A Year of Prayer

A reflection upon the Gospel of Mark 1:29-39 and upon the Year of Prayer.

Transcript

00:00 This year, 2024, Pope Francis has asked us to dedicate it in a special way to prayer,

00:10 and that is to prepare ourselves for next year, 2025, which is the year of Jubilee.

00:19 And we do this at Aletea as part of our mission, because prayer is what motivates

00:28 everything that we do. Prayer is also an important part of what we want to offer

00:34 to you, our readers, to teach you how to pray, and to show you the glories of

00:38 prayer, and the meaning of prayer, and the richness of prayer for the life of faith.

00:44 But also, our Lord himself prayed. Prayer was such a key and integral part of his

00:53 life of priority, as we hear this Sunday in the Gospel, where we read that Jesus

00:58 rising very early before dawn, left and went off to a deserted place where he

01:06 prayed. And we might ask, "Well, why does Jesus pray? Jesus is divine. Why would

01:14 Jesus, who is himself God, go off to pray?" And the answer is because Jesus loves

01:21 his Father, and he wants to live in that love, and experience the joy of that love,

01:28 and even grow in that love. And the best way to do it is in silence and in

01:37 solitude. Solitude is a great, great blessing for us as well. A wonderful

01:44 spiritual writer, the Trappist-Abbot André Louf, says this in one of his books.

01:50 He says, "Each and every solitude throws us back on ourselves and on God, on our

01:58 extreme poverty and God's immense love and kindness." He says, "In this, the faith in

02:06 our heart is burrowed out." A wonderful expression. And he says, "An unsuspected

02:14 depth of being is laid bare." And I don't know about you, but I want to come in to

02:20 touch with the unsuspected depths of being that are within me, that need

02:26 to be laid bare, and that prayer makes possible. He says, "For Jesus, too, learned

02:32 something from solitude." He says, "His full stature as a man he first acquired and

02:38 exercised in the desert alone, in solitude and in silence." So we want to do

02:44 this, too. I know it's difficult. I know it's hard in our busy and

02:49 frantic days with so many distractions and so many things to keep us just from

02:54 being still and silent, to carve out that time for a little solitude. Because as

03:00 Abbott Louf says, "Solitude gives a person release from many false ideas and

03:06 illusions, from myths of every kind. It teaches one how to be an ordinary human

03:12 being, frail and in need of help. And when we come before God in solitude and

03:18 silence, with our frailty and our need for help, all he does is help us. God

03:25 bless you.

03:27 you

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