Ora et Labora

“Prayer and work” are the rhythm of the Christian life. Mother Teresa expressed this beautifully on the little “business cards” she would give out: “Prayer is the fruit of silence; faith is the fruit of prayer; love is the fruit of faith; service is the fruit of love.” It’s a kind of chain reaction—silence leads to prayer, which leads to faith, then to love, and finally to serving others. Authentic prayer will inevitably lead to service. A Christian who prays but does not serve is kind of a dud, a “failure to launch.”

In today’s gospel, Jesus is weary of the crowds and just wants to get away by himself. The previous day the “whole town” had been gathered at his door for a free cure, and he must’ve been exhausted. We’ve all had days when everyone needs something from us. So the next day Jesus gets up very early and goes alone to a deserted place to pray. But before long Peter and the others find him and order him back to work: “everyone is looking for you!” Jesus simply says, “let us go…for this purpose I have come.” God came to earth to serve, and during our time on earth we must serve with him. There’s certainly plenty of work to be done.

Only a Shadow

The Catholic Church in San Francisco is but a shadow of what she once was, and I suppose that is true in most of our big cities. I realized this most forcefully last week with the storm of protest against our altar boy policy, but it became much more apparent when I saw Archbishop Cordileone attacked for requiring Catholic school teachers to teach Catholic doctrine. These protests are generated by the secular media, of course, but what surprised me was how quickly and cruelly our own parishioners joined in. For CBS to belittle Catholic belief and practice is understandable; for a Catholic to do so is dysfunctional and disobedient. If Catholics side with the media against their own archbishop, then we must say that the Church in our city has somehow failed. In 1939 France and Germany were still “accommodating” the National Socialists in Germany even as the Reich’s armies overran Poland; our Church has also been complicit to some degree in the rise of the increasingly militant “dictatorship of relativism” in this country.

My People are Dying

“The people are dying for lack of knowledge,” cried out the prophet Hosea (4:6). “They don’t know me, and so they don’t want me” Jesus said to Mother Teresa in 1946. People are dying because they have not found a credible witness to Christ. Last year 38 people jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge, down from 46 the previous year. Jesus spent from morning to night healing these people, principally by witnessing to the love God has for them. He commands us to work with him.

“But father, I’ve tried to bring my children back to Mass!” many lament. True enough: it’s downright difficult to serve people who don’t want our services. The 50 Catholic parishes in San Francisco offer hundreds of “services” every Sunday, and most are mostly empty. So let us begin with silence and prayer, as Mother Teresa counsels on her “business card.” His bishop assigned St. John Vianney a dying parish in 1818 with these words: “there is little love of God in that parish.” Fr. Vianney sat in the confessional and no one came. He offered Mass and no one assisted. So he gave himself over to prayer, spending long hours in his silent church. Eventually people started coming, because they knew they needed what he had to offer.

Prayer through Our Lady

As always, we turn to Our Lady. She knew she could not save even one soul, so she gave herself over to prayer. Her prayer was: “Let it be done to me as you say.” We who have faith will avoid the terrible discouragement of seeing our society lose its faith by repeating those words, and turning to Our Lady for consolation and strength. 

The Angelus Prayer

Does anyone recognize the Collect for today’s Mass? “Pour forth, we beseech you O Lord, your grace into our hearts that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross, be brought the glory of his resurrection?” It is the “Angelus Prayer,” which Catholics for centuries have prayed three times a day. In Europe all the church bells ring at noon, as do our own bells here at Star of the Sea, calling us to this prayer. We would do well to regain this tradition.

The Angelus prayer reflects today’s Gospel, which is the Annunciation, the precise moment in which the eternal Word became incarnate. The mystery of the Incarnation stands at the head of all the Christian mysteries. This first mystery of the rosary contains all the other mysteries within it. God became man, so that man might become God. We ‘become God’ not because we are capable of anything great, but because God shares his divine life with us. It is by his own gracious will that He brings us into himself. “God does not choose the qualified; he qualifies those whom he chooses.” It is only for us to surrender to that perfect will.

