Remain Faithful

Praying constantly and well is the call to action in today’s parable of the Persistent Widow. We can all get better at this most basic and profound action that keeps our relationship with the LORD vibrant and flourishing.

Remain Steady

The first reading narrates Joshua’s battle with the Amalekites. As long as Moses holds the staff of God aloft, Joshua has the better of the fight. But when Moses let his hands drop, Amalek surged. So, Aaron and Hur came to the rescue and Moses was able to hold his hands steady with their aid resulting in a resounding win for Joshua. We can see the power of communal prayer in the famous battle of Lepanto which we commemorated in the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7th. It underlines the need to persevere in prayer and enlist the aid of others. These battles take up the matter of Holy War, which we will defer to theologians, but nevertheless it reminds us that prayer itself is a battle. We need to remain steady and persevere.

Remain Faithful

But you remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it. (2 Tim 3:14)

Saint Paul charges his protege Timothy to proclaim the word, remaining persistent whether it’s easy and convenient or difficult and inconvenient. He emphasizes the value of Scripture which is useful for teaching, refutation, correction, and training and capable of giving us wisdom for salvation through Faith in Jesus. Jesus himself ends the Gospel parable with this line:

But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8)

Going Deeper

Faith and Trust are key to going deeper in prayer. In their book, Personal Prayer, Frs. Thomas Acklin and Boniface Hicks apply Judith Glaser’s levels of conversation to the human-divine relationship. Just as we can go deeper in human conversation, from the trite to the transformational, the same applies with our prayer relationship. The basic level is transactional, characterized with not a lot of trust and basically asking God for trivial things or only turning to Him out of desperation when all else fails. The interim level is conditional, we’re still using God for selfish purposes and clothing our requests in Christian language, trying to get Him to do what we want. This isn’t bad per se, it’s an example of the widow’s perseverance winning through.

But the deepest level is transformational and is the level that Christ is thirsting for. God is infinite and unchanging, His trust in us is likewise infinite. Our growth in prayer necessitates vulnerability and trust. In other words, the deeper our faith, the closer our relationship with God. Nothing is too trivial to share, and we can open up our dreams, our desires, our fears, our sins, anything, and everything. All of which will be received with reverence and genuine appreciation. This is the level of intimacy we must strive for with God.

Nuggets

The book has wonderful nuggets on prayer. Prayer is actually very simple. He has only one message: unconditional love. He has only one Word: His eternal Son. He speaks only one language: silence. Silence is not the mere absence of noise, it is the silence of potential sound, a silence that makes sounds or words possible, the silence that allows us to hear at all, to hear God at all.

Let us seek God in the silence of our own hearts. Let us beg Him to increase the gift of faith He infused into our soul at baptism until our love is kindled into flame. May we profess this faith again and again in the hidden God, who is revealed by the Holy Spirit in the divinity of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and our God. I recently heard on a podcast: Prayer as Exposure. It talked about opening wide the aperture of our hearts and exposing our innermost selves to the radiance of God and by doing so, we cannot help but be changed, providing we don’t put up any blocks. The startling takeaway is prayer simply requires us to show up. It is God who does all the work!

[Readings: Exodus 17:8-13; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8]