Mass readings for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Genesis 18.20-32 Psalm 138.1-3, 6-8 Colossians 2.12-14 Luke 11.1-13
You can find a YouTube video on the internet by Bishop Robert Barron entitled, “Saying Prayers versus Praying” and from that title one can grasp his point: there is a difference between reading and reciting a prayer text from actually praying the words either silently or aloud. That is, Barron is addressing one of the great symptoms of the spiritual deficit in our society today: people don’t know how to pray; indeed, they’ve lost the sense of what prayer is versus spoken declarations, speeches, the recitation of poetry or the acting out of a script.
All of those things are legitimate and authentic human activity, suitable to legislatures, lecture halls, theatrical stages. And we all know what it is to see someone act on a stage, at Stratford or the Shaw festival, we’ve seen the speech-making by politicians and know what it is; we’ve sat through seminar presentations and understand their character. Prayer is different, and perhaps as much for being far more instinctual for us than the forms of communication that we’ve developed through time. That is, the yearning for connection with God, however one conceives of him comes from somewhere deep within us – the techniques of the lecturer, the actor, the legislator in effective communication, these are more inventions of the human mind, and they do actually change as society and culture changes. The actor of Shakespeare’s day would offer a very different Hamlet from what we would see today; and those who would stand up in the House of Commons and begin to speak in Churchillian tones are mocked, because the rhetoric of the last century doesn’t suit today’s sensibilities. However, we do recognize that whatever the current conventions are in speech-making, delivering lectures, etc., to do them properly, and perhaps even well, requires study and effort. But because authentic prayer doesn’t really change, we can derive guidance from our tradition going back two thousand years, but more importantly, we can take the advice of our Lord as still valid and applicable. And what does he tell us as a first principle of prayer? It requires time and effort.
We’ve got to get up, walk over to the door and knock. Indeed, as with the man who went to his neighbour for a loaf of bread, we might have to pound on that door til our fist is sore and plead til our voice grows hoarse. Prayer at times, especially when urgent, in times of fear and of great need, it is real work.
Unfortunately, we now have a society enraptured by their pacifying devices, and we stay where we are, sitting their, hardly stirring but for the movement of our thumbs, staring into the little screens and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. It’s incredible, or I suppose actually getting quite believable, the amount of time and energy people are devoting to the consumption of information and entertainment on their personal devices. Worldwide, people spend an average of 6 hours and 38 minutes per day on screens consuming media content (DataReportal – https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-global-overview-report.)
These are fast becoming prisons without walls, jail cells without bars. They fix people in place, and shut them off from the world even as they believe they are connecting to the larger world. But it’s all distraction, and in some cases discouragement.
There’s something now called “doomscrolling” – the compulsive continuous reading of negative news that tells the reader the world is going to hell. Where once there was worry about seniors getting wrapped up in the idiocy of 24-hour news channels, younger people are now hooked into online media, that thanks to Artificial Intelligence, personalizes algorithms that are now finely tuned to an individual’s obsessions. The devices then keep feeding stories that compel the user to keep reading, keep scrolling, and to keep spiralling down into despair seeing one story after another of disaster, along with predictions of catastrophe.
The way out is easy enough. And it’s not just setting the phone down, or turning off the cable news show, and then putting on some music instead or flip over to watch some sports. That’s just further distraction, albeit of a more benign nature.
No, we can walk out of the world that is being created in our minds by all these devices, all this media, we can step through a door that leads out into the real world, the one God has made, and pressing on, we can find our way into his kingdom.
But that takes some effort, some work. I’ve said that before about worship – the word we often use in the Church is “liturgy” which is from the Greek word leitourgikos that had an original meaning of “public work.” So, the Church’s collective prayer, its worship is work of a kind, and prayer is a constitutive part of that work. Prayer is also the context for all else that we do here: scripture is read and listened to prayerfully, and I hope that what I say is received prayerfully. When at the celebration of the Eucharist you hear the words of consecration prayed aloud by me as the celebrant, your spiritual energy is to be focussed on the action at the altar. That is, I may be praying on your behalf the words, but the totality of the prayer is more than just what I’m doing. We’re all in that prayer together, we’re working together.
But let’s return to the simpler notion of prayer, the one you offer in the privacy of your home. As with your time at church, it’s more than just a break from the world; it’s more than a quiet hour of contemplation. When in the comfort of your favourite chair, perhaps with the Bible on your lap, you say it’s time to pray, it’s to be more than a relaxation exercise. Don’t get me wrong, some nice breathing exercises, emptying the mind, shaking out the tensions of the day, these are all a good prelude to prayer. Yet prayer itself is a conscious reaching out to God.
The Catholic philosopher, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski is famous for saying that, “… every act of consciousness is directed toward an object of some kind. Consciousness is essentially consciousness of something or other.” Foundational to prayer is the understanding that in it, we working to become conscious of God, and so, truly conscious of reality because God is the ultimate reality. Ideally, in prayer we are never more conscious of our existence, and yet we are to be focussed not on ourselves, but on that which is outside us. Prayer is not inward meditation, but a reaching out of the mind and the soul to the furthest limit. And that is a reaching out to others, in compassion, to the world in love, but ultimately, and at the furthest limit of our ability, we are stretching ourselves out to reach God. These exertions are prayer.
We might all recollect the description of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, so intense was his prayer that it is said he sweat blood. And the Church preserves the stories of men and women of prayer (the hermits of the deserts of Egypt and Judea, for example), noting their efforts were quite physically real as they struggled to get their hearts and minds beyond themselves and their personal concerns, to focus and so shut out distractions that cause us to lose sight of God. In prayer we are fighting to gain true consciousness. I know from the complaints people share with me about how they get distracted, how they fumble their prayers, let me assure you that you’ve come a long way from what I see out there in the world. Out there the world is filled with the unconscious, the sleepwalking, the oblivious and the unaware.
So, take heart, and follow the advice of one of the Church’s great men of prayer of recent times, Thomas Merton, who when asked what was the most important thing we could do to improve our prayer life, he said, “take the time.”
The not-so-subtle message from our Old Testament lesson is that the Church’s prayer preserves the hope of humanity. True, the story is about Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, but the future of those wicked cities comes down to whether there are ten righteous people to be found, men and women who would have been unaware of impending doom. As long as there are people of prayer seeking a real, living relationship with God, then our destruction will be forestalled, we will live to see another day, and so, another opportunity to repent and live, to awaken and enter into the fullness of the reality of God’s world and so leave behind the lurid dreams and nightmares of the world that comes through phones and pads and screens.
Now, this isn’t to say that these sometime hellish visions of violence, discord, social disintegration aren’t real and don’t need to be addressed. It’s just that we won’t find the answers in them, and we need to keep ourselves from being hypnotized by them.
The answers, instead, will come from our persistence in building a relationship with God that starts with prayer. We knock on the door, we search, we ask. And God will speak the answers, his still small voice will be heard by those intent on listening. But this won’t come of us reciting the psalms as poetry, reading the books of the Old Testament as mere history, listening to our Lord’s parables as we would a lecture, but rather prayerfully hearing, and so then being able to prayerfully ask for what we truly need.
Amen.