Stay with us Lord

Father Kerry Prendiville
The 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 19, 2025

This beloved widow, this person of great persistence teaches us how to pray. And even if the one who changes his mind is an evil person or a dishonest person, Jesus is telling us the importance of persistence and to pray without growing weary. 

What does it mean to be weary in prayer? I imagine we can identify it when we think, “Does God really hear me?” 

We can identify with weary when we say, “It seems like I’m praying for the same things over and over again.” 

We can identify with weary when we say, “I’m wondering if God is even listening to me.” 

Those situations that don’t change can be very challenging for us. What we fail to recognize sometimes is what’s being changed is our interior. We’re growing in confidence in God, because God listens to his people in prayer. And if God’s first language is silence and what we receive in our prayer is silence, through faith we know that that silence is never ambivalent. 

We’re being asked to pray for great and marvelous things. Our Holy Father Leo has asked us in this month of October, the month of Our Lady, to pray the Rosary especially for peace in Gaza and other war-torn lands. For the safety of Christians and all peoples. That Our Lady’s mantle can surround all peoples of every race, creed, color, and tongue, and that they might know the providential love of God. 

Will our prayers change the situation of Gaza? Will we grow more in faith and love by having prayed as our Holy Father instructs? How could our mother not encourage her sons and daughters? 

In the 1960s, the Carmelite nuns of Lisieux were cleaning the room that Saint Therese the Little Flower used at the end of her life when she died of tuberculosis. A painful death. A death that challenged her faith. In her pain and her agony, she sometimes would think that God was absent or not present — temptation to doubt the God existence of God at times. 

But there’s a secret in that room from 1924, when she died, to 1960, the middle 60s, when they were cleaning this room that the people didn’t know. She had etched into the wood frame of the door, “Jesus is my only love.” 

I wonder if she would have become a saint if they knew she defaced the convent property. “Jesus is my only love.” 

And she would pray that in spite of how she felt and knew that she had the great privilege of belonging to the Lord in his life, in his suffering, and in his death. And her consistent prayer at the end of her life would probably be embodied in those words she quietly and surreptitiously carved into the wood door at her eye level. “Jesus is my only love.” 

In the Mass we pray, “Stay with us Lord.” 

We pray like those disciples on the way to Emmaus, “Stay with us Lord.” 

And in the Eucharist, when we receive his Body and Blood, soul and divinity, we know that Jesus is our only love. 

What we pray and we pray in his name. What we do with our hands, we do it as his hands. Let us renew our faith in the resurrection and the power of Jesus Christ.