First Reading Genesis 18:20-32;
Second Reading Colossians 2:12-14;
Gospel Luke 11:1-13
Way back in 1997, a small group of us Primary school teachers were entrusted with the job of putting up a play for our School Annual Day celebrations. Back in the day, when such things as the internet and google were unheard of, we began with the task of spending hours after school, rummaging old books and looking through dusty library shelves for some inspiration. After a couple of weeks of frantic searching, some arguments and disagreements, and a few trips to the Principals office, we decided to script a play based on the poem ‘Heaven's Grocery Store’, a poem widely attributed to Rozetta Stutler Thompson. The poem uses the metaphor of a grocery store to represent the abundance of spiritual resources available for those who seek it and emphasizes that these gifts are freely given by God and not something to be bought. The poem was going to be our skeleton and we had to put some muscle and flesh around it to birth it into a play. You bet that wasn’t going to be child’s play.
To stretch a poem that could be recited in three minutes, into a forty five minute enactment, we decided to introduce four departments in the grocery store. They were ‘ Gimme’, ‘Thanks’, ‘ Oops and ‘ ‘Wow’.
The angels servicing the ‘Gimme’ department were constantly on their toes and exhausted. The next busy department was ‘Oops’ and then the ‘Wow’. The department that rarely had any customers was ‘Thanks’. Can you see where this is going...? I’m sure you can. Well.... Gimme is Supplication (Gimme for me is Petition, Gimme for others is Intercession); Oops is Confession; and Wow is Adoration; Thanks is Thanksgiving, obviously.
The sisters were so impressed that we managed to convey the five basic forms of prayer, outlined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and commended us for highlighting the fact that prayer for many of us was then, and still is, an exercise or perhaps a ritual that ends at the ‘Gimme’ department and the attitude of gratitude has faded away, if not vanished altogether.
The readings today invite us to reflect on prayer. Whether our prayer be praise, contrition, thanksgiving or petition, it always recognises our need for God. In the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t talk about prayer, but rather, He prays. He doesn’t give us a definition of prayer, rather he teaches us how to pray and the most obvious characteristic of prayer depicted in the readings for this Sunday, I think, is persistence. Jesus answers the question- How to pray with three departments in His grocery store - Ask, Search, Knock. If I have the audacity to add one more department to that grocery store, it would be ‘Repeat’.
Ask, Search, Knock… Repeat. You’ve got to keep at it, be persistent. And by persevering in genuine prayer we come to the realization that all things are in God’s hands, and that we can leave them there, knowing and trusting that the situation will be cared for as God sees fit. In surrendering our will to the will of God, we learn to live the words of St Paul- “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known to God. And the peace of God which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. (Philippians 4:6-7)
