Today's Gospel and first reading are all about prayer. One of the more significant theologians of the twentieth century spoke about prayer. Charlie Brown was standing next to Lucy. Charlie was standing like this and he said, "I've made a theological discovery. I found out that if you pray with your hands like this, instead of like this, you get the exact opposite of what you asked for." How many of us have had that experience?!

Another significant theologian in the twentieth century was Father Michael Dibble. Father Dibble said, "Pray like a pest. Give Jesus no rest!" And that's pretty much what these scripture readings are about, in Jesus' story about the guy coming at night. Pray like a pest. Give Jesus no rest! Although my own experience, and I'll bet some of you will share that with me, is we tend to pray in spurts. We're not that steady at it. So, I'm going to talk to you, not about when we should pray, but something about how we pray. And I'm going to use a homely division of three kinds of prayer.

The first kind of prayer is recited or memorized prayer, and in the last twenty or thirty years it has gotten a bad name. And there is something to that. Whereas it is great to pray someone else's prayer, especially the Our Father, the Gloria, the Psalms from the Old Testament, at the same time, it shouldn't become automatic and it shouldn't become impersonal. It shouldn't become like a parrot reciting something memorized, or like an automatic robot. We should use our own words.

That's well and good, but let me say something in favor of memorized, recited prayers. I don't know about you, but it's very hard to get up each day and compose a new prayer. It's very hard to be that spontaneous and that creative to be always creating a new prayer with our God. There are ways of doing it, but it's not always that easy. Sometimes it's easier to hitchhike on somebody else's prayer rather than to walk alone. But we do need to revitalize those prayers, lest they become dead air, dead weight and empty phrases. Some people do this. At least once a year, they take one of those prayers that they usually say and they write it out in long hand to reflect on it. Others take, maybe once every couple of months, a phrase from a prayer, like "Thy will be done," and really spend some time thinking through "What does that mean in our world today?" Does it even work? Or "Forgive us as we forgive others." Spend some time around that. Or "Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil." What about evil in the world? How is that working? So, what my suggestion is about memorized and recited prayers is that we do say a prayer every day, at least once a day, and we occasionally try to revitalize those prayers.

The second kind of prayer is the prayer that we least think of as personal prayer and it's the prayer of the gathering. It's a prayer when we gather as an assembly. It's a prayer when we come together, but our language betrays us. We say things such as, "We're going to Mass," or "We hear Mass." We think of ourselves almost as an audience, watching somebody else do the praying, as if it were a spectator sport. And yet it is our most common kind of prayer. But, for it to work, it's not enough just to show up. It doesn't become prayer for you if you just show up. It needs the discipline of participation. And it is a discipline. It means we have to bring energy and bring attention to what we do. It means the discipline of setting aside our own preferences and our biases. It may not be the way that we would choose to pray on a given day. And, yet, with the assembly and gathering, we end up stretching more than we normally would. We end up singing songs, and we might say, "That wouldn't have been my choice today, to sing that song." Or we may end up singing, and that may not be my choice either. I would prefer to be silent. But, if I join in that discipline of participation, prayer of the gathering, I also hear readings that I wouldn't have chosen, reflections on the readings that I might never have heard before or might not even fully agree with, time of silence that I might not have given or set aside, and greeting other people that I would hardly have done on my own.

If we have that discipline of participation and bring energy to our prayer of gathering, then there are moments..... not every Sunday, not every time, not all the time..... but there are moments that really touch our hearts and lift our spirits. And when that happens..... It might be at the Elevation. It might be a phrase from the Gospel. It might be during the greeting of peace with each other. It might be at Communion time. God help us!! It might even be during the homily! (Maybe if we are sitting there thinking of something else, it will happen.) But, if that happens to you, I suggest that, later on in the day, you sit down for five minutes and really think about it, and relish it. Otherwise, we don't anchor that memory and it's just forgotten. And, secondly, if we do that, it raises our radar and our antenna so we are alert for it to happen more and more often.

