To join one's will to the will of God, so that the human will consents to whatever the divine will prescribes, and so that there is no other reason why it wills this thing or another except that it realizes God wills it: this surely is to love God. The will itself is nothing other than love, and good or bad will should not be called anything but good or bad love.
AELRED OF RIEVAULX The Mirror of Charity
Let your love be strong and constant, neither yielding to fear nor cowering at hard work. Let us love affectionately, discreetly, intensely. We know that the love of the heart, which we have said is affectionate, is sweet indeed, but liable to be led astray if it lacks the love of the soul. And the love of the soul is wise indeed, but fragile without that love which is called the love of strength.
ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX On the Song of Songs
If any soul yearns for the transcendent charity of Christ, then her first need is to have this law written in the very center of the heart, for this is the straight and royal road that leads to that royal eminence. In fact, if your heart is agitated with even the smallest dispute over some injury, whether you are enduring it yourself or making another endure it, then there is no room for prayer. No, a cloud presents itself, and let's nothing pass through it. But, on the other hand if you listen carefully, a voice sounds from the cloud: ‘ Make peace with your brother or sister’, and forgive whatever you have against them.
JOHN OF FORDE Sermon 91
Not to know when the end is, or the day of the end, is good for people, less knowing, they might become negligent of the time between, awaiting the days near the end. For then they would argue that they must only attend to themselves. Therefore, too, Christ has been silent about the time when each shall die, lest men, being elated because of this knowledge, should immediately neglect themselves for the greater part of their time. Both the end of all things and the end of each of us, then, has been concealed from us by the Word (for in the end of all is the end of each, and in the end of each the end of all is comprehended), so that since it is uncertain and always in the future, we may advance day by day as if summoned, reaching forward to the things in front of us and forgetting the things behind.
ST. ATHANASIUS Discourses Against the Arians
The devil… always tempts in order to hurt by urging man into sin. In this sense it is said to be his proper office to tempt…. The devil tempts in order to explore the inward disposition of man, so that he may tempt him to that vice to which he is most prone.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS Summa Theologiae
You must not break away from holy prayer for any reason except obedience or charity. For often during the time scheduled for prayer the devil comes with all sorts of struggles and annoyances—even more than when you are not at prayer. He does this to make you weary of holy prayer. Often he will say: "This sort of prayer is worthless to you. You should not think about or pay attention to anything except vocal prayer.” He makes it seem this way so that you will become weary and confused and abandon the exercise of prayer. But prayer is a weapon with which you can defend yourself against every enemy. If you hold it with love's hand and the arm of free choice, this weapon, with the light of most holy faith, will be your defense.
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA The Dialogue
ALL THE WAY TO SUNSET
Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it. This admonition of St Paul to his beloved Timothy provides a sturdy basis for our reflections this morning, which center on the theme of faith—and perseverance in faith—through prayer. From the outset we must realize how emphatically rooted our faith is in the living tradition that other faithful Christians have gifted us with! As the joyful heirs of others’ deepest treasures and heroism, we must exist in a state of perpetual thanksgiving.
Our gospel selection from St Luke and the first reading (from the Book of Exodus) together offer us a solid catechesis on prayer: first, prayer as struggle; then prayer as intercession; and, finally, prayer as plain-old, dogged persistence. We should be greatly consoled by the fact that these texts do not present prayer as an activity of the sleek and strong but, rather, of the radically weak.
In the Exodus passage, Moses has to be helped by Aaron and Hur to hold up his arms extended wide in prolonged intercession. In the gospel we see how a poor widow persists in clamoring for justice from a corrupt judge despite her indigence, her fragile age and her social insignificance. Both Moses and the widow are fortified only by their faith, which empowers them to persevere in prayer and never give up. Perseverance in prayer is, thus, proposed to us by Sacred Scripture at this Eucharist as confirming evidence of practicing a lively faith, against all purely human expectations.
Our readings are very realistic and do not portray prayer as some kind of laid-back swoon. We witness an unforgettable example of the fatigue induced by insistent prayer in the drama of Moses up on a hill, extending his hands toward heaven in his passion to intercede with God on behalf of his people as they wage hard battle against their enemy, Amalek, down in the valley. Two men must hold up Moses’ arms when these grow ever heavier as the battle draws out interminably, all the way to sunset. Moses’ prayer is clearly presented as an intense and exhausting effort, a struggle even, an experience of prayer that sometimes appears in Scripture under the image of wrestling with God, as Jacob did throughout one crucial night with the mysterious angel, and he came out wounded. Moses’ wrestling with God in agonic prayer is indispensable because it shows how much the great Prophet cared: this was his way of participating decisively in his people’s battle, which Israel eventually won solely on account of Moses’ ardent intercession.