Total Surrender

No human being had ever, or has ever, or will ever perfectly surrender to God except the Blessed Virgin Mary. Only she who was conceived without original sin could do this, and she did do it. The rest of humanity is trapped in the fears, addictions, and dysfunctions of Original Sin. But the wonder of Christmas is that one person did completely surrender to God’s perfect will in loving trust.

God has always loved us, but we have not always loved God. It was at the precise moment when the young maiden of Nazareth chose to trust him completely that the world changed. The human and divine wills, for the first time in the history of our race, perfectly aligned, and she became the mother of all the living, humanity’s solitary boast, our one great merit to become children of God. That’s why Christmas is not just about Jesus, and the US Post Office doesn’t just have a Christmas stamp with Jesus, but a picture of Jesus and Mary, Mary holding Jesus.

Fr. Driscoll and I (and any other priests who happen to be staying with us) try to have dinner together after “Oratory” (evening prayers) every night. After washing up, we often pray a rosary while walking up and down bustling Clement Street. We generally wear cassocks when we pray, and the first time I entered that very public street with cassock and rosary I felt a modicum of trepidation. We certainly did not want to make a show of our prayer, and yet neither did we want to hide it under a bushel basket. But my mild anxiety was groundless, as the public seems to welcome public prayer with gusto. Some do not notice or acknowledge two blackrobes with rosaries on a busy street, but about half do, and to date not one has frowned or disparaged us. Most who look at us smile, one (elderly) lady blew a kiss, and a few have thanked us with obvious sincerity. I’m sure that the big cities, as tough and secular as they posture themselves, are longing for the presence of God. The public really does want the joy that only a world beyond this world affords. Two priests in soutanes has brought smiles and gratitude to many here in San Francisco, and that is, after all, what a priest is called to do.

Many thanked me for mentioning the homeless man, Myron, in my homily a few weeks ago. Fr. Driscoll and I were just beginning our third decade the other day when he waved toward a figure bedding down by some bushes. It was Myron himself, and he saluted us with great glee. “Keep praying, fathers!” he called out. We will keep praying.

By the grace of God I am the new pastor of a big beautiful old church in San Francisco. Star of the Sea on Geary Boulevard was built in 1914 and rebuilt in 1929. Three spreading rose windows cast colored light upon a shining white marble high altar graced with soaring gilt candlesticks. The church’s arching portals open upon one of the city’s main arteries, and its twin bell towers topped by large gold crosses can be seen a mile away. But there is one problem: the church is almost always locked, and therefore almost always empty. In a meeting with some priests in April, Pope Francis urged them to keep the doors open and the lights on: ‘Open the doors of the Church,’ he said, ‘and then the people will come in…if you keep the light on in the confessional, you will see what kind of line there is for confession.’ Pope John Paul II, they say, brought the Church to the world; Pope Benedict brought the Church back to itself; and Pope Francis is bringing the world to the Church. John Paul gave the world hope, Benedict gave the world faith, and Francis is giving the world love. “My house,” God says through the Prophet Isaiah in the first reading, “shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” My own Archbishop wants our parish to become an “oratory,” a house of prayer, open to all people. We have to get the church doors open, and the confessional lights on.

Refining our prayer

But will the people find God when they get into the church? That is the story in our Gospel today. Jesus had gone into the pagan territories of Tyre and Sidon, and a non-Jew, a Canaanite woman, calls out: “Have pity, Lord, Son of David.” Notice that she addresses him as Lord and Messiah (son of David), professing more precise faith than most of his own disciples. So how does Jesus reward her faith? He ignores her. “Send her away,” the disciples ask him, and then he denies her outright: “I was sent only for my own, the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman persists: “Lord, help me.” And he goes even further by insulting her: “why should I throw good food to a dog?” The woman does not miss a beat, nor take the insult personally, nor lose her faith: “Please Lord, even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ tables.”

