I am going to cite for you a Church teaching that I am guessing you may never have heard. From paragraph 2098 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.
Everything you have heard about how much we live our faith; our morality and the commandments means nothing if we do not first understand that simple sentence. Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.
As you know that often I say that whole concept of good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell is wrong and that is why. It is through prayer that God transforms us and makes us whom he calls us to be for it is in prayer that we encounter God personally.
If we remove prayer from Catholic morality then it becomes just a moral standard that anyone can try follow, whether they believe in God or not, or whether their god is one of a pantheon of gods or is the atoms and molecules that they believe define all of reality. There is no mercy in that moral standard and those who fall short of it discover its tyranny. Just because someone does not believe does not mean he or she does not love or rejects the morality of the Commandments.
It is prayer that transforms us to encounter God on a personal level and leads us to seek him totally over time. It is the person who prays who learns that God is ever present in his or her life.
It is the person who prays who understands the work of Christ and His spirit in leading us all to the Father.
It is the person who prays who comes to understand what it means to encounter Christ as the embodiment of the truth.
Prayer is essential for each of us.
Many people who do not normally pray will find themselves praying when things go wrong. They feel bad that they only call on God in tragedy, but many of the saints would say not to dismiss this desperate effort, because even this sporadic prayer is important.
Our call is to pray more.
I often quote St. Alphonsus Liguori who taught to converse with God as one would a good friend. This is what prayer is. It can be the formal prayer we learn in religious education. It can be the public liturgical prayer we do here but it also can be the private informal prayer we all have a calling to do daily. Prayer is all of that and we have an invitation to participate in it.
However, prayer is even more for it is a dialogue.
Questions for discussion:
How do you pray?
What do you say when you pray?
What does Jesus talk about today? The persistent woman who does not give up and demands an answer.
Prayer demands an answer for prayer expects an answer.
Many people will say as they pray that they wonder if God hears them. Of course, He does. His response will be as Father so that answer will be what is best for you but He will answer.
I always like to tell the story which I read I think in the Reader’s Digest which I understand is a true story. It is of the woman who prayed that her number would come out in the lottery. When they did the drawing on television that night she checked her ticket and it came out exact, except it was exactly backwards.
Obviously, the ticket was useless but she learned not to trust in the lottery but to trust in God.
When we pray, we must expect answers. Billy Graham used to teach to pray and give thanks to God for his response in that prayer, for that is how confident we should be that he will answer. He may not give us what we want the way we want it, but He will respond.
My mother was handicapped from the neck down with the exception of her right hand. It was a slow process that began when she and my father were hit by drunk driver one night in 1967 in our hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts. Slowly the process began that she was more and more unable to walk until she became unable to move all below the neck but her right hand.
Many times, she prayed to be healed and obviously that did not happen. However, she was healed in so many other ways. I can still remember her smile at times and her unique humor and more. Her spiritual healing was more powerful than her physical healing and that is how God brought more to her and through her than a healing would have accomplished.
I think today that God is speaking to His Church about all its failures and those who pray will persevere but will listen to what He is saying.
Cardinal Sarah in his latest book writes what it appears others are learning and getting as a message in their prayers as well that our Church has been busy teaching justice and issues but has not been teaching prayer and the quest for holiness. The reason her bishops have not been doing this, according to Cardinal Sarah is that they have been lost in issues. The end result is the same: teaching a moral standard without prayer and a relationship to Christ makes that standard a tyranny to those who fall short of it. Christ came to give us freedom and we find that freedom in Christ.
So you have many demanding morality but not prayer. As I began this homily in the same way I end it.
If we do not pray, then we cannot live the quest for holiness for according to section 2098 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.
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