29th Sunday in Ordinary Time - 16 October
16th October 2022
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time - 16 October
A reflection on today's gospel reading by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
"We pray as much as we desire to, and we desire to in ratio with our love. But the capacity for prayer belongs to every soul, and even those who do not acknowledge any love of God pray under stress. Our Divine Lord told two parables, sometimes badly interpreted as saying that God is reluctant to grant favours but may be persuaded by our repeated pleading; actually, the stories do not have that meaning.
"The real meaning of the parables is this: if a grumpy man, selfishly interested in his rest - or a scoundrel judge - will grant favours to those who solicit them, then how much more will God do good things for us if we ask? Prayer is not the overcoming of a reluctant God, but an identification of our needs with the highest kind of Willingness to help. In the parables the tardy selfishness of one man is set against the prompt liberality of God, and the unrighteousness of another man is contrasted with the righteousness of God. A second meaning lies in the stories: they tell us that prayer is natural in time of crisis, for one of them deals with a physical and the other with a social catastrophe. The suggestion is clearly made that if the neighbour were not in need of bread and the widow were not in need of justice, they would not have pled. He who says that he cannot pray or will never pray is stating only an opinion, held in times when no grave crisis troubles him. He is not revealing his basic impulses. An atomic bomb dropped on any city would make millions pray who had denied such a possibility. George Herbert said: 'He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.' And Abraham Lincoln said: 'I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go; my own wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for that day.'
"If God sometimes seems slow to answer our petitions, there are several possible reasons. One is that the delay is for the purpose of deepening our love and increasing our faith; the other is that God is urging us. God may defer for some time the granting of His gifts, that we might the more ardently pursue, not the gift, but the Giver. Or we may be asking Him for something He wants us to learn we do not need.
"Jacob once asked God to bring him home safely, promising that he would give ten per cent of his income for an altar as a thanksgiving. Later on, after Jacob had wrestled with the Angel, he forgot what favour he had wanted to get from God; he merely said, in the joy of communion with Deity: 'I have seen God face to face.' The greatest gift of God is not the things we think we would like to have, but Himself. And as all love grows, it asks less and less, seeking only to give and give. God, likewise, does not always give us what we want, but He always gives us what we need. Often this is a gift so great and generous that we should never have asked for it because, until it came, we did not know of it." (Lift Up Your Heart)
Prayer for Guidance in Seeking God (St Anselm)
O Lord my God, Teach my heart this day where and how to see You, where and how to find You. You have made me and remade me, and You have bestowed on me all the good things I possess, and still I do not know You. I have not yet done that for which I was made. Teach me to seek You, for I cannot seek you unless You teach me, or find You unless You show Yourself to me. Let me seek You in my desire. Let me desire You in my seeking. Let me find You by loving You. Let me love You when I find You. Amen. 💖🙏💐