Pre-Prayering

Recently I have come across a certain word in several different kinds of literature. Hence, it seems to be an “in” word. “Detritus” is the word. It means several kinds of reduced particles of ground-up rock or decaying biological matter. So now you know why I had to look up. It has Latin roots of course, with quite a picturesque collection of meanings. You will probably be running into it now that you know about it.

Given the above, I am amazed at the amount of detritus I find in my head. With the right stimuli I can recall a lot of things I wish I could send to the un-cycle bin of my mind. Without any stimuli, they seem to just float around in my own personal me-sphere waiting for some prayer time to put them to rest. This recovery time seems, for me, to be a well spent time in prayer. Grace does not say, “Oh, let it go.” Grace says instead, “Let it be a part of how you are created.”

This becomes part of each day’s offering at the Eucharist and the reception of his Holy Body and Blood seems to say, “Live with your self more peacefully, because I do, even your detritus.”

Reflection

We hear a wonderful story about Elijah in today’s First Reading from the First Book of Kings, about the recovery of a son’s life and the recovery of faith for his widowed mother. Elijah is one of the great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. Unlike many of the other prophets he does amazing things, usually for the poor and needy. The others have their duties of denouncing the present causes of God’s coming punishments and announcing calls of repentance. Elijah walks around doing the good deeds which announce the presence of the living and active God.

We hear today how Elijah is taken into the house, as a guest of a widowed mother. While he is staying there, the mother’s son has a breathing attack and seems to be dying on his mother’s lap. She questions whether Elijah has brought the sickness upon her son to punish her for some free-floating guilt she has.

Elijah takes the son from his mother and celebrates a kind of liturgy where he calls upon God and seems to press life into the lad’s body and lungs. Elijah then returns the boy to his mother who then makes her faith statement of praise. In great joy and gratitude the mother acknowledges Elijah not as a punisher from God, but as a Holy Presence of God. It is a little story of how we, as humans, distrust in the hard times of loss and fear and how much easier it is to thank God when we see how things do work out.

The Gospel has a similar little story about a widow who is accompanying the funeral procession of her only son. These are two important elements, her being a widow and her having only one son who is now dead. A husband and a son were signs of God’s blessing a woman in the times of Jesus. He is moved by the sight and approaches the dead man. “Young man, I tell you, arise.” In the same way that Elijah rose the son up, Jesus gives the mother back her son who begins to speak. All who heard him and saw what Jesus had done responded in great proclamations of faith, saying that God had visited his people. The Jewish telegram service began sending reports of this Jesus who is now living out exactly what he announced he would be doing when he unrolled the scroll in his hometown. He was going to be the fulfillment of all the predictions of the coming Anointed One. We will spend the remainder of these Ordinary Times watching, listening to our Savior at his best.

Here’s a little pondering I have been doing about this man who was raised from death and began speaking. We know that the fame of Jesus was spreading throughout Israel. I was reflecting about how exactly did the raised-man live out his life after that. Did he become a celebrity and keep talking about how his short trip was to the “other side”? Was it all about him? For a little while anyway.

There can be a subtle kind of selfishness in our spirituality. Granted, there is much about being personal in our relationship with Jesus, yet our prayer can be all about ourselves, all about me. I do want to be better, more virtuous, trusting and such. I can become a celebrity in my own prayerful way. It is attractive of course, nobody is more interesting to us than ourselves. But there is also God and other people!

I propose that our prayer, our recovery, our relationship with Jesus is completed and perfected by how we are returned to community, to the complete reality of ourselves. The more we have of our own self, the more we are in relationship with others.

Prayer, then, can become a dangerous activity.

“The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer; my God is my saving strength.”

Larry Gillick