17th Sunday 2013
Robert VerEecke, S.J.
Keep it simple. That’s the message that I’m hearing today from the
scriptures and from Pope Francis at World Youth Day in Brazil.
I don’t know if you’ve been following Pope Francis in his visit to Rio to
gather with millions of youth from around the world but his message is
stunningly “simple”.
Speaking to Brazil's bishops, he said ordinary Catholics didn't understand
such lofty ideas and needed to hear the simpler message of love, forgiveness
and mercy that he said was at the core of the Catholic faith.
“At times we lose people because they don't understand what we are saying,
because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an
intellectualism foreign to our people," he said. "Without the grammar of
simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish
for God in the deep waters of his mystery.”
Concerned about the exodus of so many from the church for evangelical
congregations, Francis offered a breathtakingly blunt list of explanations for
the “exodus”.
“Perhaps the church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their
needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold,
perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid
formulas,” he said. “Perhaps the world seems to have made the church a
relic of the past, unfit for new questions. Perhaps the church could speak to
people in their infancy but not to those come of age.”
Keep it simple, he says. Know the Beatitudes and Matthew 25. They are the
blueprint for Christian living.
Keep it simple, Jesus tells his disciples. When you pray, no need for long
run-up sentences with subordinate clauses. Pray from the heart, pray to God,
your heavenly father with a heart filled with gratitude and ask for what you
need your daily bread, forgiveness and mercy and be with us as we face the
challenges of every day living.
Ask, seek, knock. The answer will come. It’s always a “yes”, even when it
first feels like a “no”.
A parishioner gave me an Anne Lamott book for my birthday and I just got
around to reading it. It’s called, Help! Thanks! Wow! The three most
important prayers. She focuses on the simplicity and importance of three
prayers we all find ourselves saying from time to time: the prayer for when
we feel desperate or hopeless (Help!), the prayer for when we feel fulfilled
(Thanks!), and the prayer for when we feel awed by the beauty around us
(Wow!).
How simple is that.
Prayer is about
getting outside of your
own self and hooking
into something greater
than that very, very
limited part of our
experience here — the
ticker tape of thoughts
and solutions, and
trying to figure out
who to blame. ...
"It's sort of like blinking your eyes open. ... It's sort of like when the Wizard
of Oz first — when Dorothy lands in Oz and the movie goes from black and
white to color, and it's like having a new pair of glasses, and you say,
'Wow!'"
St Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast we celebrate this Wednesday, was a
master of the simplicity of prayer. In his Spiritual Exercises he invites us to
pray a “colloquy” that is speaking as one friend speaks to another. No need
to stand on formalities. Speak to God, to Jesus, to Mary as one friend speaks
to another. Like Abraham speaks to God in the reading from Genesis. Just
keep it simple.