Finally Jesus breaks, and I think he breaks into a big smile. She has passed the test, she has kept the faith. “O woman,” he exclaims, “great is your faith!” Had Jesus refused to answer her prayer until that moment? No, but he has answered her with silence, even with what seemed rejection and insult. Have you ever prayed for something with all your heart only to be met with icy silence? You say “God does not hear me. He does not answer my prayers.” Later, when you’ve thrown your tantrum, you begin to see how God refines our prayer by denying us immediate gratification, just the way you do with your children. Perhaps this woman was not ready to receive, to appreciate, to understand what Jesus was offering her. Healing her daughter is important, but infinitely more important faith and trust in the good God. This she received from Him precisely because he hid his face from her. We want to love God, not just his gifts. If he gave us everything we ask for immediately, most of which would not make us happy anyway, we would think of him not as a person but as a vending machine. Prayer would become magic, and our desire for control would overcome our desire for love. True love waits, and this Canaanite woman waited, by the grace of God.

Open churches, Open hearts

We’ve got to get the doors of our churches open, but conversion is not as simple as coming into a beautiful building or a supportive community. Ultimately, we learn to trust God and love others only through the Cross. Our prayer must be refined through adversity, even through what seems to be God’s indifference or rejection.

The next time you pray for something you don’t get, please don’t panic. Imitate Our Lady, who trusted rather than demanded. Learn from the saints, who learned to “give what he takes, and take what he gives.” It is through many trials of faith that faith becomes real, and we learn to live the second invocation of the Angelus: “Let it be done to me according to your word.”

Dominus Flevit

“Dominus Flevit.” Jesus wept. On a hill overlooking Jerusalem sits a small chapel built in the shape of a tear drop, called the Dominus Flevit chapel. It is said that from this spot Jesus wept over a dying Jerusalem. “If only you knew the time of your visitation,” he cries out. “If only you knew what makes for peace.” Jerusalem (the names means “city of peace”) still does not know what makes for peace. Friday, after the briefest of cease-fires, Hamas struck Israel with mortars and Israel responded with aircraft, tanks, and gunboats. Nearly 2000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since July 1 in the Holy Land. “Israel started this war,” Tariq Ali said Friday in London.

Who did, in fact, start “this war?” Who started the war in Syria, or in Iraq, or in Egypt? Who started the war in Ukraine, in Nigeria, and in North Korea? Who started the deep divisions in our own country? The answer is: I did. I started this war, and I can end this war, with God’s help. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Who started the war in your marriage, in your place of employment, or in your home? Someone once asked GK Chesterton to write an essay on “What’s wrong with the world,” and he wrote back two words: “I am.” The question is not who started this war, but who will end this war?

Terms of Peace

God stood at the gates of the city, offering terms of peace, and the people crucified him. These people were not essentially different from us in San Francisco. Like St. Peter, we deny the Lord, probably daily, at least in small ways. He who denies a smile to someone in his own house denies Christ; he who calls his brother a fool calls Christ a fool, and is liable to Gehenna. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, and he weeps over San Francisco, even over those of us who attend the Latin Mass. This Gospel is meant for us.

Prayer

What then, brothers, must we do? We must insist on true religion, which is the only way to peace in the world. Man needs God. The first act of true religion is prayer. The entire Catechism of the Catholic Church leads to the fourth part, the art of prayer. First of all, pray the rosary, and pray it as a family. Fr. Driscoll and I, your two new priests, are trying to pray the rosary every day together, and it’s not easy.  You can’t always pray the rosary with others, and it’s better to pray it alone than not at all, but try to pray it together at least a few times a week. Come to confession at least once a month, and try to make a Eucharistic holy hour once a week. And finally, assist at Mass as often as you can—only the Eucharist can save the world. The rosary, confession, and adoration prepare us for the Mass, and extend its graces. So: build your prayer life around Our Lady and the Holy Eucharist.

