Tony Worner, Leader of Formation at St Agnes’ Catholic Parish, today reads from the Gospel of Luke (11: 5-13) in which Jesus says ‘Ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For the one who asks always receives; the one who searches always finds; the one who knocks will always have the door opened to them’.
Tony says, virtually every article or reflection you read about today’s Gospel, suggests it’s about being persistent in prayer – keep on asking, keep on searching, keep on knocking. St Paul in the First Letter to the Thessalonians commands us to pray without ceasing and I love the saying attributed to St Francis de Sales who said, “Every one of us needs half an hour of prayer each day, except when we are busy – then we need an hour”, and you might remember the elderly Augustinian priest from yesterday who said, that if nothing else, he prays the Our Father, slowly and methodically at least once a day. But this begs the question, what is prayer? Not what are the different types or kinds of prayer but what is prayer. If everyone was asked to share what they thought, we’d probably find as many answers as people listening to this recording. Recently as an exercise for himself, Tony googled what the saints had to say about prayer and ended up with two A4 pages of definitions – some similar but none the same. There is no one definition of prayer. However, there is a common thread and that is, it’s got something to do with God and my relationship with God. Tony leaves us with this thought as we reflect on today’s Gospel – what do you think prayer is? God, source of everything that is good, grant me wisdom to come to know you better, patience to continue struggling to make time for you, and peace to be able to rest in your love. Amen.
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