When I think of the feast of St. Matthew, I am immediately drawn back to Caravaggio’s painting located at the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, which I visited recently, again, with some friends from the United States. I will not repeat myself here, but I would like to reflect on an aspect of it but from a different angle.
The description of the painting says that the bars on the window remind us of the Cross. And the light in the painting comes in as Christ enters the scene. It is a light from another world to illuminate ours, often in darkness. Now to understand both, our calling, and the meaning of the Cross in our lives we need prayer.
Prayer
Prayer is like the air we breathe. Matthew was called to a life of prayer to sustain his calling to discipleship. No one can keep her or his vocation without a strong spiritual life, which is only supported through prayer.
In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI began a series of catecheses on prayer during the Wednesday audiences at the Vatican. He first proposed examples of prayer in the ancient cultures. This, to show that practically always and everywhere they were addressed to God. All great civilizations have been religious.
“We know well, in fact, that prayer should not be taken for granted. It is necessary to learn how to pray, as it were, acquiring this art ever anew; even those who are very advanced in spiritual life always feel the need to learn from Jesus, to learn how to pray authentically. We receive the first lesson from the Lord by his example. The Gospels describe Jesus to us in intimate and constant conversation with the Father: it is a profound communion of the One who came into the world not to do his will but that of the Father who sent him for the salvation of man.” (May 4, 2011).
Making a connection with contemporary reality, during the second catechesis on prayer he said:
“The “digital” man, like the cave man, seeks in the religious experience ways to overcome his finiteness and to guarantee his precarious adventure on earth. Moreover, life without a transcendent horizon would not have its full meaning and happiness, for which we all seek, is spontaneously projected towards the future in a tomorrow that has yet to come… Man bears within him a thirst for the infinite, a longing for eternity, a quest for beauty, a desire for love, a need for light and for truth which impel him towards the Absolute; man bears within him the desire for God. And man knows, in a certain way, that he can turn to God, he knows he can pray to him.
Desiring God
St Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of history, defines prayer as “an expression of man’s desire for God”.” (May 11, 2011, emphasis mine)
The Pope then quotes a contemporary philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein: “prayer means feeling that the world’s meaning is outside the world”.
Our human nature reminds us that the world’s meaning is not in this world. Perhaps Matthew sensed this when the Lord called him to be a man of prayer and a man of action. And he decided to follow Him without hesitation.
May the Lord, through the intercession of this great Apostle, keep alive in us a desire for God manifested through prayer so we can search the meaning of this world outside this world.
God bless you all.
