Homily for 29th Sunday Year C

Homily for twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 21 October 2007 Today’s readings are about prayer and the importance of prayer, the necessity for us to be constant in prayer, to persevere with our life of prayer. It is always daunting to talk or preach about prayer, partly because so much drivel, so much confusing stuff, has been written on the subject, and I am sure that some of you are already switching off! The trouble is, that prayer has become associated in the minds of many of us with something complicated and rather special, something perhaps best left to the experts, and there are so many books about prayer that with all their talk of meditation, contemplation, and other rather technical terms, can completely put us off and make us think “This is not for me”. It reminds me in a way of all the mystique and snobbery that surrounds the whole business of wine and wine drinking, especially in this country. People not used to drinking wine feel completely out of their depth when some snooty waiter in a restaurant hands them a wine list the size of a photograph album, and then there’s all that palaver about good years and bad, and people claiming they can tell which slopes a certain vintage was grown on, how can anyone compete with that kind of expertise? On TV programmes about food and wine you get presenters going through a whole rigmarole of sniffing and swishing the wine around in their glass before actually tasting it and saying “Yes- I can taste blackberries, chocolate, a hint of boot polish….” All complete nonsense of course! All you actually need to know about wine is, do I like what I am drinking? If so, try to remember what it’s called and buy it again next time. There are a few easy rules, like the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) and red wine goes with red meat, and, as that great cookery book of the 1960s, “Cooking in a Bedsitter”, said, white wine goes with carpets. You can get along very easily with just a few basic rules of thumb like this and just by trying things out for yourself. Don’t be afraid, just go ahead, have a go, taste and see. Well, that’s enough about wine- I don’t want you to think I am getting obsessed! But do you see my point- forget all the stuff that’s written about wine and just get on with it and enjoy it. Prayer is exactly the same- forget all the stuff that’s written about prayer, the levels and stages of prayer, St So-and-so’s method of prayer, the nine days of this prayer, the hundred days of that, don’t be side-tracked by any of all that. Prayer is not a specialist subject to answer questions on in a quiz programme! Prayer is something easy and straightforward that all of us, however ordinary a Catholic we may feel ourselves to be, has the ability, the right and the duty to engage in. So what is prayer? Well, in essence it is simple a conversation with God. St John Chrysostom, the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, says “Prayer is the supreme good, the familiar conversation with God. It is a relationship with God and a union with him”. You see, we as Christians are called upon to develop a relationship with God, that is what the Christian life is, an on-going and ever–deepening friendship we are trying to have with Our Lord. And how can we have a relationship with someone if we don’t talk to them? We have got to be on good terms with God, and that means at the very least being on speaking terms with him! And so we talk to God, that is what prayer is. We can use other people’s words, the words the Church uses, like the Our Father and the Hail Mary, or we can use our own words, just spilling things out to God, telling him what is on our minds right now. We don’t need to find special words to do that, we don’t need to feel awkward because we haven’t got the right churchy language to put it all in, we can just talk to him as we would talk on our mobiles to a friend we want to keep up to date with our life in all its as pects. And that is important too, we don’t have to clean up our act to talk to God, we don’t have to leave out all the messy bits that won’t sound too good- God knows us inside out, so we don’t need to hold anything back for fear of spoiling the impression; we need to give him the truth, the truth of our joys and sorrows, our anxieties and so on. As we would to a best friend. Of course conversation ideally is a two-way traffic. You won’t have much of a relationship with someone if you do all the talking and you never listen to what the other person is trying to say! So too in prayer: we have to let God get a word in edgeways. How does God speak to us then? Well, principally in the words of Scripture, when we listen attentively to the readings at Mass, when we read portions of Scripture every day in our private devotions- either using the Divine Office, if we like to join in the great prayer of the Church that is always rising from the four corners of the world, or in the excellent Bible reading notes that Melina and Connie sell in our shop. Very often as we read a phrase will just stand out, a sentence will pop up before our eyes, full of meaning for us in our particular situation that day. And God also speaks to us in silence, especially if we come and keep him company by praying before the Blessed Sacrament- in the stillness there Our Lord can drop a word into our minds. The main thing I want to stress this morning, apart from how easy and uncomplicated it actually is to pray, to talk to God, is that this must not be just a sporadic activity on our part, something we only do when we’re feeling in the mood, when a special holy feeling comes over us. I don’t get those holy feelings very often- and that feeling may never come! St John Chrysostom again: he says “Prayer is not confined to set hours or moments, it is in continual activity”. We must keep that life-giving conversation with God going at all times, when we feel like it and when we don’t, for without that conversation our relationship with Our Lord will wither and we will never become the close friends that he wants us to be, and that in our better moments we also desire. We must persevere, we must be like Moses, praying all through the long day and the heat of the battle. Our arms may well grow heavy as we keep them outstretched in prayer, but we can be like Moses and get help to ensure that we persevere – he had Aaron and Hur who came and held his arms up when he grew tired, and we can call on Our Blessed Lady and the Saints to come to our aid too, and join their prayers to ours. May we persevere in our relationship with Our Lord, may we keep our arms outstretched to Heaven in our life-long conversation of prayer, and may the help of Our Blessed Mother ensure that our arms remain firm until sunset. Amen.