Bigger than Our Prayer

23^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

September 6, 2015

Mark 7:31-37

“They begged him to lay his hand on him (Mrk 7:32).”

 Mark wrote considerable details on how Jesus healed the deaf man with speech impairment. Jesus took him by Himself, He touched his ears and tongue, even He spitted, and prayed to God. Then, the miracle took place. The deaf man began to hear and speak. However, there was something that did not really happen in this passage. Jesus did not lay His hands upon him, as the people wanted it to happen.

Surely, Jesus healed the person, but not in the way that the people expected Him to do. This speaks a lot of our relationship with God. We pray and we ask the Lord to fulfill our intentions, and without noticing it, we start making our requests with various attachments. Our prayer is now filled with details on how things should be done. We now shift our attention not on God and our relationship, but on our prayer intention and subtly, on ourselves.

Definitely, it is good to pray. Jesus Himself prayed a lot and He asked us to pray constantly (Luk 18:1). He told us to ask Him in prayer and He will grant it (John 14:14). He even asked us to place our trust in Him every time we make our request, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Mat 7:7).”  Yet, the problem is we tend to forget that prayer is our means of communication with God, and we begin putting our faith on the medium rather than Person whom we talk to. We start to thinking on how to improve the quality and quantity of our prayers. The best prayer is the longest and the most carefully crafted. It is about the how many time we recite the rosaries, how many days we say the novena, how many masses we attended. Then, when we realize that our prayer is not granted the way we want it, we grumble and are disappointed because our beautiful prayers are not heard!

In one of our Rhetoric classes in the Institute of Preaching, we were asked to write a homily. I was so engrossed in the making, and I was sure that my homily was well written, carefully researched, and theologically sound. I delivered before the class. I thought I did well, until my friends reacted that they did really get what I said. Then, our professor would point out the cause. Among several elements of speech, the most important is actually the audience. In all our preparation and actual delivery, we need to have in mind always, who our listeners are. A good preaching addresses the need of its hearers. I believe that it is the same with prayer. Our main listener is God, and it means our primarily concern is Him and the rest will follow.

It is thus, unsurprising that many saints and mystics advise that the best way of prayer is silence. Once a journalist asked Mo. Teresa of Calcutta what she did in prayer. She said, “I was listening in silence.” And the journalist, hoping for a good interview, asked again, “Then, what did God say to you?” Mo. Teresa replied, “God is also listening in silence.” the Gospel points to us that God does a lot of things to fulfill our request, but He does according to His own Wisdom. The problem is we are trapped in our own rigid prayer and expectation. When it seems God does not hear our prayer, it is not because He does not listen, but because we do want to hear to His answers. We ask the Lord to open our hearts, “Ephphatha!” so we may put our faith in Him and not in ourselves.

Br. Valentinus Bayuhadi Ruseno, OP