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The Roman Catholic Monastery of the Holy Cross was founded in 1989 and became a Benedictine house of the Subiaco Congregation in 2000. We follow a traditional contemplative life, chanting Psalms seven times a day and singing Gregorian chant at the Eucharist. We do this in a distinctive way by living our monastic life on the South Side of Chicago. Prior Peter, the author of this blog, was appointed Prior in August of 2004.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Twenty-Eight Sunday in OT - Dom Peter

This past month, my mother and her siblings had to help move my ninety-one-year-old grandmother into assisted living. She is one of the most energetic people I have ever known, a tough German, and so this transition has been especially poignant. Moreover, she has been praying for years now (and she is famous for her intensity in prayer) that God would allow her to die in her home. Last year, my oldest uncle asked her if it wouldn’t be better to pray that God’s will be done and for the grace to accept it. She thought about it for a moment and then responded with her characteristic Teutonic honesty, “I can’t trust Him!”

Many people come to the monastery to learn how to pray. Often times, people have learned to pray as children, have memorized all kinds of prayer, which is good, but are longing for some kind of genuine conversation with God. Other times, people are quite comfortable sending up petitions of various sorts, but are not sure how to interpret whether God is answering and so become discouraged and perplexed; they begin to wonder if God is really listening or if they maybe aren’t cut out for prayer.

In his ninth Conference, the monk John Cassian develops a tradition from the early church on prayer. This tradition goes back to a passage from Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made.” Cassian interprets supplications to mean confession of sin and begging pardon. “Prayers” are then considered to be vows and good resolutions made to God. Intercessions are what they sound like, as are thanksgivings. Today’s gospel gives us a good lesson in prayer: intercessions come easy, thanksgivings are easily gone. Just as I suspect that a desire for prayer is just as lively today as it was in the time of the Apostles, I suspect that the neglect of thanksgiving is just as prominent. Is the bewilderment we face in prayer connected to a lack of thanksgiving?

Today’s story is, like so many of the stories in the gospels, much more complex on close inspection than it appears on first reading. Are we sure that the ‘other nine’ did not give thanks to God, maybe on their way to see the priest, maybe with a votive sacrifice of some sort? This is a question that has cropped up for me in this passage since I was a child. Is Jesus then saying that He is God? Or how about the final word from the Lord that the Samaritan’s faith has saved him? Are the others not saved? Why is only this man said to be ‘saved by faith’? Did not the others take Jesus’ word on faith to go to the priests? Would they have gone off if they only thought that they would be turned away again? What exactly did these others do wrong?

St. Luke’s gospel sometimes gives the impression of stringing together random incidents, but generally rewards closer study of adjacent texts. So last Sunday, we had this other curious incident. The Apostles ask Jesus, “Increase our faith!” What a fine, direct prayer. Should we not all be asking this when our prayer falters? And yet, Jesus does not answer to the effect that this desire for an increase of faith is somehow meritorious and then grant their request. In fact, He seems to scold the disciples, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed…” He then gives this puzzling example of the unworthy servant doing only what he was told.

Yet, here we seem to be getting closer to an answer. The ten lepers did ‘what they were told’; they went off to show themselves to the priests. Well, actually, the one who receives praise today hasn’t yet completed the task given to him by the Lord. Is there some connection between the fact that he is a Samaritan and the fact that he alone turned back? Perhaps he didn’t have as far to go to see a priest, since they are on the border of Samaria already, whereas Jews probably would have needed to get to Jerusalem. He had time to swing around and head back toward Jesus. Or perhaps since he took the chance of hanging out with Jews and approaching a Jewish rabbi, he wasn’t expecting his request to be heard and so was more overjoyed at recognizing the miracle. Is this the meaning behind “Your faith has healed you?” Have the others figured on the reward based on obedience to the Law by contrast?

We should, of course, not be too quick to contrast faith and obedience. I suggested earlier that obedience is often an act of faith. But there is a formal side to obedience and a material side, as Jews and Christians alike have always known. “God loves a cheerful giver,” while the person who “fasts twice a week [and] gives tithes of all that he gets,” is not thereby justified if he expects his reward. There is always this danger to the Law, which is meant to bring us to God: that we will turn it into something by which we try to prove to ourselves and to others that we are succeeding in the contest of self-generated holiness.

At the monastery, we have been receiving an increasing number of mailings from all sorts of initiatives for vocations to the priesthood and to religious life. I’m all for increased numbers of priests and religious—if they are genuinely called to that life by God. But often times, these sorts of initiatives strike me as efforts to manufacture success out of increased effort, even effort in the area of prayer. The idea goes that if we offer so many novenas and spend so many hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament, then God has to do what we think he ought to and reward us with more priests. At the end of this, how often do we thank God for the priests that we already have and even more, for the good being done in all the Body of Christ by the laity as well as by the clergy and consecrated persons?

Similarly, how often do we fret over details when things don’t go the way we want in other areas of life? We so often today hear things like, “Someone ought to fix that; heads ought to roll; we need to find competent bishops/presidential candidates/people to run the CTA, ad nauseum. Or on a more personal level, we interpret areas of our lives that we find unacceptable as evidence that we are doing something wrong, that we need to try harder. I suspect that we suffer more profoundly by the anxiety over having to figure out what God wants so as to make life easier. Maybe we can do everything right and still suffer; certainly it happened to someone I know. Do we take these concerns to God and then remember to thank Him for the incomparable salvation that we already have received? I condemn myself first of all in saying this, so I hope that my offering this reflection is not thereby too much diminished, because it is the truth. We are never going to present ourselves perfected to God by our own obedience. On the other hand, God has already saved us, healed us, forgiven us in Jesus Christ. We gather today to celebrate the Eucharist, that is, thanksgiving. Let us not forget that this Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith. If we are a people of faith and thanksgiving, we can be healed and saved wherever we are.

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