23rd Sunday after Pentecost 8.11.09 Faith
The woman touches the hem of Our Lord’s garment and is instantly healed. Not all prayer is so successful or answered so quickly. What can we learn from this?
We can discern that there is a kind of inverse proportion between the level of faith of the one praying and the number of words used. If our faith is strong enough the lightest touch is enough to reach Almighty God and receive whatever He is willing to give.
The more we believe the less song and dance we need.
It is not how many words we use or how many gestures we make but the depth of our faith.
Our Lord did say, Do not use many words when you pray, and then proceeded to teach us the Our Father, a prayer which is very succinct but also very deep.
Using very few words is not to be confused with making very little prayer, whereby a person with little or no faith makes little or no prayer. Indeed they do not use many words but that is because they do not expect anything to come from the prayer.
If we should pray with few words then what are we to make of such lengthy prayers as the Rosary or of events such as prayer vigils when many words are said? And even the Mass contains many words.
Our Lord once referred to a particular demon as being more difficult than usual to remove. He said that for such a kind much prayer and fasting is required.
Sometimes longer prayer is required, not because we lack faith, but because the mountain that needs to be moved is bigger. It takes more prayer to convert a sinner, for example, than to produce fine weather for the parish picnic.
Our Lord Himself found it necessary to pray all night sometimes.
We do not repeat ourselves out of doubt but for emphasis! If we say the same words over and over again, as in the Rosary, it is not because we doubt their truth but because we want to emphasize them. Like a lover saying, I love you, again and again. We are making a triumphal expression of the goodness of God. Hallowed be Thy name, Hail Mary full of grace, Glory to the Blessed Trinity... in affirming these things to be true our faith grows stronger.
We want to fill every moment with the confidence that comes from our knowledge of God’s goodness.
And we want to make His love cover as far across the world as we can make it go. Every time we repeat the affirmations of His goodness His power goes out to someone somewhere.
The best of both worlds – strong faith (like the woman who touched His garment) combined with a desire to make that faith cover every possible need.
The key to both the short and the long of it is closeness to God. The closer we are to Him the more effortlessly we can express the substance of our prayer; also the more we perdure in a state of prayer, not just a moment here or there. Our prayer is constant rather than episodic.
We need to be strong in faith to the point that our prayer flows smoothly. We do not pray only when the brakes fail or we feel the earth trembling and think there might be an earthquake! We nurture a closeness to Almighty God such that we are able to speak to Him without fuss and panic. We do not approach Him as strangers but as His children.
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