Charity

Once we have developed our interior life, we must then strengthen our brothers. We do that by practicing heartfelt charity—a simple smile, a helping hand, a listening ear. Not great things, but small, everyday things with great love. Washing a sink full of dirty dishes can express more charity than buying someone a new car. Finally, don’t forget that “instructing the ignorant,” “consoling the doubtful,” and “admonishing sinners” are works of mercy, necessary acts of charity. There is a lot of ignorance and doubt and sin in our city. We have a lot of work to do, work that we can only undertake after we have developed an intense interior life and learned heartfelt humility and patience with others. The city and the nation depend on us to promote true religion. I saw a full-page ad in the New York Times some time ago. It was a picture of the twin towers on a sunny day with the headline: “Imagine a world without religion.” But true religion did not take those towers down, and we already know what the world without religion looks like. It looks like the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag. The world is moving away from true religion, and we must insist on its irreplaceable benefit to the common good.

In all things, we turn to Our Lady. We must learn to pray as she prayed, and learn to love as she loved. May she guide us in building a civilization of love.

“My Word will not return to me empty.” The readings today promise that no one will leave this Mass without some degree of transformation through the Word of God. This weekend, those of us in the Seminar have studied Genesis 1-3, along with the commentaries of St. Augustine and St. Thomas on these chapters. God declares that this word, “that goes forth from my mouth, shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.” It’s been inspiring to enter into these truths about man’s original goodness, his original sin, and God’s promise of redemption with you all. Not one of us can return from this weekend unchanged, because “my word shall not return to me void.”

Reading the Word

St. John Paul II gives the Church her marching orders for the 21st Century in his 2001 apostolic exhortation Novo Millenio Inuente. We build Christ’s Civilization of Love, he says, in three steps: by reading, by praying, and by teaching God’s Word. The first step is to read; or in today’s parable of the Sower, to receive this “seed.” Not a few in our weekend seminars have asked why Jesus speaks in parables in the first place; why is the Bible so hard to understand? I think God speaks sometimes cryptically—or at least on many levels—in order to reach the many layers of our human experience. Think of how JRR Tolkien’s many-layered tales speak truth to such a broad spectrum of people precisely because of their multivalent imagery. Infinitely more is this true of the Bible, but we must stay with Scripture; we must make the effort to receive what is infinite; we must be lifelong students of God’s word. Think of the rewards each of us received this weekend because we persisted with those first chapters of Genesis, working through Scripture and the commentaries line by line.

Praying the Word

The second step in building Christ’s kingdom is to pray the Word of God. Last week I attended a conference on the Catholic ministry of exorcism. One infallible principle we learned is that “Prayers do what one asks them to do”—you get what you pray for. If you pray for humility, you will get it. If you consistently and sincerely pray the Our Father, you will get your daily bread, you will attain the capacity to forgive others, and you will be delivered from evil. If we pray the prayer to St. Michael as the Popes have asked us, we will be protected from the demon. If we pray the rosary, we Our Lady will be with us at the hour of our death, and we will not dread it. If we pray to our guardian angels, they will protect us. Authentic Catholic prayers work because they are the word of God, living and effective.

Speaking the Word

And finally, we must teach others this Word of God. Some of the Sower’s “seed” fell on rich soil and produced fruit, a hundred grains for every seed sown. God casts the seed liberally, knowing that not every grain will land in rich soil. Some of it will fall on hard or rocky or thorn-infested ground, and produce nothing. The seed falling on the hard path is snatched up by the Evil One; the seed falling among rocks is rendered sterile by the weakness of the flesh; the seed falling among thorns is chocked by worldly anxieties. Thus the three enemies of the Word of God: the world, the flesh, and the devil. Still, the sower casts his seed. So after we’ve carefully read this word, and prayed this word, we must speak it, even if some will not receive it. The increase is God’s, but it is for us to cast the seed.

