about prayer: 3rd week of Lent 2013

In this parable Jesus is teaching us about prayer, about how to pray. 

First, he is teaching us that a proud man cannot pray or more specifically a proud man is not actually praying.  When we insist on what we want, we are not actually praying.  Prayer is submission to God.  In prayer we have the tendency to manipulate God, to control God, to win him over.  But in real prayer we put ourselves in the hands of God.  And only the humble can learn to willingly submit.  So, a proud person does not really pray even if he is praying, for prayer is first and foremost a disposition of the heart, a heart that opens itself to the direction and guidance of God.

Second, we are not actually praying if we despise others, or more specifically if we lift ourselves above others as if we are the best and not like the rest.  With authentic prayer comes a consciousness of our own littleness before God.  We are like the rest of humanity unworthy before God and that fact becomes even more pronounced when we truly pray.

Sometimes because we have the tendency to envy, we compare ourselves with others even when we pray.  And so we sometimes ask ourselves, why does God seem to listen to this sinner giving him the best things in life, while I who serve him daily have to suffer like this?  Sometimes we have that feeling of being abandoned even when we pray intently.  But prayer is not about comparisons and it is not a race as to who is the better person who can win God’s hearing.  But in our gospel today Jesus is telling us that prayer is about trust.  We don’t have to prove anything to God after all.  If we do, we will always fall short anyway.  But trust opens us to the opportunity of putting ourselves in the Father’s care, in the Father’s assuring caress and in the Father’s providence.  That is why when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray he told them to pray by starting it with the address, our Father.

Today let us learn to pray as we ought to, to recover the real meaning of prayer so that we can truly profit from it and learn how to do it during and starting this season of lent.