17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Luke 11, 1-13
One of the best-selling books lately is the “…for Dummies” series. This series is so popular because it has something for everybody. From “Ipad for Dummies”, “Auto Repair for Dummies”, “Parenting for Dummies,” and even “Catholicism for Dummies”. It is a series of instructional and reference books for everybody who needs to get a crash course on any topic that they want.
In the gospel today, we have the apostles requesting from Jesus a “Prayer for Dummies” instruction. Most probably, the disciples saw how Jesus prayed. Throughout the gospels, the evangelists have emphasised the importance of prayer to the life of Jesus. It seems that every time Jesus was to make an important decision in his life, he is portrayed as having prayed the whole night first. So for his disciples, they wanted to pray like Jesus. They must have admired how Jesus prayed and they wanted to know how to do it properly.
We say that the “Lord’s Prayer” is the perfect prayer because it contains everything we want to say to the Lord. First, this prayer is taught by Jesus himself, so with Jesus as our teacher on how to pray, how can things go wrong? Second, it has all the elements that are essential to make a good prayer to God. The “Lord’s Prayer” adores God and makes us surrender to his will. It also tells us to ask forgiveness with the expectation that we are forgiving our brothers and sisters ourselves. It teaches us to ask for our “daily bread”, for God to provide us with all that we need in daily life and most importantly, we ask for guidance and help in times when we are tempted by the devil.
Of course, even if the “Lord’s Prayer” is the perfect prayer, in the more than two thousands years of tradition of the church, there are countless kinds of prayers that were developed. And nowadays, with more inter-religious dialogue, we also adapt other methods of prayer from other religions and make it Christian. Examples of these are Centring Prayer, Qi Gong, various meditations. We are also seeing a revival of ancient forms of Christian prayers, like the Liturgy of the Hours, Lectio Divina and others. We can also make our own kinds of prayer, for prayer in essence is a conversation with God.
One time, while browsing my Facebook page, I saw this post from one of my friends; God doesn’t say “no” to prayer. He answers prayers in three ways: ‘Yes’, ‘Later’ and ‘I have a better idea’. In the second part of the gospel for today, Jesus assures us that all our prayers will be answered if we are persistent and at the same time he also assures us that our Father in heaven will give whatever we need and more.
That is why in prayer, we should be persistent and persevering. It is only by continuously being close to the Father through prayer that we will truly be happy, because God will provide whatever we need, we just need to be open enough to let his will be done in us.
So when we pray, let us pray the “Lord’s Prayer” slowly and really meaning the words that we say. It is the perfect prayer but to be effective it must be prayed perfectly. Aside from the “Lord’s Prayer”, we should not be afraid to make our own prayer also. If we are afraid, whether we would not do it right, let us do it anyway. Our Father in heaven will know what is in the deepest parts of our heart more than we know ourselves, so let us not be afraid to talk to God. He is there listening to everything that we say. What we have to do is to actually stop, be quiet and pray. And with this we are assured by Jesus himself that his Father is there, ready to answer what we need.