Thomas Aquinas College

And this, it seems to me, is the history of Thomas Aquinas College. Dr. Ron McArthur and his friends, all laypeople, founded a College where young people could read, pray, and eventually teach the Word of God. They knew that not all of their students would receive what they had to give. But it was worth the trouble for those who would bear the fruit of a Catholic Great Books program.

Thomas Aquinas College is an inspirational success story, but more than success, it is a story of fidelity. None of the founders knew if or how this project would work, but they were faithful to Christ who had told them to sow his words of truth. Truth Matters, and is worth the risk of failure.

So it is also in our personal lives—among our families, friends, and colleagues. Let us emulate, with Our Lady’s help, these founders of our College, and stay with the Word of God: reading it studiously, praying it sincerely, and speaking it charitably. We will not become discouraged if some, or even many, do not receive the Word. It is for us to speak the eternal and glorious truths of God’s Word, and for Him to grant the increase.

The Month of May

This is the first Sunday in the lovely month of May. I don’t remember Santa Paula Ridge so brimming over with yellow mustard last year! It is a beautiful springtime here at TAC, and every May we turn to Our Lady, Mother of Life. Tonight, after my “farewell barbecue” by the sports fields, we will have a rosary procession to the Lourdes Grotto. My best parting gift would be for you to pray the rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary with me tonight. Thanks to our dear Legion of Mary for organizing this, as always.

Good Shepherd Sunday

We call this “Good Shepherd Sunday,” because of its Gospel: Ego sum pastor bonus. For about sixty years now the Catholic Church has designated Good Shepherd Sunday as also “World Day of Prayer for Vocations.” A vocation to the priesthood is God’s call to be a shepherd, to offer one’s life for the sheep. The day I was ordained to the deaconate, a friend asked her daughter Hanna what happened that day. “This big man with a pointed hat made Uncle Joe a shepherd,” she said. The little girl instinctively knew that Holy Orders transformed a man into a “good shepherd” who lays down his life for others.

Christ suffered for you, Peter declares in the Epistle. Why did God have to suffer? First, because we had all gone astray like sheep, and someone needed to come to earth and rescue us, to pay the price, so to speak. “By his wounds have we been healed,” St. Peter continues. But more fundamentally, Jesus Christ suffered for us because he loved us, not as a mercanarius, a “hired man,” but as a shepherd. He proved his love for his Father by obeying him, and so proved his love for us by suffering in our place. There is no authentic love without suffering.

The Vocations Crisis is a Crisis of Faith

And so Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.” He is good because he knows the Father and the Father knows him. Only in knowing the Father can the good shepherd know his sheep. Only in knowing the Father can a priest know his people, and knowing, love them, and loving them, serve them. The crisis of the priesthood, which began with Judas and will continue until the Second Coming—the crisis of unfaithful, scandalous priests, shepherds who eat their sheep, is fundamentally a crisis of faith. The crisis of vocations—the fact that the world has too few priests to meet the needs of the Church—is a crisis of faith, and nothing less. It is a crisis of priests who do not pray, and therefore know neither God nor their people. Not a few priests have been trained to be “activists” in seminaries—in bad seminaries—to consider prayer as something optional for those who like that kind of thing, but not essential to the priesthood. This is not true. A priest is essentially a man of prayer, as Jesus was essentially a man of prayer.

When I was in seminary a priest told me that “nothing can touch a man of prayer.” No real harm can come to a priest who is faithful to his prayer life, even when he doesn’t want to pray, or especially when he doesn’t want to pray. John Paul II defined the “parish” as a “school of prayer” in his blueprint for the Third Millennium. But how can a priest teach others to pray if he does not know how himself? It is hard to pray if you don’t know how. We must make time for prayer, and continually work on our prayer life.

Expect your Priests to Pray

And so the key, it seems to me, of this Good Shepherd Sunday, the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, is priestly prayer. Expect your priests to pray, to pray the Mass from the heart, to pray their breviaries faithfully, to make a daily holy hour, to go to confession every few weeks, to keep up their spiritual reading, to pray the rosary every day. In 23 years of the priesthood, no bishop or layperson has ever asked me if I’m faithful to my prayer life, to the breviary, the Mass, confession, to Our Lady. A few good priest friends have asked me, but no one to whom I’m actually accountable—neither to my superiors (bishops) nor the people I serve (laity).

