A Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Exodus 17:8-13   2 Timothy 3:14-4:2   Luke 18:1-8   

As a kid, I was forever trying to build a tree house. My father was a grocer, not a carpenter. So there was not a lot of material ready to hand. Nor talent. I was just beginning my now life-long record of never nailing a nail in straight. 

Neighborhood boys contributed what they had of either stuff or skill, but I selected the site, a Chinese elm near my house. Not nearly as noble as the backyard cottonwood would have been, but those branches were far too high to scale. 

Sadly, we never advanced beyond two or three boards, ruefully nailed into branches. The geometry was against us, preventing the construction of any arboreal platform.

Why a tree house? It was more than the promissory explanation I gave to Don Peter when I signed him up for construction. I told him that we could live in the tree far into adulthood and that we would never eat anything but uncooked chocolate chip cookie dough. No, it had something to do with the idea of rising out of the ordinary world. It would still be close enough to survey, but from a secure height that I commanded, to which only I and my fellows had access. 

It is a primal desire to rise above or to go beyond the world, and it is linked to an equally primordial intuition that there is more to this world than we can see, that another world begins where this one expires. Of course, that other world does not lie at some far end of the globe, over a distant horizon. No, it must be quite near, yet still out of reach to ordinary folk, somehow hidden from all but a few. 

It is possible to rise above the world. This desire, this intuition of the human heart, corresponds to the proclamation of the Gospel. Scoffers dismiss the congruity between the two as a clear expression of wish fulfillment. They suggest that religions simply pronounce our desires to be realized.

But we believers are not so easily convinced that we have been hoodwinked. We see ourselves as having been created to long for that which lies beyond the world. And however else we might describe God, God is surely beyond both us and our world. So we are not so sure that longing for another world, finding satisfaction within it, equals delusion.

But let’s be clear. The only time we come close to finding such a world, to locating its portal, is during prayer, and that is true whether the prayer is private or communal. 

Consider first the communal. Catholic and Orthodox Christians are united in their understanding of the Eucharist as more than an exercise in pedagogy and entertainment, more than preaching and music. No, we understand ourselves to be entering another world in the liturgy. Hence our many references to praying with the saints and angels, and to offering the Sacrifice of the Lamb at the very altar of God. 

Sadly, the contemporary Catholic defense of the Mass often rings as though it would reduce this heavenly assembly to the reception of holy Communion. But as St. Augustine pointed out so long ago, there would be no Communion given from the altar without the communion of heaven and earth that gathers around it.

If you, therefore, are Christ’s body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! You are saying “Amen” to what you are: your response is a personal signature, affirming your faith. When you hear “The body of Christ,” you reply “Amen.” Be a member of Christ’s body, then, so that your “Amen” may ring true! (Sermon 272).

We also access a hidden world, one that lies above and beyond us, when we enter private prayer. That means more than presenting our petitions to God. Requests are a small subset of prayer, though, for all too many Christians, they almost exhaust their entry into the world of the divine. If all you do is ask things of God—however true your needs might be—you are somewhat like a neighbor who tacks a note to the door, rings and runs away. You are never, on this side of the grave, going to meet your own neighbor.

To live in this life in the presence of God is to return frequently to prayer. We must be like Moses, who does not drop his beseeching arms until the battle is won. Otherwise, the world that lies beyond us begins to fade, just as surely as the imagination of children withers with the advance of age. But the fundamental vision of our childhoods is not intended to pass away. There is someplace over the rainbow, there is a land of promise that lies beneath, behind and beyond us. We go there each time we truly pray.

Before he went on to philosophize about God, St. Anselm of Canterbury insisted that we would never understand God without seeking to be with God in prayer. God is not an obscure fact. He is an elusive person. Anselm wrote:

Insignificant man, escape from your everyday business for a short while, hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares and troubles and be less concerned about your tasks and labors. Make a little time for God and rest a while in him.

Enter into your mind’s inner chamber. Shut out everything but God and whatever helps you to seek him; and when you have shut the door, look for him. Speak now to God and say with your whole heart: I seek your face; your face, Lord, I desire (Proslogion, 1).

Of course, even when we pray—and pray well—this world remains forever just beyond our reach. We can almost see it; we can certainly sense it. As St. Augustine put it so well so long ago, we have not yet gained the homeland. We are still on the road, still in the land of longing.

We are but travelers on a journey without as yet a fixed abode; we are on our way, not yet in our native land; we are in a state of longing, but not yet of enjoyment. But let us continue on our way, and continue without sloth or respite, so that we may ultimately arrive at our destination (Sermon 103, 1).

Some people grow tired of longing. They are not all like the widow who will not relent until she is heard. But prayer is more than being heard. Our Lord promises us that, whatever the result, we will indeed be heard. 

Prayer is about longing, about almost entering another world. Indeed, the longer we give ourselves over to prayer, the less it becomes about needs and desires. For we have only one real need, only one true desire: to find our way home, to find the one who loves us, the one who created, redeems and calls to us.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.