Pope Francis and Young Life's Day of Prayer

There is nothing more necessary to the Christian life than prayer.  It is our lifeline to God, an ever-accessible means to commune with the Father.  Martin Luther King once said, “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”  Therese of Lisieux called prayer “a surge of the heart, a simple look turned toward heaven.”  So today, Young Life’s Day of Prayer, we turn our gaze toward heaven, allowing our lungs to fill with the Spirit of God and our hearts to surge on behalf of lost kids.

 On this Day of Prayer, I’d like to share with you a simple guide that has helped multitudes around the world to draw near to God and enter into meaningful prayer.  This guide was composed by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, and reflects the beautiful simplicity of this man of God that both Catholics and non-Catholics have come to admire.  You only need the five fingers of your hand to remember this easy guide to prayer:

1. The thumb is the closest finger to you. So start praying for those who are closest to you. They are the persons easiest to remember. To pray for our dear ones is a “sweet obligation.”

2. The next finger is the index. Pray for those who teach you, instruct you and heal you. They need the support and wisdom to show direction to others. Always keep them in your prayers.

3. The following finger is the tallest. It reminds us of our leaders, the governors and those who have authority. They need God’s guidance.

4. The fourth finger is the ring finger. Even that it may surprise you, it is our weakest finger. It should remind us to pray for the weakest, the sick or those plagued by problems. They need your prayers.

5. And finally we have our smallest finger, the smallest of all. Your pinkie should remind you to pray for yourself. When you are done praying for the other four groups, you will be able to see your own needs but in the proper perspective, and also you will be able to pray for your own needs in a better way.

Allow this simple rule to guide your prayer today.  Share it with your friends.  Teach it to your kids.  Pass it along to your teenage friends to whom you minister.  We are one in prayer!

Merton on the Mass

It isn’t very difficult to see that Merton has something quite pointed to say in this story (see my last post on The Art of Missing the Forest for the Trees).  On the surface, it would seem that the primary issue is racial equality and integration (keep in mind Merton told this story in the full tumult of the 1960s).  Yet Merton chose to direct his commentary toward the true lightening rod of the narrative: the Eucharist.  The churchgoers were so incensed by the priest’s sermon that they left prior to receiving the Eucharist, the body of Christ, the “source and summit of the Christian life.”[1]  Thus we have the consternated words of warning hurled at the priest as the offended parishioner stormed out, “If I miss Mass today it’s your fault!”

There is an implication of guilt and punishment here.  The parting parishioner assumes that there will be a penalty to pay because he was not able to partake in the Eucharistic meal.  For those Catholic readers, the guilt of moral obligation will already be ringing in your ears.  Yet in a beautiful turn of parody, Merton uses this very idea of judgment in his response:

 Not only do we see in these men a flat refusal to listen to the plain meaning of the word of God. . . there is also a complete moral and spiritual insensitivity to the meaning of the Mass as the Christian Agape, the union of brothers in Christ, a union from which no believer is to be excluded.  To exclude a brother in Christ from this union is to fail to “judge the Body of Christ” and hence to “eat and drink judgment to oneself.” (1 Corinthians)[2]

The proverbial forest missed in Merton’s provocative story is nothing short of Christ and the kingdom of shalom which Christ so insistently preached, a kingdom which, projected into the 1960s, envisioned “little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.  Eucharist is not a private ritual for personal sanctification.  It is the real presence of God with the power to mobilize the people of God to build a civilization of love.  That civilization is marked by reconciliation, right relationship, wholeness and justice. “The ritual action of Eucharist is powerful when it is allowed to penetrate the life and action of the people, and transform them into an effective embodiment of the love that is God, a sacrament of his presence.”[3]   There is an essential relationship between ritual, especially sacramental ritual as momentous as the Eucharist, and the lived realities of human beings which serve as primary witnesses to Christ’s presence among us.

I’ll let Merton get the last word, but I pray that we, the whole body of Christ, will take this universal meaning into our own lives and religious practice.

Is not their attendance at Mass a legal formality?  Formalities, abstractions, are not enough.  Gestures of conformity do not make a man a Christian, and when one’s actual conduct obviously belies the whole meaning of the gesture, it is an objective statement that one’s Christianity has lost it’s meaning.[4]

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[1]             Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 11.

[2]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105.

[3]             Mary Peter McGinty, The Sacrament of Christian Life, Chicago, IL: The Thomas More Press, 1992, 50.

[4]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105-106.