Pray for your priests, yes, pray for vocations, but also expect and encourage your priests to pray as good shepherds, as Jesus, who knew the Father and the Father knew him through a consistent and intense interior life.

Will I Find Any Faith?

The folks “back home” can hardly believe that at TAC we have four Masses a day with confessions before and after each one. Some people assume we are a seminary—“so you don’t have any females on campus?” Rather than an exception for Catholic colleges, this should be the norm, since, Christ tells us in today’s Gospel to “pray without growing weary.”

The comic irony of today’s Gospel never fails to delight me. Jesus speaks of an unjust judge and an “importunate widow.” She keeps at the judge until he breaks down: “I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.” One imagines a little old lady whacking a dignified gentleman with her umbrella, maybe delivering an uppercut with her elbow or a jab in the ribs with her cane. But consider: Jesus portrays our Heavenly Father as an unjust judge. Certainly, he admits, it seems like God is “unjust” at times, that he ignores our prayers. “Why do bad things happen to good people” is the question that has driven many to give up their faith. How can God treat his faithful servants so poorly? Once, when praying about her many trials and sufferings, St. Teresa of Avila heard God say, "But this is how I treat my friends." She replied, "No wonder you have so few of them." If even the great Saint Teresa struggled to keep her faith, what about us? So Jesus asks the terrifying question at the end of today’s gospel: “when the Son of Man returns, will he find any faith on earth?”

Total War

Our first reading, from the Book of Exodus, speaks of faith in terms of war. “In those days, Amalek came and waged war against Israel.” We read everything in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, on several levels, the most important of which is the “tropological,” the symbolic or figurative meaning. When we read that Amalek attacks Israel, we understand as the world, the flesh, and the devil attacking us. How often are you minding your own business, studying in the library perhaps, and out of nowhere a lurid and overpowering temptation attacks you? Or, without warning, you get slammed with an insult, a misunderstanding, or a confrontation from someone you love? The struggle to preserve our faith must be total war, and that war begins in this chapel. We carry the fight out into the streets, but only after we have wrestled with God before the Blessed Sacrament. It is here that we struggle to crucify our own lusts and calm our fears, and where we learn to trust Him.

Like Joshua, we can’t afford our enemies—the world, the flesh, and the devil—any quarter. Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.” The Bible is not telling us to slaughter our enemies, but to kill what is evil in our enemies with love, with the “sword of the spirit.” We must wield this sword against evil: in ourselves; in others; in our society.

How do we learn to wield this sword? We wield it in prayer. The battle for eternal life is essentially the “battle for prayer.” Moses kept his hands raised throughout the battle with the Amalekites, with the help of his friends (not even Moses himself could sustain his prayer without help). At all costs, we must keep our hands raised in prayer, all day long, lest the “Amalekites” get the better of the battle.

The Catechism describes prayer as a “battle.” “Our battle has to confront, finally, what we experience as failure in prayer” (2728). This is perhaps the devil’s most devastating tactic, to convince us that we cannot possibly pray, that we are wasting our time, that no one is listening, that we only talking to ourselves, speaking into the void. But we must insist that every minute spent in this chapel, or in our room, or in our car in prayer is full of grace, no matter what it feels like.

John Paul II on Prayer

In an address to young people in 1979, the young Pope John Paul II called them to pray without growing weary. “It must be humbly and realistically recognized that we are poor creatures, confused in ideas, tempted by evil, frail and weak, in continual need of inner strength and consolation. Prayer gives the strength for great ideals…it gives the courage to emerge from indifference and guilt… it gives light to see the events of one’s own life and of history in the salvific perspective of God and eternity. Therefore, do not stop praying. Let not a day pass without your having prayed a little! Prayer is a duty, but it is also a great joy. Every Sunday, Holy Mass; if possible, sometimes during the week. Every day, morning and evening prayers, and at the most suitable moments!”

