Overview:

Wednesday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Wednesday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

“Amen, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth
about anything for which they are to pray,
it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.” (Mt 18:19-20)

Find today’s readings here.

I once had a sick friend whose family asked everyone they knew to pray for her. And then they asked those people to ask everyone they knew to pray for her. Before they knew it, they had heard from enough pray-ers that they had good reason to believe that there was at least one person praying for her in every corner of the globe.

In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus teaches about the importance of collective prayer. When one person asks God for something, God (of course) listens. But Jesus highlights here that when a community, even of only two or three, prays together, Christ is already present.

“For all the prayers we hold in the silence of our hearts.”

Whenever I hear this language spoken by the priest during the prayers of the faithful at Mass, it strikes me as profoundly beautiful. It calls my attention to whatever I might be holding privately and not praying for out loud, but it also reminds me that my fellow congregants are also silently asking God for the things that weigh heavily on them. I might not know the particulars, but I appreciate this reminder to lift the people around me up in prayer—and to recognize that their inner worlds are deeper than I can comprehend.

During the prayers of the faithful, we have this kind of opportunity that Jesus talks about in the Gospel, to join our voices and to invite God’s presence into our midst. It’s a privilege to pray with others—when they’re friends whose joy and suffering we know a bit more about, and when they are relative strangers whose lives are more mysterious to us.

My friend’s story didn’t necessarily have a happy ending in the traditional sense; eventually she succumbed to her illness. As the loss of every young life is, her death was a tragedy. And yet it was clear that all those prayers in all those places over all those months still meant something. Today’s Gospel gives us a clue about why: When we gathered in prayer, even at a great distance, Christ was present there. With her. With her family. With me. With others around the globe whose names and faces I don’t know.

There’s a place for both private prayer and also for collective prayer. May we take the time today and this week to carve out some space for each one, offering to God our personal needs and also gathering our hearts with those of our community near and far.

Molly Cahill is Associate Director of Digital Strategy at America. She was a 2020-2021 O'Hare Fellow.