19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle
A
August
10, 2014 4PM, 7:30 and 9:00AM
Saint Margaret Parish,
Bel Air
My Storms
When I
was twenty-five years old, I experienced the first real storm of my life. My mother was diagnosed with cancer and it
was advanced.
Mom
died nine months later. This was a very
painful loss for me.
It was
a major storm in my life, right in my first year of priesthood. There was no way to avoid it.
Then,
when I was thirty years-old, I hit another major storm. I had been a priest for four years and
suddenly I had serious doubts about my vocation.
I felt
good about some things I had done and I felt lots of affirmation. But suddenly, I was questioning
everything.
Did I
really want to do this for the rest of my life?
Could I do it and be happy?
I ended
up seeing a psychologist, getting the issues resolved, and I have been happy as
a priest. But it was a major storm and there
was no way to avoid it.
Peter’s Storm
I
recalled all of this as I thought about today’s gospel.
Peter
and the other disciples are in a boat on the lake and it gets stormy. The wind and the waves are tossing the boat
around.
It is a
real storm. And it is also symbolic –
intended to be symbolic of the storms in our lives.
And you
know, don’t we all have storms at one time or another? It could be a threatening medical report, the
death of a loved one, the break-up of a marriage, an addiction, the loss of a
job, and on it goes.
In
today’s gospel, Peter in his fear looks to Jesus and calls out, “Lord, save me!” So he turns to the Lord and calls out to
him in the midst of the storm.
That, I
think is the message. We need to do the
same thing.
The question is: what does this mean?
How do we do this?
From the two big storms in my life, I learned that three things are
important. Three habits or practices are
important for allowing God to help us get through the storms.
Three Habits or Practices
First, a prayer
every morning is helpful and even essential.
It can be simple and it is probably better if it is in our words and not
a learned prayer.
In this prayer,
and this is very important, resolve to do your best today. Resolve to give yourself as best you can to
whatever you have to do even if you have to push yourself to do it.
This resolve is important
because sometimes we will just have to push ourselves and make ourselves keep
moving through the storms. So in the
morning, make a prayer of resolve to do your best and to push yourself if need
be, and ask God to help you with this.
Then second, choose
a brief, one-sentence prayer and repeat this often throughout the day. For example, Peter’s words, “Lord, save me.”
Or, “God is love,” or “I am with you always.” Or, “Lord, you are my refuge and my strength.”
A one-sentence
prayer helps us to stay centered on the Lord throughout the day. It helps us to keep our eyes on Jesus when we
are in stormy seas.
And then, third,
make space for some silence. Elijah in
the first reading gives us a great lesson on this.
He hears the Lord
not in any dramatic way, but rather in silence.
My experience is that in the storms of life, we need to go within and
listen to our inner self and this is why we need a little silence.
God speaks through
our feelings, our deepest desires, our ideas and our yearnings. God can really help us through our storms in
this way and we need to be quiet and listen to him in our inner self.
Conclusion
So, 1) a prayer of
resolve in the morning, 2) a one-sentence prayer for throughout the day, and 3)
some silence and going to our inner self – these are ways to turn to Jesus and
allow him to help us in the storms of our lives.