We do pray a lot here at TAC. We have a beautiful chapel in which to pray, and beautiful people with whom to pray, and an inspiring campus. When I raise my eyes to the mountains that surround our College, my soul naturally gives praise and thanks to God. But we must also take the time, and the trouble, to pray, many times a day. Begin the day with a morning offering, visit the chapel at least once a day between classes, pray the rosary or a part of the rosary each day, and continually lift up your mind and heart to God. Our Lady will teach us to pray. Begin with the rosary, and stay with the rosary, and you will preserve your faith, so that when the Son of Man comes, he will find faith on earth. 

Sacramentals

In every culture, and in every age, people admire valiant and virtuous military commanders: men who put their strength, courage, and intelligence at the service of their country. Such was Naaman in the first reading, commander of the military forces of Syria, a giant of a man, expert in battle, loyal to king and people. Valiant though he was, the Bible tells us, he was a leper. A little Jewish slave girl tells him of a man of God in Israel, so Naaman goes with an impressive retinue, loaded with gifts, to Elisha for healing. The man of God, however, refuses even to meet him, but tells him to bathe seven times in the river Jordan. At first Naaman refuses, but then plunges into the waters. “His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child….” If someone asks you why you dip your finger into holy water upon entering a Catholic Church, you tell them this story. It’s to keep your skin as young as that of a little baby. Have you ever seen a nun with wrinkles?

Blessed water is a “sacramental”—a simple element that communicates God’s healing power: a drop of olive oil, a splash of water, a flickering candle flame, a waft of sweet-smelling incense. If we were angels, we would not need sacraments or sacramentals, but we poor human beings learn through our senses, so God gives us these little helps to our faith. In the Gospel, not one but ten lepers come to the Man of God, Jesus Christ, who is God himself. Like Elisha, Jesus does not heal them directly. He tells them to “show themselves to the priests,” to perform the simple sacramental rituals of Jewish law. It was not the ritual that saved them, but their humble obedience, their faith, in God, who gives us these sacramentals. Jesus says to the one grateful leper that returned: “your faith has saved you.”

Many people—Catholics and non-Catholics alike, do not take sacramentals seriously. They don’t put crucifixes and statues in their homes or build little “altarcitos” in their homes. They don’t make the sign of the cross in public, or carry a rosary, or say traditional prayers. But these simple expressions of our faith are most important: at least Jesus thought so; he would not heal without them. My mother used to remove the little holy water font in our house before our Protestant cousins came for dinner so as not to offend, but one day she just left it up and said “I can’t help it if the Catholic Church has all the good stuff!”

Naaman goes back to Elisha, after bathing in the river, to ask for two mule loads of dirt. He intended to bring the soil back to Syria, so he could kneel on holy ground while worshipping the true God. Do we have to go to a consecrated chapel to pray to the living God? Jesus says we should pray not on this mountain nor that mountain but in spirit and truth. And yet Jesus himself goes to Jerusalem for the Passover, and follows traditional rituals, directing his disciples to do the same. Holy things and times and places are important to our faith. Can you pray to God without candles, statues, and rosaries? Yes, but they certainly help. They are biblical, and Jesus uses them.

The Rosary

The simplest and most effective Catholic sacramental is the rosary of the blessed ever-virgin Mary. October is the month of the Holy Rosary (the feast of the Holy Rosary is Oct 7), and a good time to resolve never to leave home without a rosary. If you have a rosary, you are more likely to pray it. It’s a simple prayer, but as John Paul II said, “marvelous in its simplicity and its depth.” In my last parish, I tried many ways to pray with my staff, but nothing worked until we began praying the rosary together once a week. 

