PRAYER

A recent piece in the online version of the 'National Catholic Reporter' cited a book called 'Future Shock,' which was all the rage some forty years ago. It warned that we were 'speeding on the highway to incoherence,' and Irish novelist, playwright and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, voiced her approval at the time in an op.ed. piece to 'The Times' of London. If it was true then - when nobody had a laptop, a cell phone or an iPad and when instant messaging meant talking to someone face-to-face - imagine how true it must be today!

Serious observers of the Face-book, Twitter and iPad scene feel that these gadgets nourish personal self-absorption and narcissism. Iris Murdoch once said that we need exercises that 'break us out of the narrow confines of our egos.' 'Human beings are naturally self-absorbed, she wrote. 'The rarest and best moments in life occur when the web of our egotism and self-absorption is broken through.' She listed prayer as one of the exercises to get us out of our false selves, our egos.

Jesus tells a gem of a parable in this Sunday's gospel about two individuals who went to the temple to pray. One belonged to the Pharisees, a group of law abiding Jews who made a religion out of being publicly righteous. The other had contracted with the Romans to collect taxes from the Jews. He would have been despised especially by the Pharisees. The Pharisee was self-absorbed and felt he was the center of the world, while the tax-man's web of egotism had been broken. While the Pharisee, head held high, offered a litany of personal achievements, the other acknowledged his flakiness and his need for God's help. The Pharisee prayed out of who he thought he was, the other out of who he really was, 'warts and all' as the late Oliver Cromwell would say. The Pharisee's 'prayer' was an exercise in self-congratulation: 'Thank God I am not like the rest of humanity...or even like this tax collector...' The tax collector prayed, head bowed, like somebody who had become overwhelmed by God's presence, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'

We are told that the tax collector went home justified, but not the Pharisee. He allowed God to open his eyes and see himself as he really was. The Pharisee closed himself off from self-knowledge and from God. St. Augustine would pray thus: 'O God, grant that I may know you, and come to know myself as I am in your eyes.' The prayer of the tax collector eventually became known as the 'Jesus Prayer' in the monastic life of the Eastern Church. 'Lord, Jesus Christ, be merciful to me a sinner,' is meant to be repeated very slowly, over and over again, as a spiritual mantra. It has the power to turn one upside down and allow one to escape from the paralyzing self-regard of the Pharisee.

In this little parable, Jesus offers us a terrific lesson in the sincerity and self-knowledge that authentic prayer calls for.

PASTOR EMERITUS