May 28, 2017
Prayer is an essential expression of our relationship with God. Today’s reading teaches us a lot about prayer. We see the apostles with Mary and other women disciples at prayer to ask for the coming of the promised Spirit. And we listen to the great prayer of Jesus at the last supper shortly before his passion and death. The readings put us the question what the place of prayer is in our own life. How much time and attention do we give to prayer? Jesus asked his friends to pray always. Only a few saints have reached such closeness to God. We should at least try to pray at important moments. The most important moment during the week is surely the Eucharist that we are about to celebrate. It is the great prayer of thanksgiving of the Church. As the priest lifts up to heaven the symbols of bread and wine, we bring ourselves and our lives before God in praise of the Lord, the God of all creation. There are at least three moments every day that naturally lend themselves to prayer. At the beginning of each day before the bustle of daily activities claims all our attention we could dedicate the day to God and ask His blessing. And the end of the day, when the TV is switched off, the kids are in bed and our brains begins to wind down we could pass our day in review, become aware of the little signs of God’s love and drift into sleep with a heart-felt “Thank you Lord.” And then there are the common meals, these sacred moments of sharing food and friendship. It is such a loss that table prayers have virtually vanished from Christian practise. They could be a moment during the day to remember that food does not come just from the supermarket, but in the last resort is gift of God’s creation for us. As we grow into a discipline to give to God key moments of the day, we might also find ourselves sometimes praying spontaneously at critical moments during the day: before an exam, when we have problems with a difficult person or seem stressed by the overload of work. Prayer thus becomes slowly a habit. The way we send spontaneously a photo or a whatsup message to friends about an interesting happening we naturally communicate with the One who promised to be always with us. We do not even have to type it in. A word about a special form of prayer one might call: prayer of discernment or prayer of decision. This is what the apostles did when Jesus was gone from them. They were in a difficult situation. Jesus had given them the mission to make the whole world his disciples and yet he had not left them with a work-programme how to go about it. He had simply told them to wait and to pray for the Spirit. One element in making wise decisions is to wait for the right moment. Jesus often said: My time has not yet come. In todays Gospel, he said at last: My hour has come. He waited for a sign from his Father. Mature decisions are like a ripe fruit that falls from the tree. When you pick it too early, it is still sour. When you wait for too long, it has started rotting. We have to learn to wait for God’s time. The other element in a decision-making process is prayer. It is not good to take decisions when we are emotionally upset. We need to wait that our heart is at peace. Prayer leads to peace. To make a good decision we have to gain inner freedom, a disposition where we put gently aside our natural preferences and become open to God’s will, whatever that entails. Then, we need to use our intelligence and weigh the reasons for and against each option. Finally, in prayer we put the decision we need to take before God and ask him to show us what He wants from us. God usually does not send us messages. The sign of the direction in which God calls us is a deep sense of inner peace.
Fr. Wolfgang Schonecke, MAfr