Getting Ready to Pray                     

There is the ancient question about why there is anything. There are other “big questions” as well floating through the liturgy towards which we are moving these early days of February. “Why am I, who and where I am at this time of history?” “What am I to do with time and the other realities of my life?”

We are praying these days, not so much for clarification, but for the faith and the courage which faith provides to live toward peaceful trust. We can pray with the experiences of our time and talents which can lead us to that peaceful, though unexplainable contentment. We pray to rise from our debilitating paralysis from fear and doubt. We pray for the spirit of the adventure of faith which proves that life’s questions are valid, but not absolutely essential for real fulfillment.

Some Thoughts 

Job, in our First Reading, has had a hard time of it. He is downer and outer than anybody else in Scriptures. He is experiencing the crucible of fidelity. The Devil makes a bet with God that if Job is squeezed hard enough he will cry out in disbelief. The devil says that Job is a man of faith only because he has everything he wants and has it within his control.

So his family, his possessions and even his own physical well-being are removed. He is struggling to stay faithful. He is a most conventional or normal human being. These lines are his answers which are being wrenched from his mouth by the twisting of his body and soul. He has lost everything except some trust in the value of life, and very little even of that. His “ouch” we all know in our own lives. 

Our Second Reading, which is not usually thematically united with the First Reading and the Gospel, does have Paul’s spin on the meaning of life for him. Paul was an unusual man who found the meaning in life from his preaching the Gospel. Paul preaches what he has received through Jesus Christ, the Good News of freedom from condemnation.

In the Gospel we continue seeing of Jesus in his early days. He is curing humans, not of their humanity, but of those illnesses which prevent them from the usual way of living. Simon’s mother-in-law rises from her bed of fever and begins doing something good with her being well. So many others were healed that when he went off to pray by himself, his friends came to find Him. Everybody in town was looking for him. He refused that invitation and left with his friends for other villages and folks to cure. Jesus had received his meaning for his life, his “purpose,” which was to be and live his being the Good News.

I could want to be unusual and in many ways, thank God, I am. As with Job, I can desire to have the natural “ouchings” of life. I would not want to live a faith which trivialized losses, sufferings and confusions with easy answers. Eventually Job proved unusual in that he wrestled with God and the meaning of suffering: faith. I can desire to live the unconventional way Paul did. He was not cool, nor cooled by what others thought of him and his way of preaching.

I recently was told by someone attending a talk I was giving that I spoke too quickly and was boring. I had a little Job-like response of wondering why I was doing this and what was the use of it at all. Whether they had given me a simple correction or an expression of frustration I do not know. I rose from my temporary bed of doubt–fever and went on with the talks. This is a way of my being unusual, I claim: not odd, but not lying down in my Job-like bed of self–question and expression of doubts about God and God’s working through me. If I am boring, so be it. I will try to be—not what you think I should be—but even more of what God would have me be.

O come, let us worship God and bow low
before the God who made us,
for he is the Lord our God.
Psalm 95:6-7