PRAYER; ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE

 

Some further thoughts on PRAYER, from reflections on Matthew 7; 7-12, the Gospel for Thursday of 1st Week in Lent.  

 

 

"Ask and it will be given to you ..."  (Mt 7:7)   This passage can be extremely unsettling when we ask and do not receive what we ask for.  The promise seems to be clear.   But there are times when our prayers are not answered in the way we are asking, and very difficult things happen.   We seem to be handed a stone instead of bread, a snake instead of a fish.   If we would not do this to our children,  why would God do it to us?  We ask to be kept safe,  but we are broken open.  Only slowly have I realized that it has been in that breaking open that I have come closer to God.  It may not have been the bread I had asked for,  but it was the Bread of Life."      (Patricia Livingston in LIVING WITH CHRIST daily meditation for Feb. 26, 2015.)

 

 

"The sense of the Lord's words in the Greek language of the Gospel is to "keep on asking",  to "keep on knocking", and to "keep on praying".  This is not a recommendation to bombard heaven since the Lord told us not to rattle on and on in prayer.   Rather,  He asks us to keep the attitude of prayer so that we can recognize the answer when it comes in an unconventional guise.  Prayer attunes us to discern God's response in the events of our life.  Perhaps we limit the kind of response we expect God to give to our prayers.  When it is answered in a way different from what we expect,  we can fail to recognize it.  If we keep the attitude of prayer, we will find that the Father does answer us in His own way."   (Fr. S. Joseph Krempa in  DAILY HOMILIES  (Seasonal)  p. 69.)

 

 

"In the Gospel,  Jesus tells us in a number of ways that God always answers prayer.  The tone of Jesus' words is not one encouraging us to lay out in specific detail for what we are praying (e.g., the model, unit number, size, and color of something we want), but the tone is simply that we trust God.   We need confidence in God and confidence that God will do what is best for us whether it's what we pray for or not.  Possibly,  more prayer should be about asking to be in tune with God rather than asking for specific items which we think we absolutely need.   Prayer doesn't really change things around us like altering the laws of meteorology or physics;  it more likely changes us.    Only persistence in prayer and regular practice of prayer can teach us how life-changing prayer really is."    (Fr. Don Talafous in HOMILIES for Weekdays - Year I,  p. 35/36.)

 

 

MORE on the LORD'S PRAYER

 

Fr. Don Talafous, writing in HOMILIES for Weekdays,  offers us another reflection on prayer based on the Scriptures for Tuesday of the First Week of Lent:

 

How can God get a word in?

 

Perhaps we can let today's words from Jesus (Mt 6: 7-15),  helped by Isaiah (55:10-11), remind us that our prayer includes listening and not simply saying words.   At times we act in prayer to God in the same way as a person sitting nervously with a new acquaintance.   We feel we have to be saying something every minute;  we find little pauses in the conversation embarrassing.   How different it is with someone we know very well;  we can sit together, gazing at a fire or listening to music, without feeling that one of us has to be saying something every moment.   Jesus says that in prayer we shouldn't rattle on or multiply words.  Isn't it true that what our prayer lacks so often is just some space and silence which allow God actually to influence our minds and hearts?   The author of Isaiah says that the word of God is like rain or snow that softens the earth and makes it fertile, eventually bringing forth its crops.   True prayer is a dialogue and not merely a one-sided conversation dominated completely by us.   God's work in us requires that we leave God some opening, a chance to be heard.  In our world of so much noise and so little tolerance for silence,  it may be hard for us to learn to be quiet before God.  But it's definitely worth the effort.   In silence we may experience our minds wandering all over the place.  To minimize these distractions, it may help to take a phrase from the Gospel or one of the readings and keep coming back to those inspired words gently, while trying to focus our attention.   Silence and attentiveness can be learned.  This may be a helpful way to stay with what is going on at Mass, too;  coming back to some favorite phrase.  

 

 

PRAYER REFLECTION

(winter look at the Prayer Fraternity)

 

The Gospel for the Tuesday of the First Week of Lent is from Matthew 6:7-15 and is Jesus teaching about prayer;  offering in that teaching the words of the OUR FATHER.  Fr. S. Joseph Krempa in his DAILY HOMILIES reflection for today has some important things on prayer for us to consider:

 

The Lord gives the disciples an example of how they are to pray:   with economy, trust and intimacy with God.   Like making love,  prayer is one of the things we all have to do on our own.  Nobody can do it for us.  Speaking with God is an intensely personal event.  

 

There are two extremes that make prayer difficult.   The first confuses prayer with our daily routine.  Prayerful living is not identical with prayer.  If getting through the day is the extent of our prayer life,  prayer loses its distinctive character.  The opposite extreme identifies prayer exclusively with surges of mysticism.  A rapid pulse and wild transports of spiritual passion are not attractive to many people.   There must be a middle ground between the two.   This is what the Lord describes.

 

We should have a set time for personal prayer.   In addition to our regular prayers, we should find a time when we are most at ease to simply communicate with the Lord and not be interrupted by anything else.   Some people even set aside a place of prayer in their homes.   Secondly,  our prayer should be authentic.   There is no need for us to posture before God or recite prayers written by a great saint which we think God will like to hear.  Thirdly,  we should await the Lord's response.   After a while,   we will not be greeted by silence.   We will slowly tune in to the Holy Spirit.

 

An important meaning of the Lord's Prayer is that we can contact the God of the universe.   Reading a great deal about prayer is not initially helpful.   Like teaching,  litigating,  preaching, driving or swimming,  we have to start at some point and will improve slowly.   After several months of experience,  books will be more helpful.  

