Humility and Prayer

Prince Edward of England, the Black Prince, lived 1330 to 1376.
A true knight is a man of action disciplined by prayer.

Last week, in the chapter just prior to today’s Gospel, we heard about the narrow gate. Jesus said that we’re not able to pass through on our own. A friend reacted to last week's Gospel, mentioning that he felt spiritually fat, too bloated with sin and ego to squeeze through the narrow gate.
 
My friend's comment made a big impression on me and it's been haunting me all week. I have found this week’s chapter a helpful next step. Today’s Gospel is about how to get spiritually lean, how to live the little way, how to be small and humble enough to pass through the narrow gate.
 
Today Jesus is at a dinner party with the Pharisees. People are jockeying to be noticed. They’re probably squabbling not only over who gets to sit where, but all kinds of one-upmanship, little conversational daggers. Maybe we can remember what it was like to have lunch in the middle school cafeteria, except in this parable, it’s adults who haven’t grown out of it.
 
The problem is that it is in our fallen nature to jockey for position. We get self-conscious. We want people to think that we’re cool. We get disappointed or jealous. We find daily opportunities to turn our attention back on our selves and our comfort.
 
Jesus says – stop, don’t play that game. He loves us and even his hardest commands are always for our flourishing.
 
When he concludes today’s Gospel saying “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous,” I don’t think he means that we should be humble and kind for the sake of a reward down the line, for the sake of delayed gratification. It’s more interesting than that.
 
In my experience, it works like this: if we love our selves more than anything – to the extent we turn daily social interactions into self-assertions - we will be repaid accordingly. If we put up the walls and keep telling ourselves self-justifying stories, God will give us what we want. God will leave us to our lonely grumpy selves.
 
But if we die to our selves, if we lay down our ego and gaze on Jesus, then we will also be repaid. God repays love with love. Humility and a docile heart open the gate to freedom. This is why the first will be last and the last will be first. This is why if you try to save your life by asserting your ego, you will lose it, and if you give your life away, you’ll save it.
 
The philosopher Peter Kreeft says “the difference between forgetting self and forgetting God is the difference between heaven and hell.”
 
Constant, daily, hour by hour prayer is necessary to stay close to God, to live in the Spirit. To be who we’re created to be, we take our most basic concerns and circumstances, our hopes and fears, and moment by moment offer them back to God. We crucify the ego. It’s the only way to live like Jesus. We have to be connected to the vine, His grace has to be flowing, otherwise humility is too hard, and we lapse back into the sad games.
 
Now maybe, in talking like this about prayer, overcoming selfishness, staying close to God – maybe I’m just telling on myself. But I don’t think it’s only me who needs to hear this. A couple times this week in the news, some prominent politicians and at least a few journalists cynically mocked prayer. Their not so subtle implication was that prayer is useless, a cop out. I don’t want these people to define for us what real prayer is. It’s timely to remind ourselves.
 
Authentic, mature prayer is not an app like Door Dash, bossing God around, getting him to fulfill orders. Nor is prayer magical protection against suffering. It can’t be – there’s Jesus himself, on the cross, praying while he suffers and dies.
 
Instead, real prayer “is raising the mind and heart to God.” True prayer is opening our broken hearts to God, trusting that God is listening, and asking God to restore our courage and trust, to keep us anchored and rooted in him. God respects our free will, and we exercise our freedom when we choose to invite God into a situation. Prayer is turning to God and asking him to send his grace into a situation and then, tuning our hearts to that grace so that we can live in harmony with it.
 
Really and truly, sometimes miracles occur, and it is right to ask for them. It is also right and necessary to ask for God's routine intervention. He is listening. But those prayers are not the last word. The heart of prayer is offering our intentions and yet concluding “thy will be done.” Prayer is saying “Lord, I love you. Lord, I am sorry. Lord, thank you. Lord, I am needy, please come.” Prayer is communion. Prayer is relationship. Prayer is us gazing at God, and God gazing back.
 
When sin and tragedy happen – including violence – it’s right and necessary to ask God for help. And God needs boots on the ground. We need disciplined, well-formed knights – wise political leaders, policemen, soldiers – to protect us. But to be a real knight – or to make any defense of what we think is right and good – starts with purification through prayer. It’s not either/or, it’s not action versus contemplation, active versus passive. No. It’s both. The narrow way is to purify our hearts before we act. The narrow way is to flush the vanity before we do anything. The test of purified action is our own openness to self-sacrifice, the opposite of posturing. Only the humble are strong enough to follow Jesus to a lower seat at the table. That is true chivalry.
 
Christian life demands a daily martyrdom, a daily dying to self. It takes courage to let Christ grow within us, to follow him to the lower seat. But prayer is not wasted time, never opposed to action. When we have a faithful, constant, trusting life of prayer, God will breathe in us, animating his image in us, making us fully alive.  Intimacy with God and humility are a feedback loop, making us spiritually fit and lean, enabling us to pass through the narrow gate.