Life as a Prayer

So often we think that prayer is simply a passing moment where we listen to God or ask for something but the mystery of today’s liturgy reveals to us that…

Life is a prayer.

Today we have heard the passion story from John’s gospel. This account tells us of the condemnation and death of Christ as prophesized by Isaiah in our first reading.

Christ’s death is a prayer.

The God of Creation is a God of prayer. God prayed the universe into existence and prays continually into creation.

Christ’s life too is a prayer. The logos has always been with us and will always be in existence. Jesus’ death is one part of that eternal prayer.

Our lives too are a prayer.

God prayed us into existence through the prayers of our parents. When we come into ourselves as spiritual beings we join further into God’s prayer with our lives.

Each act and event of our lives is a prayer adding to the mystery of God’s creation in the book of our lives.

When we reflect on Jesus’ crucifixion and death we should naturally reflect on our own cross and passing on to God.

What does the prayer of your life look like?… does it reflect the way in which the eternal God acts in creation?

And let us also reflect on what our own deaths might look like.

Will your death be a prayer?

I think that we Christians immersed in a material culture have an inordinate, fear-based, attachment to life. Fundamental to our Christian walk is the primacy of hope in God.

Even Jesus in the Garden deals with this struggle as he asks that the burden of death might be taken from him… Yet he concedes that God’s will is paramount.

Jesus shows us that there is more to life than life itself.

Is there more to our lives than simply living for ourselves?

Would we really let our lives reflect the life of God-made-flesh… the Christ? 
Would we really give our lives for others?

When we walk our lives as a prayer the fear of death is decreased.

A life where each event, action and decision is intentionally attempting to reflect the God who exists in all of Creation… the power of the anti-God is held at bay.

It is natural for humans to desire life. All organisms seek life. The praying human organism however has the gift of grace enabling us to see a bigger picture… Human life has been gifted with the ability to connect with God and trust in the Divine plan.

When I was eight years old I was at a basketball game and stopped to talk with a priest I knew. His name was Fr. Small.  That afternoon he spoke to me showing a genuine interest in my life. He radiated something that was incredibly compelling and compassionate. He radiated a love that seared itself into my eight-year-old brain.

Fr. Small left my hometown to work in East Africa and I did not see him for a long time.

Twenty two years after our conversation at the basketball game I found myself living in community with Fr. Small. I was now a Jesuit like him and we worked together in the same high school campus ministry office. But after only one term he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I became his primary caregiver. In his last months I wrote his letters and eventually fed and washed him. In his last weeks I slept at the foot of his bed and administered his pain medication. On the night he crossed over to God I was holding his hand.

Fr. Small lived his life as a prayer. Each day he sought opportunities to share the peace of Christ with others. He carried his cross well and somehow he lived without letting fear guide him.

When it was his time to go, Fr. Small showed me what the prayer of a dying saint looks like. Even in his physical pain he was filled with a joy that drove him toward the next step in the Christian journey. Rather than fearing death he embraced new life.

The anti-God present in our world, and in our minds, wants nothing more than for us to live in fear. The fear of death is a powerful motivator. It strikes us viscerally.

This afternoon in this Liturgy we celebrate death… we celebrate a moment in the life’s prayer of Christ. This moment of death, this passion, is not the end of the story.

And so it is with us. When “it is finished”…  when it is our time… will we have lived our journey toward death anticipating passing the spirit within us on to new life. Or will we walk in fear. Fear of humiliation, fear of being rejected, fear of loneliness and loss.

Let us begin again now, in these most holy days… let us pick up our crosses and make our lives a prayer of thanksgiving to the life-giver… so that when the time comes to be welcomed into the eternal kingdom our prayer in life will have reflected the hope of the New Life demonstrated by God-made-flesh.