4th Sunday after Epiphany 1.2.09 Praying as one
It always pains me to think that on a Sunday morning, while many Catholics take themselves to Mass, a great many more stay home in bed, or are out playing soccer, or walking the dog and not giving due worship to Almighty God. And then of course there are all those outside the Church who may have some knowledge of God but are not giving Him due honour on this His special day.
It pains me because I know God would be disappointed with the lack of recognition He is receiving. Further because it means that people who do not pray sufficiently are going to be experiencing a lot of unnecessary misery in their lives, and the world is going to experience a lot of unnecessary trouble.
Further still, that the things I am praying for are less likely to happen because there are not enough people praying with me.
Our Lord said in the Gospels: Ask, and you shall receive. (And there are several similar passages). If you have faith enough you could move this mountain into the sea, for example.
We have all been inspired by such passages and launched into confident prayer only to find that the mountain does not move, and in the case of less dramatic petitions that the problem does not improve in any visible sense.
We can then feel rather deflated and maybe even give up praying - which is one reason why so many no longer come to Mass.
Why does it not ‘work’ when we do as Our Lord bids us? Why do not the mountains move, and our problems remain firmly in place?
One answer lies in the fact that some prayers require more than one person to be praying them, and they require to be said more than one time.
When the objective of the prayer is a hard one it takes a lot of people to be knocking on the door.
Think of a very heavy object which could be pulled by a rope, but not just by one person pulling on the rope. If we had say fifty people pulling together then we could move that object, but one person on his own will make no obvious progress.
A lot of our prayer is like that. We make some progress when we pray alone for conversion of sinners, healing of sickness, peace on earth... all good things to be asking for.
But imagine how much more progress we would see if ten or twenty times the number of people presently praying would join us as well.
We have a few people at this Mass. What if this church were now full?
What if a church such as this could be left open 24 hours and people from all around would come in to pray and worship God?
It is obvious that with more prayer being offered more good things would happen.
If enough of the world’s population prayed with faith then we could expect mountains to be toppling into the sea. At least the mountains of sin and suffering would be greatly reduced in size.
Since we do not have this situation what must we do, we the little flock? We pray for all we are worth, as much and as well as we can. And one of our prayers is, Lord, bring us more helpers to pray with us. We are going down, Lord, in a sea of indifference and doubt.
Awaken, Lord, our faith and trust, so that we can fill our churches with adoration and intercession.
It is not necessarily that we lack faith when our prayers are not answered: it might just be there are not enough people to pull on the same rope. So we do what we can in the meantime. We support each other; we keep coming; we keep praying.
Every prayer makes things better than they were before. We must pray like never before in these difficult times. May the Lord sustain us.
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