Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius February 12, 2017 Spiritual ponderings
I hope these reflections on prayers will give you the freedom to discover your own style of prayer that brings you closer to God.
3. Don’t Compare In a small country village in Sicily, there were two brothers, renowned members of the local Mafia. They were mean, bad and very rich. No one had a good word to say about them. Indeed, everyone seemed to have a story about how they had either been cheated or maligned by the brothers.
One day, one of the brothers, Luigi died. The surviving brother, Jo - with a rare touch of conscience felt that something nice should be said about his brother Luigi at the funeral. So he went to the local pastor and said: I know that folk in the village hate us, and they don’t know the half of what we have been up to. However, I want you to say something nice about Luigi at his funeral. I want you to say that Luigi was a saint when you preach. If you will agree to do that, I’ll show my gratitude by giving $100,000.00 towards the repair of the church. And here’s the check for the amount. If you don’t, you know my reputation. The priest thought about it fleetingly agreed and took the check.
A week later, the whole village turned out for the funeral and everyone wondered what the priest would say. After the opening hymns had been sung and the readings had been read, the priest climbed up into the pulpit and delivered his sermon. Eyeing the brother, sitting in the front row, the priest said how evil the pair of them had been. He went on to say how Luigi had cheated, not only in business but on his wife, how he had lied and how had had no concern for anyone but himself. In fact he went on to say what a downright scoundrel Luigi had been.
After ten minutes of preaching in this vein, the priest, being the man of integrity, ended his sermon with these words: "But compared to his brother, Jo - Luigi was a saint!”
Another danger in the spiritual life is to find ourselves comparing ourselves to others. I remember when I had been in the seminary for two years and a potential new student came to Mass. This potential seminarian stuck out like a sore thumb because everything he did was so exaggerated. For example if we could respond “Amen” to a prayer; he would respond “AAAMMMEEENNN!!!” While there was a part of me that found this very annoying there was also a part of me that thought that maybe he responded this way because he was going deeper in prayer. This potential seminarian also a much cooler vocation story than me which included being in the navy on shore leave and getting lost on a desert island and being rescued by Catholic monks. My vocations story was nothing near that exciting. Fast forward many years and he is a lawyer and father of three and I am a Catholic priest. Each day I thank God for giving me the grace to get over my desire to think that the other guy had a better prayer life than me.
Sadly in my time as a priest, I have met many people who have given up on praying because they think they know someone whose prayer life is better. They have given into the illusion that prayer is some sort of competition. Prayer though is between you and God and no one else. We can have mentors, guides, and directors who help us mature in our prayer life but we can never say that our prayer life is better or worse than another.
4. Communal/Individual My parish youth minister is fond of saying “The Catholic life was never meant to be lived alone.” As Catholics we believe that God did not come to save us as individuals but rather as a community (a Church). If we take a close look at Jesus’ ministry on earth, He made every effort to include others as a part of His ministry and thus community prayer is important to Catholics.
Community prayer is important but this does not mean individual prayer experiences are bad. Quite the contrary there is many times in the Gospel where Jesus would show the importance of private prayer by going off by himself to prayer on a number of occasions.