Father Tim Lemlin
A father took his small son with him to town one day to run some errands. When lunchtime arrived, the two of them went to a familiar diner for a sandwich. The father sat down on one of the stools at the counter and lifted the boy up to the seat beside him. They ordered lunch, and when the waiter brought the food, the father said, "Son, we'll just have a silent prayer."
Dad got through praying first and waited for the boy to finish his prayer, but he just sat with his head bowed for an unusually long time. When he finally looked up, his father asked him, "What in the world were you praying about all that time?"
With the innocence and honesty of a child, he replied, "How do I know? It was a silent prayer."
The gospel writer Mark has a tendency to highlight the physical contact that Jesus has with people. This doesn't seem out of the ordinary to us until we begin to understand that human contact was limited by the Jewish law. There are stories of rabbis taking the hand of another man and healing him, there are no such stories of rabbis doing so for a woman, and especially not for a woman who was not a member of the rabbi's family. Yet, Jesus touches Peter's mother-in-law.
The emphasis seems to be on Jesus healing in all of these stories, but I suspect that it is more on Jesus touching. The message of Jesus, the gospel stories seem to be saying, has more authority than any established ritual, law, or structure. Rituals, laws, and structures can help us know about God, but God is not bound by them. The experience of God, St. Paul tells us, comes to us in whatever way God can find to get through to us.
The authority that Jesus imbues comes from his experience of God. He authentically lives how he experiences God within his life. It also seems that Jesus needs to be alone for his experience of God to be refreshed.
The gospel stories point out that Jesus doesn't favor one kind of ministry above another. He talks with people. He feeds people. He touches and heals people. He forgives people. He remains faithful to the spirit of God within him, who moves him in one direction or another, rather than being driven by the need to be liked by others, or to dominate others.
St. Paul speaks of this way of living in the word freedom. When a person experiences God first hand (be it once or many times), St. Paul says, this person gradually becomes free to meet God everywhere. Our motivation for living changes from getting as much as I can and protecting as much of what I got as I can, to knowing that who I am is grounded in God. I come to realize that I am simply a mask and that God is the face behind this mask. The major difference in the motivation that directs our lives is the presence and the absence of fear. When who I am is grounded in what I can attain and what I have, fear of losing directs my life. When who I am is grounded in the awareness that my life is the product of God's love, freedom directs my life.
We all need reminders. As I said earlier, Jesus needs to be reminded and so he goes off to be alone with God. We call this prayer. Usually, when we do pray, it isn't what we say, how we say it, if we have a good feeling or lack of any kind of feeling, that is important. God visits with us most often; it seems, without our knowledge, changing our passion into compassion, and our fear into love; changes that we can only recognize days, weeks, or years after the fact.
It would not surprise me that if the disciples had asked Jesus, "What in the world were you praying about all that time?" With the innocence and honesty of a child, he would have replied, "How do I know? It was a silent prayer."