Moses’ unremitting plea to God, then, shows that prayer is work, real labor, and like any labor it causes exhaustion to both body and spirit. Fatigue is proof of the genuineness of prayer. We spoiled moderns sometimes idealize prayer as a warm bath of consolation into which we immerse ourselves now and then when we’re so inclined, to derive from it a pleasurable, pious satisfaction. But this scene of a Moses exhausted by prayer should correct such naïve expectations. The sight of a cruciform Moses on this hill, struggling in prayer all the way to sunset, offers us, rather, a vivid prefiguration of Jesus with arms extended on the cross on Mount Golgotha, as mediator before the Father on behalf of all humanity. The cross remains forever the privileged locus of all Christian prayer, the place and stance where the disciple rendezvous with the Master to intercede together with him for the world.
In addition, the sight of Moses praying in this laborious way also points to the communitarian aspect of prayer. The Christian community is not only the place where we are called to pray for each other, but also the place where we must serve and sustain each other’s prayer, for instance, for us monks, by joining our brothers in choir when the bell calls us to the Work of God. Mutual support and encouragement in prayer is a task rightly expected from all believers within a Christian community, since we all together constitute the one Body of Christ and, together, are nourished by the one Eucharist. By our call to this community of Spencer, and by our response to that call, we are now seriously indebted to one another: yes, we owe one another our supporting presence and example at prayer. In other words, we are all appointed by Christ to play Aaron and Hur to one another’s Moses by our loyal presence at prayer.
One aspect of the difficulty imposed by prayer is that it must be practiced not whenever we happen to “feel like it” but on a daily basis and many times a day (as many as seven, as St Benedict prescribes), and this not in just any haphazard manner but in a persevering way, and not for a few days only but without ever giving up. The Lord Jesus stresses this specific difficulty in the parable he tells us. Jesus’ insistence on the need to pray always, without ever neglecting prayer, probably reveals the concrete situation of the Christian community that Luke is addressing in his gospel: apparently this community is suffering from a certain laxity in both the ardor of its faith and in its wobbly practice of prayer. Thus, only a few decades after Jesus’ Ascension, Luke’s community is already showing signs of worldliness by neglecting both faith and prayer. In this way it is sadly fulfilling a prediction Jesus’ had made in another parable, when he said: When they heard the word, they received it with joy. But they had no root; they believed for a while, and in time of testing fell away (cf Lk 8:13).
This cyclical cooling down of faith is a universal Christian problem, and thus to be expected among us, too, because of the basic human difficulty with perseverance in love and fidelity in all situations and relationships that strive for fullness of love. Luke is here warning these Christians that to abandon prayer leads sooner or later to abandoning the faith itself. The passing of time proves to be the great test of both faith and prayer. But hearing the Gospel today always creates a time and a space of conversion. Insistent prayer renews faith daily and shows that the life of faith consists of an ongoing and ever-vibrant relationship with the Lord. The fatigue that comes from persevering in prayer is simply the exhaustion to be expected from devoting generous chunks of our time to prayer. The best “method” of prayer is quite simply to just do it, to plunge in whenever and however without any hesitation. Grace will take care of all the rest.
In this connection, let’s not forget that time is the very substance of our life! We’ll never get back the time we devote to another person. To pray faithfully, in this light, is nothing less than to give our whole life for the Lord. Consider also how prayer always includes, at least implicitly, an encounter with death. How so? Because when we pray we “do” nothing, we “produce” nothing, and we therefore experience ourselves as sterile and useless according to the world’s conventional norms, which we often internalize as our own. Precisely for this reason we can often find even the thought of prayer disagreeable, because we definitely do not like to confront our own futility and nothingness, something inevitable in genuine prayer. Then we find ourselves inventing nifty strategies to avoid actual prayer in real time, always, of course, with solid and credible excuses. (Here I can obviously only speak for myself, though perhaps some of you will empathize with such sneaky strategies to avoid looking into the Lord’s inviting eyes.) And yet, at the same time, we ought to be persuaded that the space and the time we devote to generous, silent prayer are precisely the most precious means at our disposal which we can choose to offer God in order that he might come and do something in us, make something of us. Paradoxically—both to our reason and our ego—our emptiness is the very choicest and most efficacious possession we have to offer God, if, that is, what we are truly seeking is union of heart and soul with him!
Now, all prayer implicitly looks forward to the Second Coming in glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so Jesus’ words to us today also convey a teaching on the eschatological dimension of prayer. In the chapter previous to today’s reading from Luke, the Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come (Lk 17:20). Today Jesus completes his answer to them by firing back a question of his own: When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? The question is clearly rhetorical: Jesus’ point here, I suggest, is not to ask questions about his Second Coming but rather to help us prepare to welcome the Lord’s Second Coming as a question to us, a question that makes Christians examine their faith here and now. We often ask “Where is God?”, “Where is the promise of the Lord’s Coming?” (2 Pet 3:4).
