A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus went along the Sea Of Galilee. He went up onto the mountainside and sat down there. Large crowds of people came to him bringing with them cripples, the deformed, the blind, the mute, and many others besides. They laid all of them at his feet, and Jesus cured The result was great astonishment among the crowd as it beheld the mute speaking, the deformed maid sound, crippled walking about, and the blind seeing.
They glorified the god of Israel. Jesus called his disciples to him and said to them, this must have been on the eastern side of the lake. My heart is moved with pity for the crowd. By now, they have been with me three days and have nothing nothing to eat. I do not wish to send them away hungry for fear that they may collapse along the way.
The disciple said to Jesus, how could we ever get enough bread in this deserted place to satisfy such a crowd? Jesus asked them, well, how many loaves of bread do you have? Seven, they said, and a few small fish. Then Jesus directed the crowd to seek themselves on the ground. He took the seven loaves and the fish.
And after giving thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples who in turn gave them to the crowds. Everybody ate until it was full. When they gathered up the fragments fragments left over, these fragments filled seven hampers. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday morning, I spoke to you or tried to on this matter of prayer. I also reported to you a terrible tragedy of this niece, less than a two year old niece of father Duggan, who was run over by a truck the day before yesterday. Now, the story is worse than that because the driver of the truck was the little girl's father, father Doug and his brother. Now, I want you to think of that as we as we peeled off Psalm 23, the lord is my shepherd, and I'll be wandering in the valley and everything's gonna be sweet and serene and lovely, you know, all that.
How do you put these two things together? Think of the family. The the little girl, she's in heaven. She's a saint. No problem.
How do you react to a to a situation of that sort? Think of the father's feelings and the mother's. There's nobody can can say, well, I understand. Oh, no. You don't understand unless you've been there, and I hope none of us has been there.
But just just listen to that psalm. Now how do you put these two things together? The lord is my shepherd and I will want for nothing after I run over my little girl. Now yesterday, I spoke about prayer, and that is formal, specific prayer. Words which have been printed that you either have memorized or that you read, and that they should be part of your daily living.
And let me tell you, if they're not, you're going to stop praying. And that's not just on my authority, that's on people who've had a lot of experience, but I'm speaking from experience too. This informal prayer is great, but it's not enough because it doesn't sustain us. Think of the parents of that little girl. You think that they're all infused with love of God at this moment, and that they all kinds of beautiful words come to their imagination and to their minds?
The funeral will be this evening at 08:00 in Saint Leo's Church in Virginia. Now let's be realistic. There's a second kind of prayer, which is very important prayer, and which I was brought up on. It's one of the earliest I my my memories with the Christian brothers was the morning offering. That little pamphlet, we got it every month.
That you should begin your day before you put your feet on the floor outside of your bed to say the morning offering, and to renew it during the day as we did, as I've told you. Every class, halfway through the class, the the class monitor would ring the little bell no matter what was going on, we stopped, and the monitor said, let us recall the presence of God. He said a little prayer and we renewed our morning offering. The opus dei, the work of the Lord is a tremendously important prayer. You spend about a third of your life at it, or maybe two thirds, or maybe three thirds.
Because Saint Paul says whatever you do, whatever kind of action you're involved in, offer it to God. It becomes a prayer. That's your sleeping, that you're eating, that you're working, that you're having pleasure, having fun, also suffering the cross of tragedy. It's all the opus dei. That's present tense today.
Now the parents of that young girl, less than two years old, this is their opus day for this day of Wednesday. Her funeral will be tonight. They're living with this tragedy. You mean to tell now what do you do with this kind of thing? What do you do with your daily life?