Pope Consecrates world to Our Lady

Today is “Marian Day” in the Year of Faith, the day the sun danced at the final apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. Today Pope Francis consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Rome. Let us also consecrate our city and our families to the Blessed Mother today, using the words like he used at St. Peter’s today: Holy Mary Virgin of Fatima, with a Mother’s benevolence we beg you to accept our act of consecration today, which we offer before your image, so dear to us. We are certain that each of us is precious in your eyes and that nothing in our hearts is unknown to you. Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus. Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer

Blessed John Paul II wrote these words to the Church as she embarked on the Third Millennium: “Dear brothers and sisters, our Christian communities must become genuine "schools" of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed … in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love".” Thomas Aquinas College, no less than any other Christian community, must be a genuine school of prayer. In our classes we read Aristotle and St. Thomas, Euclid and Shakespeare, but always with our final end in mind: union with the Triune God through authentic prayer. This school is indeed a school of prayer, with its chapel at the head and center of campus, and the curriculum truly culminating in the one thing necessary: knowledge of God.

There is no more authentic prayer than the Lord’s Prayer, given us today in the Gospel. The disciples watched Jesus praying one day, and they realized that up to that moment, they had never really prayed. When he returns from his prayer, they implore him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And so the Lord gives us his own prayer to his Heavenly Father: “Our Father, who art in heaven….” We pray it six times in each rosary, and to prepare ourselves for Holy Communion at every Mass. The Catechism calls this prayer the “the summary of the whole Gospel,” the “fundamental Christian prayer.”  In the words of St. Augustine: “Run through all the words of the holy prayers in Scripture, and I do not think that you will find anything in them that is not contained and included in the Lord’s Prayer.” If we learned no other prayer in all our Christian lives, if even we taught our children no other prayer but this one, if a pagan in missionary lands discovered only this prayer, it would be enough. It is the only formal prayer that all Christians can agree on.

Bargaining with God

Let us realize what prayer is: when we pray, we do not talk to God so much as he talks to us. As Fr. Barron observed in his Sunday homily this week, we do not pray to change God’s mind; we pray to change our mind—to align our minds and wills with His. Consider Abraham in the first reading. It seems like he is bargaining with God, which is what many attempt to do in prayer. Deftly but respectfully, our Father in Faith negotiates God down from fifty to ten: “if I find ten good men in Sodom, I will not destroy the city.” (As it turned out, God only found four just people in Sodom, and he gave them a free pass out before he destroyed the city.)

Is Abraham negotiating with God? He is certainly persevering in petitionary prayer to save his kinsmen. But what Abraham actually does is persevere in prayer until his understanding aligns with God’s will. The city must be destroyed, even if good men will suffer, because sin has consequences. (Our own cities too are suffering destruction from sexual perversions, as the breakdown of family and social order result from promiscuity.) Abraham comes to understand this, but he also comes to understand how God wills the salvation of every soul. In prayer, Abraham comes to know and love the mind and will of God. We too learn to know God’s will only in and through disciplined, regular prayer. If we have a problem in our life, or with God’s will for us, only in prayer can we find peace. We may need to spend many hours before the tabernacle to learn to love God’s will, but learn to love Him we will, if we persevere in prayer.  

With Jesus, Surrender to the Father

The Lord’s Prayer expresses this “Abrahamic faith” perfectly. First of all, Jesus instructs us to address God both as “Our Father” (immanent) and “in heaven” (transcendent). God is my father, understanding my fragility, but God is also the eternal and omnipotent El Shaddai, ruling the cosmos in perfect justice. In the Lord’s Prayer we pray that His kingdom come, not ours—His will, not ours. We pray that we can come to love His will, in every circumstance. When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, I join the Son of God in surrendering my will, my intellect, all that I have and possess, to my Father in Heaven, who alone can bring me to heaven.

So, with Jesus in prayer before his Father, with Our Lady “keeping all these things in the silence of her heart,” let us also put aside distractions and keep silence, listening for God’s still voice. In every time of prayer, following the Church’s own liturgy, let us pray the Our Father, not to change God’s mind, but to change our mind, that it may conform to the mind of God.