To these questions of ours the Lord replies by demanding that we give an account of our faith: Where is your faith? he asks us (Lk 8:25). The Lord’s Parousia is not a subject for abstract theological speculations but a reality of faith that has to be lived and experienced in prayer as expectation and desire. There is no better way of putting our petition Thy Kingdom come into practice than by giving ourselves generously to vigilant prayer, actually looking for the Kingdom as it arrives in our lives every day.
Finally, the prayer of the poor widow that demands justice, for its part, points to two other aspects of prayer: boldness and determination. Prayer is never ashamed to beg insistently, maybe even annoyingly. Christian prayer never hesitates to importune God: it doesn’t stop knocking; it’s not afraid of pestering God; it trusts that God can not only “take it” but that the Lord actually encourages such behavior and is even complimented by our determination as his children with inherited rights. Such parrhesía (‘legitimate boldness in speech’) manifests a faith that refuses to turn away from the one and only God to vain idols, for cheap satisfaction, a bold conviction that stakes everything on God’s fidelity and love whether or not God responds in the way and at the time we desire. Such bold prayer clearly requires courage.
No: Prayer and faith cannot be separated. Believing is, in fact, synonymous with praying. The two stand and fall together as the two sides of the same coin: the coin of God’s divine fatherhood of us in Christ. And if it’s true that we can pray only thanks to a lively faith, it’s also true that our faith remains alive only thanks to prayer.
To put the Lord’s teaching on prayer today into practice, we now turn to the sacred action in which all praying culminates: the offering of the precious Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ at this altar, the Holy Sacrifice that is the sole source of eternal life.
He who seeks God while attending to his own ease and comfort seeks him by night, and therefore does not find him. But he who seeks him in the practice of virtue and good works, disregarding comforts, seeks him by day. Such a one shall find him, for what is invisible at night can be seen by daylight.
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS The Spiritual Canticle
We might say that contemplation is an act of silent attentiveness through which we immerse ourselves in reality, whereas the outward agitation of our souls keeps us on the surface of things. For reality is God's fullness, a fullness in which all things exist and suffice to themselves within Him, a fullness which is the life of the Trinity. By this I mean that the Father communicates Himself totally to the Son, giving Him the totality of what He possesses, thus exhausting in the Son the possibility of loving.
JEAN DANIELOU God’s Life In Us
Are you sometimes tormented by those transgressions which, whether grave or slight, have dug an abyss or cast a coldness between God and you? No amount of penances could renew the bonds of friendship, if Jesus Christ had not paid your debts in advance. Insist, like the apostle, on the intentionally personal nature of Christ’s mediation: you are not anonymous among the ranks of the redeemed.
AN ANONYMOUS MONK The Hermitage Within
Communion with God is true reality, and by comparison with it everything, no matter how massively it asserts itself, is a phantom, a nothing…. Communication with God is reality. It is true reality, the really real, more real, even, than death itself.
JOSEPH RATZINGER Eschatology, 89
Humble love is perhaps the greatest of all evangelical virtues, much more rare than the frequent use of the word ‘love’ in contemporary literature would lead us to suspect. Love in the image of God – generous, patient, gentle love toward everyone, toward those nearest and those most distant, toward friend and enemy, toward just anyone who shows up. A Cistercian Abbott who lived in the 12th century, the blessed Guerric of Igny, said it this way: ‘It is the property of friendship to make itself small before its friends’.
ANDRÉ LOUF Tuning Into Grace
When God becomes our guide he insists that we trust him without reservations and put aside all nervousness about his guidance. We are sent along the path he has chosen for us, but we cannot see it, and nothing we have read is any help to us. Were we acting on our own we should have to rely on our experience. It would be too risky to do anything else. But it is very different when God acts with us. Divine action is always new and fresh, it never retraces it steps, but always finds new routes.
JEAN-PIERRE DE CAUSSADE Abandonment to Divine Providence
And the apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.”
Today’s Gospel begins with the apostles calling out to the Lord as one voice, “Increase our faith.” We all know that the Lord is often frustrated with the disciples for their lack of faith. For example, afraid that they were going sink in the storm on the lake he said to them, “Where is your faith?” On another occasion, counseling them against anxiety about meeting their daily needs, he tells them “If God so clothes the grass in the field that grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?”
This is the first time the apostles have themselves petitioned the Lord to “increase their faith”. What occasioned this appeal? If we look to the verses immediately preceding today’s Gospel, we hear the Lord address the disciples in this way: “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” “Be on your guard”, he warns them.
The next verses concern the challenge of bringing back into the community those who have gone astray: They are to rebuke those who sin and forgive those who repent. The Lord insists that even “if [someone] wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.”
