us, looks at us. It is not primarily something we are doing to God… but what God is doing for us.” On our part, “prayer”, a method of prayer, is just finding a way to attend to what God is doing, to participate in that, to maintain a composure of heart. Again, prayer isn’t just me asking God for stuff, “saying my prayers.” Prayer is our living, active, vital relationship with God—prayer is our relationship. And for a relationship to flourish you have to maintain a composure of heart, a vigilant care, you have to attend to it. Prayer is God’s work within me to which I respond, to which I attend. “You were within,” Augustine says. Our “methods” of prayer are just that: methods for responding, attending to His work, His presence, His voice.

The Practice of Prayer

Ok, so in the coming seven weeks, we’re going to keep diving deeply into prayer—but really, diving into: topics that simply help us to attend, clarifications that help us root out all of these false notions of prayer and allow for true ones to flourish, and insights that help increase a desire for true prayer. But today we want to start with just one thing, and that’s a practice of prayer.

No one does this better than the Benedictine monks. When I went to Conception Seminary College, we were immediately placed in a well-defined, immovable, draconian practice of prayer. Every morning from 6:45 to 8:00am, we all gathered in the chapel. And it was not optional: you were committed to it whether you liked it or not. And during that time there was some formal prayers from the Liturgy of the Hours, and some spiritual reading, but then also time in silence. And let me tell you: the first four weeks were painful! You didn’t know what to do, it was early, you wanted to quit. And when you complained, the monks would just smile and tell you to keep going. But what was the secret, the method to the madness? A practice of prayer, with four simple parts: 1) a time; 2) a place; 3) a commitment; and 4) something to nourish that practice. A time, a place, a commitment, and something to nourish you.

So what am I asking you to do? Here we go. For the Forty Days of Lent, I want you to implement a real, tangible, concrete practice of prayer. Remember, the practice of prayer isn’t prayer itself, it’s the method by which you can attend, maintain a composure of heart, respond. Number 1 is to pick a time: so this means not only looking at your calendar, but perhaps rearranging some things on your calendar, and then scheduling a time. For many people, the mornings work the best. And I would suggest 20 and 30 minutes. Number 2 is to pick a place: maybe you have a long commute and your car can be a sort of chapel; maybe you set up a corner in your house with a statue or an icon and a candle. I know it sounds like the step to skip, but no! Pick a place. Make a space. Number 3, I want you to commit to it. You know how it takes 4 months to see the doctor? You aren’t missing that appointment because you don’t want to wait another 4 months! So commit to prayer; treat it with the same importance as that appointment. And number 4: we need to nourish our prayer with something, so I would suggest the daily readings from Mass, read a book of the Bible, or some other spiritual reading. You aren’t going to read the whole time, but you need something to nourish your time or you’ll end up thinking about the Chiefs the whole time. So again: a time, a place, a commitment, and something to nourish you.

When we did this at Conception, what happened? Slowly but surely, a simple and stable practice of prayer began to develop—and with that, true prayer of the heart emerged. Yes, Scripture tells us to pray always, but we cannot pray “at all times” if we do not pray at specific times. We cannot always pray if we do not practice at specific times. And again, there are 101 different methods of prayer but they all have one thing in common: “composure of heart,” a vigilance, an attention. A practice of prayer helps us to develop just that.

So that’s my encouragement. During this Lent, make that commitment. In humility, and trust, and perseverance, commit to a practice of prayer. Because from there, everything else we talk about will flow. From there, true prayer will begin to flow.