Prayer School

Father Kerry Prendiville
The Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 27, 2025

Today in the Gospel Jesus is taking us to prayer school. He is teaching us what Christian prayer is about. It’s not so much the words he teaches us, even those beloved words of the Lord’s prayer, known to all of us, are important, but rather he’s teaching us about the elements that keep prayer fresh and strong in our lives. There are some attitudes we need to have in order to pray well, and the first among them is persistence. He told us in the parable about the friend who will knock on his friend’s door and ask for bread because he doesn’t have any. We can almost hear the humor of the story when he says that the man may not give him any because of their friendship but he will give it to him if he keeps knocking on the door and disturbing his sleep. Persistence, in other words, is an expression of our desire. The desire of our heart is where we meet God.

The second attitude is confidence, and the confidence to keep asking in faith that when we ask, we have been heard. The knowledge that silence from God is not indifferent, or rather when we remain in the silence and we pray we pray for we shall be heard. He’s not going to give us a stone when we ask for something good. He’s going to refresh us and lighten our load when we ask for something we need. But when we don’t feel like our prayers have been answered immediately we keep praying. We keep coming to God’s throne of grace and every time we do, we’re being stretched for greater glory. Every time we’re being made a larger vessel — a vessel that expands God’s love. 

And so, this teaches us about the heart of God. The heart of God expands to hear his children in prayer. He is never parsimonious with his graces but rather fills us with life and love. 

St. Augustine had an image of prayer which he had learned, I imagine, from his mother St. Monica. She spent almost 20 years begging the Lord, over and over, with daily tears to convert her heretical son. He learned from her that this kind of dogged persistence was helpful, and it was for stretching the heart of the person who prayed. It was making them greater and deeper in faith because they kept coming back to the one who they believed in. Imagine if you were tossed something sweet every time you asked for something nourishing. You’d have lots of sweets but none of the nourishment. 

I was on a plane recently — there’s probably over 100 people on this plane, and I like to sit in the back because it’s supposed to be safest — a person came on with a packed bag that everyone on the plane except the person dragging it knew would never go in the overhead bin, but somehow that person’s mind is stretched to believe that it would. What we stretch is not what we receive or perceive to have received. What we stretch is our heart and this expectation that God will give us all good things. So, let’s let our carry-on “shrink” but our hope and our love increase so that as we travel, we’ll travel with confidence and the persistence of God’s children.