Thursday of the 11th Week in Ordinary Time

“Prayers and Love” - Matthew 6: 7-12
 
We have been a 'love and prayers' kind of family for years now. This is our go-to salutation in emails and all manner of greeting cards in every season -- birthdays, anniversaries, expressions of sympathy, Mother's and Father's Days. Love...but not love alone. Love of friends and family carried in our hearts of prayer to the very heart of God. 
 
I went to use this closing in an email the other day, and all of a sudden the phrase seemed so thin. Does anyone else feel that one of the sad vestiges of our current struggles with gun violence in our culture is the domestication of 'prayer'? Thoughts and prayers... now protested by those who rightly want more outrage, more action, less prayer, thank you very much.
 
What does it mean to pray when we can feel so helpless and hopeless in light of the Breaking News red banners at the bottom of our TV screens -- or against the in-breaking of our personal stories of illness, financial uncertainty, or estrangement? Where is God in all of this? Does something else change when we pray? Doesn't God know our needs before we ask? What's the use of praying when we can't go to actively help?
 
So many questions, questions more than answers, perhaps...(Jesuit James Martin's new book Learning to Pray clocks in at almost 400 pages!) But just when we need it, along comes Jesus' tutorial on prayer in our Gospel today. As an important backdrop, before the sharing of the beautiful gift and scaffolding of the Our Father, comes a warning against hypocrisy and verbosity and then its consolation; "Your Father know what you need before you ask." Prayer with its template of adoration, intercession, and petitions for our physical needs and our need for forgiveness and protection begins in intimacy and trust, in relationship. God is with us, for us. Our prayers for others.. for wholeness, for peace, for healing ...are signs of a relationship of both love and a trust that what we have to offer God is enough, that even when we have no words to speak, no words to write, no thought to utter, God is with us, hears us, loves us.
 
Jesus leaves us a model of prayer as a virtue, a practice that continually reminds us of a presence, a reality beyond ourselves where our true happiness rests. It is a practice of surrender, independent of our own wills, a sacramental reminder that there is something significant beyond our power to name and claim, but a reality nonetheless that gives shape to life. Our persistence in prayer is an appeal to the heart of God appealing in us. It is never in vain, rooted in the Lord who made heaven and earth.
 
We've come full circle... a reason to pray? Simply out of love.