“This is my chosen Son; listen to him.”

          Last Sunday we talked about the weapons of Christ, the arma Christi. We saw how the instruments of the Passion, which seem to be the soldiers’ weapons become Christ’s weapons with which He willingly and purposefully undergoes the Passion. Likewise, we saw that Christians, seeking to unite ourselves with Christ’s saving work, take up the weapons of Lent: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.

We saw that one of the benefits of fasting is a sharpness and clarity in listening to the Lord. That might not be the case at first, but fasting is like anything else that can be learned with persistence. One week might not have been quite enough to get into that rhythm of spiritual clarity through fasting, but nevertheless, the Church invites to consider today the second Lenten weapon: Prayer.

          I argued in last Sunday’s sermon that we need not just more head knowledge or heart passion. We need more gut; we need more desire. We saw that the satisfaction of so many of our desires is only a few taps away. This frictionless world where the satisfaction of desire is so easily attainable has left us thoroughly bored. Not just practically bored, but existentially bored. This existential boredom leads us to sloth (sorrow in the face of the good), which means that we are not just bored: We are boring.

          This is directly related to one of our biggest struggles in prayer: We give up too easily. We expect instant satisfaction. We expect to feel something immediately. (And, we expect feeling and sensation to be the primary result – not God’s chief goal for our prayer.)

          You can have a better experience of prayer by living in such a way that your desires are not constantly being satisfied. Resist the frictionless world – accept difficulty. In fact, program difficulty into your life – particularly, program in difficulty in accessing the things that fill your head with constant noise and the tendency to move rapidly from one task to another.

          A friend suggested putting my phone in black and white mode as a mortification. Phone manufacturers don’t want you to do this, so they hide that setting pretty well. They don’t want you to put your phone in black and white mode, because they know that if you do, you will spend less time on it. Like every single person on the face of the planet who owns a smartphone, I still wish that I spent less time with the thing. But it’s gotten better, and I get sucked in less easily. It also might make me think twice the next time I’m tempted to spend hundreds of dollars on a new one: Why spend all that money for a device whose functioning I will intentionally limit for my own wellbeing?

          You can be better prepared for prayer in the rest of your life by monotasking. We think that we are really good at multitasking. But we aren’t. Not even the women – you might be better at it than us men are, but you aren’t as good at is as you think! Do more monotasking. Focus on doing one thing well at a time, whenever you can. You’ll find that focusing in prayer is not as hard.

          Of course, you must make time for prayer. People tell me that they’re always praying – they’re praying in the car, they’re praying while they’re at the gym, etc. It could be that most Catholics are way ahead of me in their mastery of “the practice of the presence of God” – what the experts call that constant awareness of God’s presence and doing all things out of our relationship with Him. Or, it could be that we’re really overestimating the quality of multi-tasked prayer. See “monotasking,” above.

          It’s great to recollect God’s presence and talk to Him – spontaneously, or through vocal prayers like the Rosary – while driving, exercising, etc. But if you set up a time to talk to a friend, and you realize while you’re talking that your friend is actually cooking dinner or cleaning the house, or whatever else, you might have suspicions about how much that conversation actually means to your friend. And if the only time you ever talk to your friend is when he or she is doing other things, you might start to wonder whether you’re really friends at all. Are you actually friends with God, or do you just talk to Him while you’re multitasking?

          How much time should we actually give to God in prayer? St. Francis de Sales, one of the great advocates for a true interior life being accessible not just for priests and religious, but for lay people as well, said that everyone should pray 30 minutes a day – except for people who are very busy, who should pray for an hour day. The busier we are, the more we need prayer.

          Thirty minutes might seem like a lot, but maybe you could start by giving God one percent of your day: 15 minutes. It’s interesting that Scripture and tradition give us a guideline for sharing our material resources: ten percent, which is significantly more than we’re asked to give of our time. Maybe that’s because letting go of our time, giving our time to God in prayer, is for most people even harder.

          You might have promised God that you would pray more during Lent. “More” is a dangerous word. Define it. Put a number on it. Otherwise you can’t be accountable, and you can’t actually succeed.

          One of the great mysteries of prayer, is that prayer really becomes deep and sustaining when you realize that I’m not primarily the one praying. We saw last Sunday that fasting is our chance to enter into Christ’s fasting, into His clarity, focus, and freedom from material concerns. Likewise, prayer is really all about entering into Christ’s prayer. Before you start to prayer, He is already praying.

          This is what we see in today’s Gospel. Christ takes His close inner circle, Peter, James, and John, up Mount Tabor to pray. He invites them to pray with Him, and as He prays, something incredible happens. Moses and Elijah appear and speak to Him about what is to happen in the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. The Lord is made dazzling white and His face shines with the glory He will have after His Resurrection.

          You might have heard that prayer doesn’t change God, it changes you. When you spend time with someone, you get to know her heart. That is what happens to Christ in His human nature on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. Prayer changes us to be like God. It changes our hearts. Slowly, but surely.

          But while this is happening to Christ, Peter, James, and John – are asleep. Sometimes we miss what is happening in prayer because we literally are asleep. Sometimes we are asleep through a myriad of distractions because our brains have been rewired to flit from thing to thing. Sometimes we are asleep through a numbness to God that comes from being numb to our neighbor in need.

           Praying in a way that lives into the reality that Christ and the Holy Spirit are already praying to the Father inside us is not easy. I at least do not come to this church every morning, kneel down in the fourth row, and instantly feel an overwhelming surge of Christ’s prayer rising out of me to the Father. The fruit of whether prayer is real is not in the feelings that you experience during prayer. It’s much more like fasting. Fasting isn’t working when it’s making you feel good. It’s in the rest of your life. Both prayer and fasting are real when there is evidence of conversion in the rest of your life. Are you showing fruits of conversion?

          There is one time, though, when we are guaranteed to enter Christ’s prayer to the Father, and that’s when the Body of Christ prays at Mass. At Mass, we are entering into Christ’s prayer to the Father. It is going on before we get here, and it continues after we leave. (Which, incidentally, is why Mass does not get out early when it lasts less than an hour, and why it does not “go over” when it lasts more than an hour.)

          Someone told me once that he felt like I wasn’t really talking to him when I was saying the prayers at the altar. I invited him to listen more closely to those prayers, because none of them are directed to you and me. This is why the priest historically faced the tabernacle during Mass, not because he was turning his back on people, but because he wasn’t talking to them in the first place for those parts of the Mass.

          God’s covenant with Abraham today ends with Him giving Him a land. Jewish history is all about the search for a promised land, the back and forth of coming to posses it, losing it, coming back, losing it again. This is our spiritual promised land: the place where Heaven meets Earth, where in His Body the Church, Christ Himself prays to the Father as on Mount Tabor. This has serious implications for the way we worship: It means that we should strive to speak with Christ’s voice, which is why the Church has traditionally used the Book of Psalms as Her “hymnal,” because Christians have always thought that it was Christ Himself speaking in the Psalms. It means that the Mass is not judged by its relevance to the contemporary world or by the feelings it produces in those who take part. It is the prayer of Christ, and we are invited to enter that prayer.

          Will you make time for Him? Will you give Him at least one percent? Will you live in a way that forms your heart to desire Him? Set a concrete goal, and start being faithful to it today.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

II Sunday of Lent, A.D. MMXXV