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The 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Heroes can be the most unlikely of people. And they can come out of nowhere -- as the Chilean miners reminded us this past week. One of my heroes is a late 19th – early 20th century Frenchman by the name of Charles de Foucauld. Pope Benedict beatified him back in 2005 but De Foucauld didn’t get an early start on holiness. Orphaned at the age of six, he had a stormy adolescence, became an aristocratic playboy, and totally lost his faith. He graduated from St. Cyr, the French West Point, but later got himself dismissed from the French Saharan army for disciplinary problems, including his refusal to remove a mistress from his quarters. He returned home to France full of despair about life, but was mysteriously drawn to the Church of St. Augustin in Paris where he would sit for hours saying over and over again, "God, if you exist, show yourself to me." God answered the prayer in the person of a wise and sympathetic priest who helped reconcile him to his faith. He joined the Trappists and later traveled to Nazareth, where this one-time aristocrat worked as a doorkeeper for a community of nuns. He was later ordained a priest and returned to the Sahara desert to live among a local tribe there. Four times he drafted a Rule for an order of Religious Brothers, but the only man who came to join him quickly gave up. One day he sat down and wrote in his Journal, "Pray for my conversion, so that when I die I may bear fruit." In 1916 he was shot dead by a band of desert raiders, and that was the end of Charles de Foucauld. Well, not quite. In the early 1930s some French seminarians came across his writings and adopted his Rule, banding together in a small community they called the Little Brothers of Jesus. Six years later, the Little Sisters of Jesus were founded and today there are some 1500 religious brothers and sisters working in some of the world’s great cities among the poorest of the poor. All of them claim Charles de Foucauld as their founder. It seems his prayer got answered after all.... And the story doesn't even end there. The writings and the spirituality of de Foucauld are the inspiration for a movement among diocesan priests around the world, including here in Seattle -- a movement called Jesus Caritas, the Love of Jesus. The Jesus Caritas Movement gathers priests together once a month in small groups for prayer and companionship. There are thousands of these groups around the world today and many in this Archdiocese. For forty-three years (nearly all the years I've been a priest), I have been fortunate to belong to one. Prayer. Persistent, persevering prayer. Prayer day in and day out. Prayer in season and out of season. Prayer that is slow to get answered. That's what Charles de Foucauld's life was all about. It's what the scriptural readings for today are all about, too. In the first reading we saw Moses on the mountain top, the weary forces of Israel down on the plain locked in mortal combat with their far superior enemies, the Amelekites. What a powerful image of persistent prayer Moses gives us there, his hands outstretched in supplication to the God of surprises who takes a special delight in making winners out of losers. The Book of Exodus tells us that Joshua mowed down hoards of Amelekites down on the plain, but the real battle that day was fought up on the mountaintop between Moses and God. God, it seems, just couldn't say no to the doggedly persistent Moses who wouldn't stop praying, not even when his arms were ready to fall off. The gospel parable tells the same story: the persistent widow who wouldn't give up on the corrupt judge who respected neither God nor humans. It helps to remember that in biblical times the widow was the ultimate non-person. That's because a woman's value in that culture came from her relationship with her husband. Once she became a widow she lost her claim to her husband's family; she lost her very identity. But the widow of Jesus' parable was no shrinking violet. She pestered that judge mercilessly day after day, giving him not a moment's rest. She absolutely refused to take no for an answer. And finally she got what she was after. She got justice. Sometimes I find it strange that Jesus would encourage us toward such a feisty approach to prayer. Moses only raised his hands, after all: this woman raised her fist! Jesus, it seems, wants our prayer to have some passion in it. Now I know there is a place for prayer that is more pious and passive but that's not Moses’ prayer and it’s not the widow’s prayer. Theirs is passionate prayer, passionate for justice, prayer that pounds away relentlessly. At the end of today's Gospel there is a question that is meant to hit us between the eyes. It goes like this: "When the Son of Man comes will he find any faith on the earth?" Every time I hear that question I realize that the answer to it lies with me. And it lies with you. The answer lies with people of faith who are willing to enter into a frank and persevering relationship with God, people of faith who are slow to take no for an answer. The answer lies with people of faith like you and me who are willing to open the dark recesses of our hurting hearts and cry out to God -- not in easy pieties but in burning words forged in the painful struggles of our lives. God hears these prayers. Maybe not overnight. Maybe not next year. But hear them, God does. Remember Charles de Foucauld. The great challenge for us, of course, is to keep pounding away in prayer even when it seems to get us nowhere, because, crazy as it may sound, our nowhere can be God's somewhere. Let me close with a story I’ve shared before. It comes from the life of St. Teresa of Avila, whose feast we celebrated last Friday -- one of the greatest Christian mystics of all time, and one of the most down-to-earth saints God ever created. Teresa spent her life trying to reform the lax and overly luxurious Carmelite convents of 16th century Spain: an unenviable task, and certainly not one calculated to make her a lot of friends. Toward the end of her life, already old and sick, Teresa set out on yet one more journey to visit one of her convents. After bouncing around for hours in a miserable horse cart, she arrived at her destination in the middle of a thunder storm. She stepped out of the cart, and proceeded to slip and fall face down in the mud. She raised her mud-splashed face and shouted at the heavens, "Lord, why are you doing this to me?" To which the Lord answered, "Teresa, this is the way I treat all my friends." Not to be outdone, Teresa replied to God, "No wonder you have so few!!!" My friends in Christ, the question is: do we have faith strong enough to count ourselves lucky to be among those few...? Father Michael G. Ryan |