 

Through prayer, we locate the still point inside ourselves.   When we locate that point,  there we will find the Spirit of Christ. 

 

 

LENTEN REFLECTION for prayer

 

 

wof@wordonfire.org

 

If you would like to add a daily Lenten reflection to your prayer,  there is a very good one available online from Fr. Robert Barron,  a priest from the Archdiocese of Chicago who teaches at their major seminary in Mundelein.   You can access it from that website given above.

 

the Concord Pastor TWO-WORD PRAYERS

This item is always on my sidebar.  I'm bringing it front and center to highlight its possibility for our prayer this Lent.  You'll see that each triad of two-word prayers is thematic. You might make the whole piece a part of your prayer or choose just one triad to pray repetitively as a mantra.  Sometimes the simplest prayers are the best prayers...

Calm me, quiet me, settle me... 

Steady me, balance me, ground me... 

Plant me, root me, embed me...

Support me, sustain me, protect me...

Forgive me, pardon me, free me...

Refresh me, restore me, heal me...

Enfold me, embrace me, hold me... 

     Lord, hear my prayer today!

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(Fr. Austin Fleming is a priest from Boston (Concord really) who writes a wonderful daily blog that is available for free;  above is a recent TWO WORD PRAYERS that he blogged;  you can access this and sign up to get it daily by goggling "Concord Pastor" and follow the prompts.)

 

 

Thomas Merton and prayer

 

On January 31st,  Thomas Merton  (the Gethsemani Trappist monk,  Fr. Louis) would have celebrated his 100th birthday.  We will be hearing many things about Merton this year.  There are many resources out there about Merton,  books that he wrote,  articles and poems and photos,  even copies of lectures that he gave that have been reproduced. on CDs.     

 

Here is a taste of Merton from his autobiography,  THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN,  as he writes about his first experience of prayer;  this is well before his conversion and subsequent baptism:

 

I was in my room.   It was night.  The light was on.  Suddenly it seemed to me that Father  (his dad),  who had now been dead more than a year, was  there with me.  The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.  The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly,  I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an urgency unlike anything I had ever known before.   And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray  --  praying not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of the very roots of my life and of my being, and praying to the God I had never known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and to help me to get free of the thousand terrible things that held my  will in their slavery.  

 

There were a lot of tears connected with this, and they did me good, and all the while, although I had lost that first vivid, agonizing sense of the presence of my father in the room,  I had him in my mind, and I was talking to him as well as to God, as though he were a sort of intermediary ....

 

The one thing that seems to me morally certain is that this was really a grace, and a great grace.  If I had only followed it through, my life might have been very different and much less miserable for the years that were to come.

 

Before now I have never prayed in the churches I had visited.   But I remember the  morning that followed this experience.  I remember how I climbed the deserted Aventine  (he was in Rome at the time), in the spring sun, with my soul broken up with contrition, but broken and clean, painful but sanitary like a lanced abscess,  like a bone broken and re-set.  .....  And it was a very definite experience, a conversion, not without struggle, even now, to walk deliberately in the church with no other purpose than to kneel down and pray to God.   Ordinarily,  I never knelt in these churches, and never paid any formal or official attention to Whose house it was.  But now I took holy water at the door and went straight up to the altar rail and knelt down and said, slowly, with all the belief I had in me,  the Our Father.

 

It seems almost unbelievable to me that I did no more than this, for the memory remains in me as that of such an experience that it would seem to have implied at least a half house of impassioned prayer and tears.   The thing to remember is that I had not prayed at all for many years.    .....

 

However, I prayed, then I looked about the church, and went into a room where there was a picture by Sassoferrato, and stuck my face out a door into a tiny, simple cloister, where the sun shone down on an orange tree.  After that I walked out into the open feeling as if I had been reborn, and crossed the street, and strolled through the suburban fields to another deserted church, where I did not pray, being scared by some carpenters and scaffolding.   I sat outside, in the sun, on a wall and tasted the joy of my own inner peace and turn over in my mind how my life was now going to change, and how I would become better.

 

(This excerpt appears on pages 111-113 of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1948 paperback copy of  THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN.)

 

 

 

 

 

WISHING YOU A BLESSED SEASON OF LENT

A BLESSED LENT TO YOU!   The friars here at your Ava Franciscan Prayer Fraternity wish you and yours a "Joyful Lent",  as one of our prayers at the Ash Wednesday Mass today suggests.   Fr. S. Joseph Krempa in his DAILY HOMILIES reflection for today offers us more to reflect and pray with:

 

 

The word "Lent" comes from an Old English word for "Springtime"  --  a season when new life is wrested from the clutch of winter.  Lent is our time for revival and renewal  -- the springtime of the spirit.

 

We have all been through enough Lents to realize that complete transformation probably will not occur.   But Lent is an opportunity for repair work in a specific area of our life that might need reconstruction.

 

Maybe you have doubts about the faith or questions about things we do as a Church.   Lent is a time to resolve the doubts and get some straight answers.

 

Maybe you have been carrying personal wounds that have been eating away at you.   Lent is a time to find ways to let the healing begin.

 

Maybe your spiritual life is stuck in neutral and you want to be able to pray as easily and spontaneously as Jesus did.  Lent is a time to start to experience prayer. 

 

Each of us has some part of our life that needs a lift and some remodeling.   Lent is less a time for pain and punishment than it is a time for healing...Lent is not a time for temporary improvement until Easter after which we go back to business as usual.  Its purpose is to make a lasting change in our life.