OK. Two kinds of prayer: recited and memory, and prayer of the gathering. The third kind of prayer I call "prayer from the heart." I do this when I'm delighted. I do this when I'm in need. Most of us occasionally give thanks to God, and lots of times are asking for something, as was Abraham in the first reading, bargaining with God. Sometimes people call that "prayer of embarrassment" because we never think about God. We don't pray, until something happens. Someone gets sick. We pray for them. We lose our job. We pray about it. We buy a lottery ticket. We're not sure it's going to work this time. We pray about it. We don't need to be embarrassed. Jesus tells us our God is a generous God Who walks with us and cares for us. We need not be embarrassed.

But we need to do two things. Be a little bit more clear on our notion of God, and a little more clear on the notion of ourself, when it comes to the prayer of the heart. Our notion of God: Let me tell you something! Growing up, when I was really young, I really think my notion of God was, first of all, of an angry judge, a co-disciplinarian with my parents, a God who (My mother would say....) "You behave yourself or God will punish you." That was my first notion of God, an angry judge. I got over that. I heard about God being a God of love, of unconditional love, a God of mercy, a God of compassion. And then I ended up with a God Who was kind of a pushover God. Doesn't matter. Whatever I want, whatever I ask, all right with God, a pushover God. And then I think I moved to kind of an absent God. I think of this as "God as the Cosmic Bellhop." You know what a bellhop is like. A bellhop is someone who has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with our life, doesn't even know our name, but, on occasion when we have a big suitcase and it needs to be lifted, steps in and lifts it. So I had that notion of God, nothing to do with my daily life, but if I really needed something, call Him in to lift the baggage.

Jesus gives us a different notion of God, and we should be clear about it. The notion of God Jesus gives us is Our God is a loving parent (Now watch this!), a loving parent of grown up adults, not a fairy godmother of little children. And I think we make that mistake. We think God is this parent of little children. We're not little children. And our world is not a child's playground. But our God is the loving parent, like a woman sweeping the house to find a little penny (That's us. Our God looks for us.); like a shepherd going after one sheep and leaving the other ninety-nine (God is that loving.); like a Prodigal Father of the Prodigal Son, who welcomes him back and parties with him (that kind of loving parent). But, you notice, the Prodigal Father had a grown-up son who, when it was time to go and wanted to go, couldn't stop him. When he put himself in danger, couldn't do anything about it. I would like to suggest there are times in our world and in our lives, (It might be sickness. It might be layoff. It might be divorce. It might be earthquake, or tragedy in the world.) where all that our God can possibly do is grieve with us. Not a fairy godmother, but a loving parent of grown-up children. So we have to be clear, when we pray from the heart, on our notion of God.

And we also have to be clear about ourselves. Sometimes I'm angry. Sometimes I'm delighted, and sometimes I'm needy. And that should be coming through in my prayer. It just comes down to be yourself and be real when you pray. Someone described once to me an imaginary scene of the Last Judgment when God says, "I'm glad you're here. I know you said your prayers, but why did you leave so much out? You never mentioned what was really going on in your life. You gave me a lot of stuff out of your brain and nothing out of your heart. You weren't ever real."

Another significant theologian of the twentieth century wrote, I think, a very real prayer. Her name is Erma Bombeck. "Please, God, have I ever called on You for a real biggie? When my washer overflowed, I just offered to build an ark. When I burned the First Communion breakfast, didn't I just laugh? Now, all I'm asking, before I go into the room filled with the reunion class of 1949, is to make me look thin! You can do it. You are the only one Who can do it. Do You know what it's like to suck in your stomach and have nothing move? Please, God, dim the lights, crush me in the crowd, and, if You can't make me thin, Lord, on such short notice, could You please make Eloise look fat?" Now, that's a real prayer. And that's not a plaster saint prayer. It's not a model mystic prayer. But it's real.

And we, ourselves, whether it's recited prayer from memory, or prayer of the gathering, or prayer from the heart, we need to be ourselves. We need to be real. And we need to give thanks to the Lord Who is so good. Amen.