Homily: 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Going up the mountain to pray

Having just finished a very long day teaching the crowds, healing the sick, and performing the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, as the sun set, Jesus climbed a mountain in order to pray in solitude, and he didn’t emerge until about 3 o’clock in the morning, about six hours later.

Scripture tells us that Jesus frequently went off alone to pray.  You can be sure that his daily prayers consisted of much more than rattling of an “Our Father” and “Hail mary”, so it must be for us. 

This week we celebrated the feasts of two great Saints: Monday was the feast of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests; Friday was the feast of St. Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans.  Both were men of great prayer. 

When John Vianney was assigned to the small parish of Ars, the center of activity of the town was not the parish Church, but the four taverns.  The people of Ars were given to excessive drinking and rowdiness; they had become weak and indifferent towards their religious practices.  This was all pretty typical for a town in the wake of the French Revolution, and pretty typical now in America following our nation’s own cultural revolutions and rejections of Christianity.

Prayer was at the heart of Father Vianney’s mission to gather his sheep back into the fold.  He would wake up early and go to the blessed Sacrament to pray for their conversion.  He would visit homes and businesses and hand out rosaries.  He offered 6am weekday catechism lessons before the people went off to work, teaching them how to pray.

It took 8 years of much fasting and praying and laboring before there was a real transformation of faith in this little town.  There is the great story of the blossoming faith in John Vianney’s parish, and also teaches us something a little about prayer.  An old farmer began coming into the Church to pray in front of the tabernacle.  Day after day, week after week he would come.  John Vianney asked him, what do you do when you come here?  The old farmer said, “I do not know many prayers, I simply look at the good God, and he looks at me.” 

Prayer consists of not merely the multiplication of words, but turning one’s heart and the gaze of one’s mind to God who is love.  We need this type of prayer daily, where we go to a quiet place, the blessed sacrament chapel or a quiet room in our house, and become quiet in God’s presence where we allow him to speak to our hearts.

In the first reading we heard how the voice of God was not in the earthquake, it was not in the fire, it was not in the wind, it was a tiny whispering sound.  Perhaps we cannot hear God speaking to us because we have failed to become quiet enough to hear Him.  He wants to speak quiet words to our hearts which help us to fall in love with Him; but if we have the television going, the iphones going, the video games going all the time, then we will not hear him.  When we fail to pray as we ought, we fail to love God as we ought.

John Vianney wrote, “When we pray with attention and humility of mind and heart, we quit the earth and rise to Heaven.  We reach the outstretched arms of God.  We talk with the Angels and the Saints.”

St. John Vianney would encourage the people of his parish, the farmers, the laborers, the young, the elderly to attend daily Mass.  He said, “when you think of going to Mass on working days, it is an impulse of the grace that God wills to grant you.  Follow it.”  He knew that the Eucharist was the key to bringing powerful renewal to his parish.  This is why in our own day we priests are making an urgent appeal to you to reach out to the fallen away Catholics and to invite them back to Mass. 

When we receive Holy Communion and adore the Host at Holy Mass, when we kneel before the tabernacle or the monstrance, we are like Peter in the Gospel, fixing our gaze on Christ the Lord.  When we do that, we walk on water, we experience a little bit of heaven here on earth.  We know that Peter got in trouble when he took his gaze of Christ, and began to focus not on Christ, but on his own fear.  So we come to Mass weekly, and pray daily, in order to keep our gaze fixed on Christ.

If our mission as Catholics is to be spreading the love of God, we must be in love with God, and that happens in prayer; particularly at Mass and praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

Though the reformers of the French Revolution tried to destroy Christianity in France, St. John Vianney helped to bring a new blossoming of faith. 

About six hundred years before the anti-Catholic, anti-Clerical French Revolution, a new heresy called the Albigensian heresy began to sweep through the land; the heresy led to a weakening of people’s faith and falling away from true religion.   The young Spanish priest, Father Dominic Guzman had been traveling with his bishop on diplomatic missions throughout Europe, and saw the great damage this heresy was doing.  With the blessing of the Pope, Father Dominic began a religious order, the Order of Preachers, known today as the Dominicans, for the preaching of the true faith throughout Europe, to bring the fallen away back to the truth of the Gospel.

Dominic prayed and fasted fervently for the defeat of this Albigensian heresy.  One day, as he knelt in prayer for the conversion of the Albigensians, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him.  “Dear Dominic, do you know what weapon the Most Holy Trinity wants to use to reform the world?” Our Lady asked him.

St Dominic replied: “O my Lady, you know it much better than I do, because, next to your Son Jesus Christ, you have always been the instrument of our salvation.”

Our Lady continued: “ I want you to know that in this kind of warfare the ‘battering ram’ will be the “Angelic Psalter.”  So, if you want to reach these hardened souls and win them to God, preach my Psalter!”  Of course the Angelic Psalter to which she referred is the Rosary. 

Our Lady herself called the rosary a ‘battering ram’.  Of course a battering ram is a large beam, handled by many people, used to knock down the gate of a castle.  It only works with the repetitions of blows on the wall.  In the spiritual warfare of conquering error and heresy, the Rosary is the battering Ram.  It takes many faithful Catholics, praying all those Hail Marys to knock down the gates of hell.  And…the weapon, the rosary, worked…after all, have you met any albigensians lately?

When we hear of all the great darkness in the world today: diseases, war, the persecution of our brother and sister Christians in the middle east, we are meant to do so much more than wring our hands in worry or simply go back to playing “Angry Birds” on our iPhones.  At Fatima, Mary urged Catholics to pray the rosary to obtain peace in the world.  This last May, Pope Francis urged Catholics around the world to pray the rosary.

When we pray the Rosary, when we come to Mass weekly or even daily, we keep our gaze fixed on Christ, we allow him to speak to our hearts amidst all of the distractions in the world.  Through our dedication to prayer, may we receive all of the grace and strength and purification we need to do the work God has for us for the building up of the Church for the glory of God and salvation of souls.