Tag: Prayer

You have probably heard the cautionary tale about the boy and the scorpion.  They are at a raging river.  The scorpion pleads for help, and the boy full of compassion carries him across in his bosom, only to be stung by the ungrateful scorpion at the end.  “You knew what I was when you picked me up!” sneers the scorpion to the dying boy and we are left with the moral to choose our companions more wisely.

Today’s Gospel tells a different story.  Jesus knows quite well who is at the table with him.  He knows one will betray him for money; another will in cowardice deny even acquaintance with Him—not just once, but three times. He knows the others will run away in fear. He is “deeply troubled” because he knows that He will all too soon feel both the very real sting of profound personal betrayal and then the ultimate sting of death at the hands of those He deeply loves.

Yet He knows that they are more than their sins, and He loves each of them, inviting them to His table, into the deepest and most profound intimacy with Him.  And He continues to invite each of us, even while we are still sinners.  He loves (and calls) each of us, before, during, and after our sin.

For quite a long time, I did not believe that God loved me.  I don’t mean that I denied it as doctrine—I could in fact wax poetical about the love of God as a theological abstraction.  But I could not believe it as a particular and personal reality, for I knew who I was.  I thought that maybe God loved the Girl I Ought To Be, but He couldn’t possibly love me.  Or, maybe being God and all, He had to love me, but He didn’t particularly like me.  I suspected He was perpetually disappointed in me, waiting for me to become someone else, someone He could be proud of.

I remember going once to a priest for Confession who heard my litany of sins and said, “You need to stop trying so hard and just let God love you.”  I remember now my inward eyeroll, as I thought, “Great.  Another wishy-washy ‘liberal’ priest who missed everything I just confessed and how I am not trying hard enough…”

But then something strange happened.  The next priest I went to in Confession said the exact same thing.  Then another, then another, until it was too many to count.  I started to wonder if God was actually trying to tell me something. 😊

I am still learning how to do this.  But one key component for me (that I have mentioned previously) was instituting a designated daily prayer time, a time set apart to receive God’s love.

It is not that I didn’t pray before.  I would even sometimes pray at great length—usually when I was either deeply desperate or deeply inspired.  Other times I would be sure to “say my prayers”; to discharge that duty so that I wouldn’t feel guilty.  But as a result, I avoided prayer when I didn’t feel like it—and when I most needed it.

Having a designated prayer time has required meeting God when I wasn’t camera ready.  When I would have preferred to wait until after I had gone to Confession, or perhaps hadn’t even finished sinning yet.  When I was stewing in anger or sulking or full of a thousand distractions.

Being “forced” to pray in those moments is when prayer got real.  When I had to be honest about myself, my motives, my desires.  “Lord I am not a big fan of your plan today.”  “Lord, I know this is wrong but I really want to do it anyway.”  “Lord, I don’t want to forgive her—here’s why….”

Sometimes my anger turned to tears.  Sometimes temptation dissipated.  Sometimes my entire prayer time was a wrestling match with me not yet ready to let go of my will.  Sometimes I had to just let God hold me like a toddler in a tantrum.  Sometimes I felt better; sometimes I didn’t.    Sometimes I didn’t feel much change during prayer time itself, but over time I would see the strength of the sin losing its force and hold on me.

Years ago my friend and I were going to take her two small children to the carousel.  Her four-year-old son who had been dying to go suddenly balked and decided he would rather “stay home” while we took his little brother without him.  We couldn’t understand this change of heart—why would he want to miss out on something he had been so looking forward to?  My friend knew her son, and she knew what questions to ask.  It turns out that he had pooped his pants, and wanted to hide the fact, even if it meant missing out on the joy that was planned for him.

God loves us even in our mess.  He invites us to come to Him even while still filthy, to be changed and to receive the joy He has in store for us.

We say that God’s love is unconditional.  That means that He loves us all the time.  His love doesn’t wait for Easter Sunday, when all is right again.  He loves us on Holy Thursday, when betrayal is imminent. On Good Friday, when its ugliness is revealed. On Holy Saturday, when we start to see just what His absence really looks like.

Challenge today: Ask God to show you the love He has specifically for you.

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate
a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes.
In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled.
One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,
“Do you want to be well?” –John 5:1-16

*            *            *

“Do you want to be well?”

Funny guy, this Jesus and His questions.  It shouldn’t take Omniscience to figure that someone who has been ill for 38 years, waiting by a healing pool, wants to be well!

But perhaps He knows that something happens when we bring our desires (or anything else) into dialog with Jesus.

Years ago, I sent my friend an article I had read.  “You have to read this!” I exclaimed, “It is the most beautiful thing I have ever read!”  A little while later, I asked if she had read the article yet.  “No,” she admitted, “because I already know what it is going to say.”

I was appalled.  But in fairness, I do the same thing to God on a regular basis.  Rather than bringing something to prayer, I think about it and come to my conclusions about what God would probably think of it.

But if we’ve read anything about Jesus, we know that He is a God of Surprises.  The words most used about His teachings and actions are “astonished” and “amazed” and “nobody else speaks as He does.”  He says, “I make all things new.”  There’s no divine title, “Lord of the Everlasting Same-Old Same-Old.”

Over and over in Scripture, we see seemingly simple conversations completely transform people.  When Jesus tells the “Woman at the Well” about her five husbands and current non-husband lover, the woman declares Him a prophet and runs to tell the town “I met a man who told me everything I ever did.”

Let’s be real.  Human nature being what it is, surely there were other people in town who could tell her exactly what her sins were! But there is something different about the way Jesus speaks to us of even our sins.

I spent a lot of time writing about today’s Gospel and had a few thousand words on paper, different themes and different stories, some funny, some poignant.  I was torn over which direction to go, which stories to include, and finally in frustration I threw up my hands and prayed, “Lord, what do YOU want me to say?”

“That’s a better question, isn’t it?” He said gently.

I have a few decades of Catholic practice and a Master’s Degree in Theology under my belt.  But my life only changed “for real” in a radical way when I committed to a daily prayer time, a set (and non-negotiable) time for God to show up in my life.  A time for not just talking about God, but for talking to Him.  A time for listening to what He had to say back.  A time for Him to reveal what is in His heart, and also what is really in mine.  I am consistently surprised by both.

The Christian life is a romance, not a hostage situation.  God waits for your consent, and He invites consent by awakening your desires.  “Do you really want to be well?”

My challenge to you today is to carve out some time to let God ask you this question directly.  It may be that He has more to say to you than I ever could. 😉

From Saint John Paul the Great:

“Do Not Be Afraid…” 

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”