It
is our work, our duty, our promise is to pray. And we know it is the only way
to make sense of hurts- individual, communal, national. And so we pray- after
the clergy scandals, after 9/11, after Sandy Hook, after the Boston marathon
bombings. We pray. We pray for victims and for perpetrators, for politicians
who believe what we do and for those who might seem to disregard our cherished
values. And our praying helps us parse the incongruity, make some sense of it.
Prayer helps us get to the core of things. We pray; for
craziness and hurt and broken hearts are too many. We can pray because we know
our own poverty; we have come to know our own foolishness. We pray because we
realize that we are no better than the worst. No better.
Our praying is always for; it is our humble privilege and responsibility. In a life
marked by, what our Constitutions
describe as, a “hidden apostolic fruitfulness,” what we
do here matters, because it lies at the heart of the Church,
very close to the heart of God who sustains all things.
Our life of prayer affords us the extravagance of luxuriating in our
helplessness and utter dependence on God. Our praying is always unaccomplished but perfect in in
that it allows God to accomplish all things in us and through us. And perhaps
our perfection as monks consists most of all in this- that we accept willingly
the burden and responsibility of honest attention to our weakness, the weakness
that lets us pray. This is the secret we were made for.
Photograph of the Abbey's Manning Hill by Brother Anthony Khan, Excerpts from today's Homily for July Fourth.