The Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Exodus 17:8-13 + 2 Timothy 3:14—4:2 + Luke 18:1-8
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
October 19, 2025

If you were to ask a group of priests what topic they preach about the least, their answer would probably be: prayer.

For every ten homilies about the Creed, or the sacraments, or the Ten Commandments, you might only hear one about prayer.

Why is that? Maybe it’s because our Catholic beliefs about prayer are harder to describe in clear terms.  Like prayer, they’re elusive, like the experience of prayer itself.

By contrast, the Creed is straightforward: the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life… who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.”  But the words of the Our Father are more mysterious, and take more work to unpack.

There’s also another reason that it’s difficult to preach about prayer.  That is that prayer is deeply personal. While we all share the same Creed, no two Christians have the same experience in prayer — nor are they meant to. God’s grace meets each heart in a different way.

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One helpful way to understand prayer is to understand that God means for it to unfold in three stages: vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplation.

The first, vocal prayer, is the most familiar. It’s the prayers we speak aloud—such as the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be—or our own spontaneous words spoken to God from the heart.

In vocal prayer, we use human words to speak to God, just as we would speak to a loved one.

The second stage of prayer is meditation.  As with vocal prayers, meditation starts with the person who is praying.  That is to say, the person in each of these first two stages takes the initiative.  The third stage will be different.

Meditation is when we pray about God through our thoughts and imagination.  We might, for example, picture ourselves inside a Gospel story:  maybe putting ourselves in the place of St. John at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday, and seeing the scene as St. John did, and feeling as he did on Calvary.

If prayer were a conversation, we could say that the first two stages of vocal prayer and meditation use the mouth of the soul more than the ear.  In vocal prayers and meditation, we do most of the speaking.  The third stage will be different.

The third stage—contemplation—is where God takes the initiative.  God communicates Himself to the person praying.  Contemplation is not something you can produce.  It is God’s work in us.  It’s not a method or a technique; it’s a gift.

In contemplation, we don’t so much speak to God as rest in His presence:  this is a foretaste of Heaven, where the blessed behold God face to face.

Of course, we must dispose ourselves for this gift:  by turning away from sin and by offering our vocal prayers and meditations faithfully, with the right focus.  You might say that Jesus’ parable today helps bring focus to our prayer life:  focusing our will so it’s in closer conformity with God’s Will.

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Today’s Gospel begins with a simple line: “Jesus told His disciples a parable about the necessity to pray always without becoming weary.”

He tells us about a widow who keeps coming before a dishonest judge, begging for justice.

We’re not told exactly what her case is, only that she refuses to give up. And finally, the judge grants her request — not because he’s just, but because he’s tired of her persistence!

Now, Jesus isn’t comparing the unjust judge to God — He’s contrasting them.

If even a corrupt judge will do the right thing for the wrong reason, how much more will God, who is goodness itself, do the right thing for the right reason?

Still, the parable leaves a question hanging: If God already knows what we need, why does He ask us to keep praying — to persist in our petitions?

Here the Church gives us a guide in St. Teresa of Avila, whose feast the Church celebrated this past Wednesday, on October 15.

In her reflections on the Our Father, she wondered why Jesus didn’t simply teach us to pray, “Father, give us whatever is good for us.” Wouldn’t that be enough for an all-knowing God?

But she answers her own question. Jesus knows our weakness. We need to name our petitions one by one, so that we can reflect on them — to see whether what we’re asking truly aligns with God’s will.

St. Teresa writes that God may offer us a far better gift than what we asked for — but if it isn’t what we wanted, we might reject it. And so, He patiently teaches us that in our prayers we need to ask, to wait, and to trust.

The Lord calls us to pray always and not lose heart — not because He needs to hear our words, but because we need to learn how to listen.

Vocal prayer teaches us to speak about what is most important.  Meditation teaches us to imagine about what’s most important.  Contemplation is an experiences of what’s most important.  Contemplation teaches us to rest in the presence of God.

“Zelo zelatus sum pro Domino, Deo exercituum” (Vulgate, I Kings 19:10)