Around the year 57 AD, St. Paul sat in Corinth and wrote to a church he had never visited. Rome was the New York City of the ancient world, and his heart was set on bringing the gospel there. The letter he produced is his most theologically sweeping, written to a small minority community surrounded by a pagan culture. That is precisely why it speaks to us. Students of history and culture tell us we are living in a post-Christian, neo-pagan age, which makes the audience of Romans an audience we can increasingly recognize as ourselves.
In the middle of that sweeping vision, St. Paul admits something disarming: we do not know how to pray as we ought. In this homily, Fr. Wilson takes up the question Pope Benedict XVI wrestled with in a 2012 general audience. How does the Spirit come to the aid of our weakness? Benedict pointed to two things above all, sacred Scripture and the sacred liturgy. In the Psalms we pray with inspired words. In the Mass we encounter the living God through the Son and in the Spirit.
He walks through the opening prayer of the Mass, the collect, as a school of prayer. It begins with silence, which we are meant to fill with our own intentions before the priest gathers them up and offers them. And notice that the collect is always a prayer for help. Every Sunday the liturgy puts on our lips prayers spoken from a place of weakness and poverty before God, because that is exactly where we stand. If you have ever sensed that you do not know how to pray, that is not a failure. That is where prayer begins.
Readings (16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A):
• Wisdom 12:13, 16–19
• Psalm 86
• Romans 8:26–27
• Matthew 13:24–43