Day: May 5, 2024

“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

All our comings and goings find their meaning and truth in the comings and goings of God made visible in Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. Prayer is our life as ordered to God and with God. The pilgrimage of our souls is gathered into the pilgrimage of the life of God in the going forth and return of God in creation and redemption; this makes visible the eternal love of God in himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in today’s Gospel for Rogation Sunday.

Rogation means asking. Prayer, in its most fundamental sense, is asking. Asking for what? For this or that commodity or thing? For privilege and prestige, power and domination over others? No. Prayer is our participation in God’s own gathering of all things to himself. It is our seeking or desiring but seeking and desiring what? It is not our seeking and desiring this or that thing in the false infinity of things which never satisfies. It is our seeking and desiring what is the absolute good and our seeking and desiring to do what is right; ultimately the justice of God. That presupposes a world that is not random and arbitrary, chaotic and aimless; it presupposes the goodness of creation as God’s creation and our place within that world as ordered to God. Prayer is nothing less than that complete orientation of ourselves to the will and truth of God. In the Christian understanding, as shown to us in this Gospel, prayer is nothing less than our asking the Father in the name of the Son and in the Spirit of their mutual love. It is Trinitarian.

Richard Hooker notes that “prayer signifies all the service that ever we do unto God.” It is our seeking and desiring what God seeks and desires and as such, in God, as Peter Abelard’s great hymn, O Quanta Qualia, puts it, “wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er, /Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.” It is a commentary on what Jesus means when he tells us that “the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” Prayer “testifies,” as Hooker says, “that we acknowledge him as our sovereign good.” But up to now, “hitherto,” as Jesus says, “have you asked nothing in my name.” Prayer in the Christian sense is about asking the Father in the name of the Son in the Spirit of their eternal love: “ask,” Jesus says, “and ye shall receive that your joy may be full.” Peace and joy flow out of the Resurrection of Christ which makes visible what is present in the Passion; the “vision of peace, that brings joy evermore.”

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