OUR RESPONSIBILITY IN PRAYER Homily for Thursday of the 11th week in ordinary time

Homily for Thursday of the 11th week in ordinary time 

2 Cor.11:1-11; Ps.111; Matthew 6:7-15

OUR RESPONSIBILITY IN PRAYER

What is Prayer? The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God. It is entering into a relationship with the Divine with the sole purpose of total surrender to Him. Prayer is a relationship between a superior and a subordinate. Therefore, what counts for an effective prayer is the submissiveness of the subordinate to the superior. The subordination of the subordinate is not a matter of words but of attitude. Words are only employed to communicate ones submissiveness.

In today’s gospel, Jesus corrects the prayer mentality of the Gentiles who likened prayer to a rhetoric exercise in which the effectiveness of the prayer is dependent on the beauty of the lyrics employed. Prayer is not an entertainment wherein God is a guest to be entertained. The length of time and the strong command of words used in prayer are not what is most important. God is interested in our hearts to see if we mean what we say and if we say what we mean while praying. If we see prayer as the fulfilment of an obligation, then our attention will be focused on impressing the one whom we think has placed the obligation on us. Do we pray because our environment expects us to do so or because we feel the need to be in constant talking terms with God?

Prayer grows! When we learn to meet God in prayer, we become overwhelmed by His presence and gradually grow into contemplative prayer wherein words are no longer sufficient to communicate our feelings. We just gaze at Jesus and communicate heart-to-heart with Him. This is the height Jesus recommends for us in today’s gospel. Friendship gets to a level where those involve simply enjoy the presence of each other even without saying anything.

At such level, our needs are not paramount in our prayer but the indwelling in God’s presence. Jesus gives us a scheme to follow. First we must acknowledge the Fatherhood of God which invariably implies our sonship. Having established this basis of relationship, we praise Him for who He is and for what He has done for us. We ask that our hearts and world be permeated with His presence so that we may experience Peace that the world cannot give. We then ask for the grace to seek to do His will always in our lives; a sign of humble submission to the Almighty. We present our particular needs to Him trusting in His Providence. We seek His mercy and the grace to forgive our offenders. We then ask to be delivered from temptations and evil.

From this, we see that prayer is a communication. We express our hearts to God and God in turn reveals what He requires of us. Prayer becomes a responsibility. We are responsible for doing God’s will, for being submissive to Him, for establishing His kingdom in our hearts and environment, for forgiving our neighbour. Therefore, before we complain that God has not answered our prayer, lets us first ask ourselves if we have been responsible enough in prayer.