Prayer is not hocus pocus!

Homily
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time C
17 October 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

Prayer is tricky. Tricky. Tricky. Tricky. But it is not hocus pocus.

Sometimes our prayers work. Like the widow who incessantly nags the dishonest judge and gets what she wants, we can pray too and get results. We can experience some economic success with prayer. We can find plenty of people around us who say that prayer works. Perhaps we have witnessed a miracle or two ourselves. We are constantly urged by many to believe in prayer. Prayer changes things. It creates conduits and channels for hope and love and grace. And this is true. God does will contingent things contingently. Joshua mowed down the Amalekites because of the prayer of Moses. God used the prayer as a vehicle for his power. So prayer works when God wills contingent things contingently, and we should never stop making our needs known to God. As Jesus teaches his disciples, we should pray unceasingly.

Yet none of us do pray unceasingly. We can't, or there would be no time for KU basketball if we did. Not only do we fail to pray unceasingly, many of us pray less than we could and less than we should. This is the more maddening thing. It's not only that to pray always seems impossible, it's that most of us pray less than we could and less than we should. It is hard to find the desire to pray. Most of us are inconsistent. We pray and then we don't pray. We are inconsistent because of our own self-centeredness, to be sure. Yet we are also inconsistent because we know prayer is tricky. We know it works, but only sometimes. We know it is not hocus pocus, but sometimes it might as well be. We can't figure prayer out exactly. Sometimes it changes God's mind, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it changes us for the better, and many times it seems to make no difference. Either God does not will all things contingently, so He is not willing to change His mind on things He wills absolutely, or we simply aren't praying right. In either case, prayer is tricky. It works, and then it doesn't. Sometimes people pray for miners trapped for 69 days underground, and the miners are all rescued. Prayers are answered, and yet even in this case we're not sure. Was it the prayers that worked? Did God keep them safe? Was it providence, or random circumstance? Did prayer keep them safe, or was it the work of the rescuers alone that made for the beautiful scenes of love that we saw? Is there any way to tell?

We all know that we pray for some people who are sick, and they get better. We pray for other people, and they don't. Sometimes people are rescued. Other times they aren't. Sometimes people narrowly avert natural disasters. Other times, they don't. We pray for the most trivial things, and the most profound. Some prayers are answered. Others aren't. Sometimes when our prayers are not answered, we find out later why, for something better comes along that shows the poverty of our prayer. Yet sometimes we never understand. Prayer is tricky. So we are inconsistent in our prayer. Sometimes we pray. Sometimes we don't. Rarely do we know if we are praying enough or praying correctly. Because of all this ambiguity, because prayer is perhaps the trickiest thing of all, too often we end up praying less than we can and less than we should. And most of us arrive at Mass today feeling guilty that we don't pray. So the Lord says a haunting question to us, and it hurts us - do we have faith? When the Lord returns, will He find anyone praying? Will He find faith on the earth?

There are some maxims that can help us understand the ambiguities of prayer. God is not a vending machine. True. Prayer changes us more than it changes God. True. God's ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts. True. God wills absolute things absolutely and contingent things contingently. True. God knows what is good for us better than we know it ourselves. True. Yet all of these maxims are really excuses that we use when we are disappointed in God, when He neither seems to hear nor to answer our prayers. They are reasons to keep praying even when the results of prayer are ambiguous and disappointing.

Yet Jesus directly tells His disciples to keep praying for a different reason. He tells them to keep praying because their prayers are always heard and answered. Yes, you heard me right. Jesus promises that every prayer is heard and answered. He tells the disciples to ask for whatever they want in His name, and they will receive it. There are no contingencies in Jesus' instructions. He does not tell them they will be heard and answered if they pray the right way, for the right length of time. Jesus does not deliver a magic formula to His disciples, so that they can get the right things out of God's vending machine. He says simply to ask, and you will receive. Knock, and the door will be opened.

It is as if Jesus is saying that the prayers of the disciples are already heard and answered before the disciples say them. And of course that is exactly what He is saying. The Lord knows our prayers and needs before we ask them, and He has already answered. The Father has heard and answered the prayers of His people through the gift of His only beloved Son. Jesus Himself is the answer to every prayer, and He is always given. This is where our confidence in prayer lies, and in nowhere else. Jesus is always given, so when we pray we are always heard and answered. Like He is perfectly present to us in the Eucharist this morning, Jesus offers Himself in answer to the deepest yearnings of the human person, and He tells us from the cross that He gives to us everything that He has received from His father. Jesus has nothing left to give us that He has not already given, or is now giving to us. All things have been handed to Jesus by the Father, and He has given them all to us. One look at the cross convinces us of Jesus' complete generosity.

My friends, if we look at all our prayers, even the silliest ones to find our keys, or for the Jayhawks to win, they are in the end prayers for life. We pray for life to go better in some way or another, and we pray for security and health, for ourselves and for others. Yet a human life means nothing in isolation. What if the miners had come out of the hole, and not a single person was there to greet them? That would have been the saddest thing of all, wouldn't it? The miner would have had his life back, but life without relationship is nothing. Relationship is the basis of life, there is no life if there is not first love. So our prayers for more life, or to make life go better, are at the core prayers not for smoother days, but for the chance to be in deeper relationship. That is why Jesus proclaims Himself to be the way, the truth and the life, that in being in relationship with Him who is love, we have already received everything we could ever ask or hope for in life. Whenever we ask for anything whatsoever, to enhance our own lives or the lives of someone we love, we are asking not so much for life, but for the love that makes life possible. We are asking for relationship. In Jesus, that relationship with God is offered before we even ask for anthing, even the most trivial things.

Most of the miners, if not all of them, prayed during their 69 days trapped underground. Facing an uncertain future, they prayed harder and longer than they ever had in their life. In a sense, they were like our cloistered brothers and sisters who pray for us always, who die an early death in the cloister to teach us not to measure life not by external freedom and possessions, but by depth of relationship with God. Many prayers were answered as each miner made it back to the surface. Each miner received the gift of new life measured in length of days. Yet each miner undoubtedly grew closer to the gift of eternal life to which Jesus points us, a life that sin and death and misfortune cannot touch, and a life that is not measured in external freedom or length of days, but by the conquering of fear by love and by the depth of our relationship with God and one another. So we pray, today and always, with the psalmist to give us this wisdom of seeing all our prayers already answered in the person of Jesus, who makes Himself perfectly available to us in this Eucharist, for He is the answer to every prayer, and one day within His courts, is truly better than a thousand elsewhere.