HOMILY

"Ask and you will receive," Jesus tells us. Echoing this invitation we find that we practise quite spontaneously and habitually prayer of petition. Even more we recognise that our prayer turns easily to petition: we have so many things to ask of the Lord. It even takes on the style of bargaining that Abraham undertook on behalf of Sodom and Gomorra as Genesis tells us.

Our difficulty is not so much that we hesitate to ask favours of God, but that we feel that God does not always seem to respond to our requests, that he does not agree to what we desire. So we get this feeling that makes us think that God acts towards us according to the Spanish proverb: "to someone who has the bad manners to ask, it is good manners not to give ..."

That does not discourage us from constantly returning to the presence of the Lord with our urgent and insistent needs. Driven by the desire to be heard, we even appeal to powerful intermediaries--the Virgin, this or that saint--for the more 'difficult', 'impossible' or 'hopeless' cases.

Today's Gospel scene leads us to see that what is important when we pray is not the act of asking but the interior attitude that should animate all prayer of petition. An attitude of humility appropriate to a creature before his or her creator--the creature who recognises his or her own poverty and insecurity and who turns towards God, the source of all gifts. One asks from God, in the words of Ignatius, a "fruit"--something that is able to develop and make the life of God grow within us and around us: a life, Jesus teaches us, where we recognise each other as brothers and sisters, children of the same Father; a life in which by the strength of God's Spirit we open ourselves to accept, to welcome and to forgive one another.

At this time when we are seeking the will of God for the CLC throughout the world, it is up to us to recover these attitudes of humility and trust in God, so that our prayer will be expressed in truth and so that it will obtain the expected fruit. In truth God never abandons those in need, nor those who place their hope in Him: "Ask and you will receive."