“Never Give Up
Praying!”
(Meditation on Lk
18:1-8)
By Fr. Francis
Nguyen, O.P.
Dear
Sisters and in Christ!
This
Sunday’s Gospel message encourages all of us to be persevering in our prayer,
no matter how hard to pray, or how long to wait for God’s answer.
Very
often we may commit this, if not a sin, a mistake serious enough to prevent us
from praying in a right and efficient way.
Do you know what the mistake is?
Let me tell you this right away: we have reduced prayer into an endless,
meaningless and boring chain of repetitions of very selfish, greedy, and
dishonest demands for only material, even sinful and evil, interests.
Christian
prayer brings us many blessings, much better than we can expect, much greater
than we can imagine. Yes, prayer
strengthens our faith. Prayer sustains
our hope. Prayer teaches us humility. And, finally, prayer feeds our love with
burning fire.
First,
prayer strengthens our faith. We pray
because we believe. We pray to Our God
because we know He alone is the Source of all good things. We pray to Our Lord Jesus Christ because we
are sure that He alone has power to save us from sin, from death, and from the
Evil One. We pray to the Holy Spirit
because we need His guidance to walk in the right way that leads us to eternal
life.
Second,
prayer sustains our hope. We pray for
what we do not have. We only pray in the
hope that we will receive what we need.
The more we pray the surer our hope grows.
Thirdly,
prayer teaches us humility. Sometimes
people come before the Lord God to pray the way the Pharisee did in the Gospel
parable. That man took the opportunity
to praise not the Lord God but himself.
He even criticized his poor neighbor, the tax-collector, accusing the latter
of many bad things, in order to make himself a saint. We, aware of our poverty, imperfections,
unworthiness, sinfulness, approach the Lord God of absolute power and holiness
and glory and justice and richness.
What, then, would be the most needed blessings which we should ask for
in our prayer if they are not divine mercy and forgiveness? And we do know that only humble prayer and
contrite heart deserve such blessings.
Finally,
prayer fuels our love with much more burning fire. Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican theologian
and Doctor of the Church, once being in fervent prayer saw the Crucified Lord
Jesus Christ appear to him and tell him to ask for whatever gift he wished for
his good service of God and of the Church.
This was the prayer of the holy scholar and at the same time the
intellectual saint: “I would like, O my Lord, to beg you no gift but you.” Indeed,
we need many items to survive our pilgrimage in this life: houses, cars, food,
drink, cloths, schooling, entertainment, medicine…and all these are not free
but we have to pay for. However, we are
taught by the Lord God to employ all we can find, all we can earn, all we can
save in this life, in order to prepare a home lasting forever, a life happy
forever in the Kingdom of God. We need,
for this very important reason, to pray for God’s love. God’s love means two things: we ask the Lord God to teach us to love Him,
to allow us to love Him, this is number one; number two, we ask Him to please
love us, no matter how unworthy we are.
The more persistent we are in prayer, the more blazing our love of God
becomes.
In
this Holy Mass, dear Sisters and Brothers, we pray hard for first of all the
blessing of being persevering in our prayer anytime and anywhere, knowing that
the Lord God, Our loving and merciful Father, will soon grant us His children
all we need to live up to His Commandments of love and righteousness.
By Fr. Francis
Nguyen, O.P.