If we go back one step further, we see that these verses immediately follow upon the parable of the rich man and Lazarus which we heard last week. The rich man has caused others to sin by his bad example of pursuing a life of comfort and pleasure while ignoring the poor man Lazarus at his doorstep. Now he wants to warn others of the consequences, and he cannot. He begs Abraham to send Lazarus as a witness to his five brothers to warn them, so that they do not “come to this place of torment.”
Confronted with these demands and challenges, the apostles respond, “Increase our faith.”
Have faith and you will do great things, Jesus tells them. Just surrender, trust, let go, hand yourself over and all sorts of possibilities will open up. In me, you can do a lot, more than you ever thought. A mustard seed is very tiny, whereas a mulberry bush is large and has thick, deep and tenacious roots. Yet, with this small faith, if you were to say to it “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ … it would obey you.”
This “obedience” on the part of the natural order is the fruit of taking on what St. Paul calls our “obedience of faith”. The obedience of faith has such powerful effects in Christ, that it puts the cosmos, the natural order, in our service. In the grace of Christ it obeys our command. Creation, instead of simply presenting us with things that potentially lead us astray, serve as a distraction and pull us in all directions, truly becomes a good placed at our service that works with us for the good in Christ. It cooperates with God and with us in forming good habits and virtues in us. In so far as this happens the created order participates in the divine restoration and achieves its own end as being created good and striving toward the good, toward life, toward wholeness and integrity. All this occurs because of the new life that is given us with the act of faith.
Jesus uses these hyperboles to give his apostles a strong word of encouragement. As though to say, “Your mission will have its challenges, I will made big demands of you, but the faith I give you is sufficient for you to do to do great things. So give your assent, trust, surrender. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light.”
In what follows he shows them the way forward, which will be to follow along his own path of humility, by putting on the mind of a servant, like him, who has come among them as one who serves, as he will tell them at the Last Supper.
“When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”
To my mind it helps to get into what Jesus is after here if we look more closely at the imagery Jesus uses to describe the work of the servant. The servant plows the field, or tends the sheep, and serves at table.
Earlier in the Gospels Jesus describes the disciples as those who have “put their hand to the plow”. In that context, Jesus tells them that no one who puts his hand to the plow who then “looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” They plow the field when they spread the Gospel. With this comes great responsibility for as Jesus warned them, woe to those who in their teaching become a stumbling block for others, causing them to sin.
The servant tends the sheep. The apostles tend the sheep when they act like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind to go after the one who has gone astray. This corresponds to the command of the Lord to rebuke those who sin and to forgive again and again those who repent.
But this is not the end or sum of the role of the servant of the Lord. There are also all the ordinary day-to-day tasks that must be performed. These are represented by serving at table.
These three make up apostolic activity as faith working itself out in love.
We find this pattern at work in the Gospel itself. Earlier, Jesus sends the Twelve out with the mission “to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal [the sick]. Upon their return they tell Jesus what they had done. Together, they all withdraw to Bethsaida. But the crowds followed, so Jesus spoke to them about the kingdom of God and healed those who needed to be cured. He plows the field and tends the sheep. When the Twelve advise Jesus at the end of the day to send the people away, he responds “give them some food yourselves.” They feed five thousand with twelve wicker baskets left over. They serve at table.
Again, when Jesus had completed his “field work” just before his passion, he instructed Peter and John to “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.”
When they are gathered together for the meal he said to the apostles, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer…”
To my mind, the Lord’s demand that once the apostles have done all that is commanded they should consider themselves unprofitable servants who have done what they were obliged to do is best understood when seen as pointing to this eager desire of the Lord to eat this Passover with them. For here he opens up their service into a share in the paschal mystery. He will not only die for them but grant them a share in his suffering.
For this to be full fruit he needs them to be humble servants who receive everything from their master. He needs them to be ready be put on his own mind, to be ready to be conformed to him in his own self-emptying love. To be able to say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
The genuine humility that sincerely renounces all attribution of achievement to oneself and hands it over to God frees us up to share in the whole of Jesus’ own experience. It frees him to to lead us wherever and in whatever way he wishes, bestowing gifts as he sees fit, knowing that he will find in our hearts a fertile field in which to plow deep furrows with his teaching, sheep that will recognize his voice, who, when they falter, will heed his rebuke in sincere repentance and receive the joy of the forgiveness of sins. In this rich dramatic action we find the increase of faith begged for by the apostles, a life that opens up into thanksgiving, joy and praise. This is a living participation in the eternal messianic banquet the Lord eagerly desires to share with his disciples.
What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God hundreds of years ago, if I do not give birth to the Son of God in my time and my culture? We are all meant to be Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.
MEISTER ECKHART
Those overtaken by a storm when traveling by sea don't worry about their luggage. But throw it overboard with their own hands, considering their property to be less important than their lives. So why don't we, following this example, throw out whatever drags our soul down to the depths?
ST. NELIOS THE ASCETIC