Praying God's Word

Today's Mass readings (found here) bring forth one package to teach us about prayer.

From my childhood, I read the passage from Isaiah 55:10-11 as something akin to magic:

Thus says the LORD:Just as from the heavensthe rain and snow come downAnd do not return theretill they have watered the earth,making it fertile and fruitful,Giving seed to the one who sowsand bread to the one who eats,So shall my word bethat goes forth from my mouth;It shall not return to me void,but shall do my will,achieving the end for which I sent it.

It seemed to me that all that was needed was to quote Scripture, and something powerful would happen. Or, all I had to do was read Scripture, and God would take care of every concern in the world. At one point, I felt this freed me from disconcerting notions like living according to Scripture, and at others, I felt this would give me instant gratification of all my desires, spiritualized though I may have made them.

But today it strikes me clearly that the word that goes forth from the mouth of God is not simply any random verse of Scripture that we pick out for ourselves. The word God sends, reminiscent of course of the Incarnation, the Word who does God's will, is the word which is born of the Holy Spirit in the open field of the heart of the believer, the child of Mary. It is the living and active word which God speaks into the prophet, which will work in that heart because it is God's work, and which will grow and develop of its own accord, because this is the fecund nature of the heart God recreates and enters by grace (Phil. 2:13).

The path to prepare this heart for the Lord is addressed in the psalm: God delivers the just from their distress. He hears the cry of the afflicted. He saves and is close to the crushed. We can know then that distress, afflictions and crushing are part and parcel of the purification of our hearts for God's garden to grow. He will confront every doing of evil within us, and cause remembrance of it to be destroyed out of us. This is a work of his mercy, to be neither feared nor resisted.

And the gospel simply tells us that we are to pray as Jesus instructs us. And he has instructed us. We can fall into two errors here: we can hammer the words of the Lord's Prayer by so much ardent repetition that they become one auditory splat that we don't even recognize with our hearts. We can also resist repeating Jesus' words and judge others as pagans for doing so to the point that we ignore Jesus' teaching to "pray, saying." Any decent instruction in prayer is going to teach us how to pray the Lord's Prayer. But the fact is, we pray by receiving the living and active word. We first need to approach God with silence, with emptiness, by feeling our inadequacy and the impossibility of reaching him by our own means. We pray first with our longing. Then we can pray, saying. As we pray, saying, we receive the living and active word. We stay with it for as long of a growing season God gives: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.