This past Sunday, as we reflected upon the story of the Samaritan woman, the defining characteristic of the Samaritan woman we come to read in the gospel is not that she is Samaritan, nor that she is a woman, nor even that she has been married five times or has attempted such, but rather that she is thirsty. To be human is to be thirsty. To be human is to be in a near constant state of need, that we can never finish being hungry or thirsty.
We can never fill up all that is lacking within us. And it’s because all of our earthly neediness points to an even greater neediness, that all of our bodily needs are a reminder to us of the needs of our soul, and really the need of our soul, because it is a singular reality. We need only one thing, and that is God.
And in fact, only God can fulfill all of our need. And so to be human is to be needy, and ultimately to be human, made in the image of God and with a desire for union with God, is to be in need of God, which is why we approach him in prayer and we ask for a lot of things. There are some people who say, I do not pray because I feel like I only desire to pray when I need something, or I feel like I only pray when I need something, and so God isn’t really going to have a lot of time for the many small things that I might want, or I need to pray better, I need to pray more authentically, and praying for my needs is the lowest form of prayer.
I should pray in a better way, and so until I can do that, I’m not going to pray at all. And these are terrible mental traps to fall in, because we should pray, and we should ask for things, and we should ask for everything. We should pray for every single aspect of our lives to be granted by the hand of God.
Even the very small things, the small pains to be relieved, the small joys to be rejoiced in, we should defer all to God. That we don’t just pray when we need something great, and we’ve got some big project, we should pray for absolutely everything. And we hear of why that is, if we consider the things we pray for today in the Mass.
If we go through the prayers of the Mass most days, we’re going to find that we’re asking for a whole lot of things, and perhaps a lot of things we would not have thought to ask for. But this is the beauty of the faith, who lives its life in the rhythms of the sacred liturgy, that where our words and our thoughts and our desires may be incomplete, where we may not think to ask for certain things, our Mother the Church guides us for what we ought to ask for. We hear in the book of the Prophet Jeremiah today that the fruit of listening to God, the fruit of hearing His Word, is that we will be His people.
And so we ask in quite a number of ways that we become formed into His people in the prayers of the Mass today. In a moment when the offering of bread and wine is made, the prayer over the offerings asks that we not be led to cling to false joys, because God promises us the reward of His truth. We cling to false joys, we cling to the many things in this life that may give us pleasure for a moment, but these things keep us from what is greater.
These things keep us from the rewards of truth. So we ask that we put off those false joys, and in some sense that’s what Lent is a practice for. We do give up things that maybe are not false joys, maybe we give up things that are quite good during Lent, and yet this is practice for us to say no to the things that are not so good.
Saint John Chrysostom says that when you begin to fast you must first fast from sin. So if you’re going to fast from the appropriate joys, it’s also good to fast from the inappropriate ones as well, the ones that are not really joyful, the ones that are, again, fleeting momentary pleasures that rather distract us from the reward of truth. What is the reward of truth but God Himself? Because God is truth itself, and so if we are open to truth, if we listen to God, we become His people.
We have the reward of abiding in Him, and what greater reward could there be than that? The many false joys of this life might distract us and might hold our attention now, but that’s because they are more obvious to us in some sense, more obvious than the mystery that is God, and yet He makes Himself accessible as well. He makes Himself obvious. He makes it so that we can hear His voice and abide in His presence when we gather to worship, because what is it that we do but first to hear His voice speaking to us in the Scriptures and then to abide in His presence as He appears on our altar and becomes for us our Eucharistic food, which is then what the prayer after communion refers to in what it is that we do here and the effect it’s supposed to have upon us, because we ask God to raise up those He renews with this sacrament that we may come to possess salvation, both in mystery and in the manner of our life.
Mystery and manner, this phrase occurs quite a lot in the post-communion prayers of the Mass because it really is the theme of every one of those prayers. The word mystery is the Greek word that we render in Latin as sacrament. They’re used interchangeably in ancient texts, and in some of the Eastern churches they even refer to the sacraments as the holy mysteries.
We do as well. We begin the Mass by asking for the forgiveness of our sins that we may worthily celebrate the sacred mystery, and that points to a meaning of mystery beyond the mundane and the pedestrian that we’re usually associated with. A mystery is not a mystery in the Agatha Christie sense of a novel whereby a crime has been committed, and we’re going to look to see who has who has done the murder.
It’s not mystery in the sense perhaps more pertinent to to life in the rectory here of law and order, because we do watch law and order quite a bit. It’s not mystery even in the sense of a puzzle to be teased out, but it’s rather God who cannot be fully comprehended. God who cannot be entirely accessed by us.
We live in a world that says that we must know everything, we must conquer everything, we must surround everything with our minds, and yet we can’t do this. And so we approach mystery and living in a modern world that says that we have to get everything into our heads, and not only that we have to, but that we can. We are capable of conquering everything.
We find that there are things we cannot conquer, and so we shy away from them. And this is another terrible mental trap to fall into. If God is mysterious and I cannot get to the mystery, I may as well not bother.
Or if I think that God is not mysterious and I can wrap my mind around him, then again why bother? Familiarity breeds contempt. And if God is too obvious to me, too present to me, the problem there is that that’s not really God. That’s my projection of myself onto God.
And so God makes himself accessible, but he does so in mystery. God is accessible to us in the Eucharist, imminently accessible that we have him here, present in the tabernacle. He becomes present for us on the altar.
He condescends to become our food. He’s easily carried around. He’s easily received by us.
He’s also easily abused, easily ignored, easily desecrated, because he has made himself so accessible that this is the risk that he takes. And yet present in mystery, because to the casual observer who sees not with the eyes of faith, that tiny white host is just a piece of bread. It’s not even particularly good for food, because the caloric content of one host, or even probably a bag of them, is not going to be substantial.
And they’re quite bland, and it’s quite quite inobviously something mysterious, something great, something divine. But with the eyes of faith, we see that under the veil of that humble white host, our God comes to us to be our food, to sustain us. And this then, from mystery, leads to the manner of our life, that we become what we receive.
And this is true of everything. This is true of the unmysterious things we receive. Whatever we take into ourselves, we tend to reflect back out.
That if we spend our days in desperation, in anger, in being stirred up by the ways of the world, by all the many things that we can read about on the internet, or see on various videos, or things like that, that’s who we’re going to become. We become what we receive. They say you are what you eat, and that’s what that means.
So if you want to be Christ, you have to eat his flesh and drink his blood fruitfully, to be open to his presence, so that his presence is reflected from you. Which then leads us to the last thing that we ask for in the prayer over the people, something that we have as a feature of the Mass during Lent, an additional petition, an additional blessing that is given to us in this time in which we are trying to focus more intensely on the things of the soul, by making sacrifices, by uniting ourselves to Christ and his poverty, so that we may more fruitfully receive from Christ and his glory. We call on your loving kindness and trust in your mercy, O Lord, that since we have from you all that we are, everything we have comes from him, and there’s nothing we have that we gave ourselves.
It all comes from the grace of God. Through your grace, we may seek what is right, and have strength to do the good we desire. It is by God’s grace that we know what it is that is good, know what it is that we offer to God, to seek.
It is by God’s grace that we see that God’s grace is the destination as well. And then we ask for the strength to get to that destination. We ask that he establishes that desire in us for the good, and animates that desire in us for union with him, and then gives us the strength to get there.
Look how helpless we appear in saying this prayer. Look how needy we appear in saying this prayer, because it is from God that we receive the desire for God, and it is only God who can bring that desire to fulfillment. Let us listen to his voice today so that we may be his people, and that he may be our God, and that we may abide with him forever.