If that is if that isn't offered to God as a prayer of in many ways of all prayers, because quantitatively, there's a lot more time goes into it than any other kind of praying. Is it all a wasteland? Is it just as pagan pagan I beg the pardon of the pagans. I beg their pardon. Every time I've been to Rome, I don't mean to say I go over there every six months, but if you go on a tour, at least it's happened to me twice in the last two two or three years, you go on a tour around the ancient part of of Rome, and invariably, you know, you the guy points out there is the altar to this god, there's the altar to that goddess, this is the altar to Neptune, and this is Zeus, you know, and all the it's it's nothing but the Greek god gods and goddesses transfer over to to the Latin Rome.
But the point is here you're going around on the right and the left, you're seeing this god and this altar and this building and this temple, and the guide says, in the pagan days, you couldn't get away from the gods and the goddesses. In 1984, we managed to do just that. We're not as good as pagans in many I'm I'm I'm not talking I'm talking about our society, our society. You can walk down into Washington and walk blocks on blocks and blocks, and you won't see a thing to remind you of a god or a goddess or not even of god. Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. You couldn't do it in ancient Rome, so I apologize to the pagans. They lived with their gods and their goddesses. We, in many instances, do not.
We reserve our god for a hour in church on Sunday, and some people only do that when they feel that they want to give to God, or when they feel that it's gonna be good for them, or when they feel that if they need it, then they traipse you off to church. You see, that's not reliving a religious life. This is phony. Phony. Because you see, if there's a God and you believe there's a God, and if you believe that this whole life is simply a transition to being with him as we pray in every mass, then you should have deep in your heart this conviction that you live for him day in and day out.
Our lord said, come, follow me. Now Christ didn't spend all his time on the mountaintop alone praying. Although he in every every single critical moment of Christ's life, we are told he withdrew by himself alone on the mountaintop. He didn't dash up to Jerusalem to the temple. He didn't go into a synagogue.
He didn't call his community around and say, come on. Now let us all pray together. He withdrew by himself alone in a desert place. Now remember, whether you like it or not, you're going to be shoved many a time or at least sometimes in your life into a desert place. Think of it think of mister and missus Duggan today.
They're in a desert place. Now, what I'm asking you is to think of God during the day. You're lit. You can't escape his presence. All you can do is forget it.
See, plenty of people live their lives without thinking at all of that sun which we don't see this morning, but we know it's up there. They live their lives without even thinking what's around them, without even much less appreciating it. You can't appreciate something that you don't observe, that you don't know. You can't love what you don't know. I rest my case on that.
And we can live our lives. We can live our lives without God. And you see, reserving religion for specified little moments when we make a big deal out of it, that's not the real McCoy at all. What happens to your daily living? What happens with your job?
What happens when you are the afflicted one and are invited literally to carry the cross? This is what matters. This is what counts, and this is something that you do twenty four hours a day. You go to bed thinking of God, you wake up thinking of God, and you offer your life to him. That's the theory of the thing anyway.
No one can dispute this. And you can't get away from the first commandment is, thou shalt love the lord thy god. Not yourself and not your neighbor, god. Our religion is vertical. Don't ever forget it.
You could be the world's best altruist on a nice horizontal level going out among your peers or whatever, but that can expect God needn't be there at all. God played no role in the life of John Stuart Mill, and yet John Stuart Mill was the probably the world's greatest altruist. You've had oodles of philanthropists who couldn't have cared less about God. They love man. We're talking about religion.
We're talking about God, I believe. So the second kind of prayer that I recommend highly is living in the presence of, I mean, consciously. And what you're doing, say, God, whatever I'm doing, I'm going to do for you, and I'll do my best. Whether it's laying bricks, whether it's doing a writing and typing a paper, or whatever. You do your best.
When you've done your best, finished, say, God, there it is. I did what I could. Thank you. No. No remorse.
No remorse. You did what you could. May not have been the best. When you look back, you say, gee, I could have done a heck of a lot better there. Maybe you could have.
I don't know. Point is, it's history. Give it all to God and say, there it is. There it is. And so, I repeat, do not neglect underrate formal organized prayer.
Secondly, do not miss the boat. By that I mean realize who you are, what you're living for, and the company you keep. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.