7 October 2021
Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” Over and over, as we pray the Hail Mary, we meditate upon the mysteries of the life of Jesus. Some find the repetition tedious; some who do not understand the rosary find it to be equivalent to pray with “vain repetitions” against which Jesus taught (Matthew 6:7). But our Gospel today teaches us about the importance of persistence and repetition, as demonstrated by the parable of the man seeking to borrow food for a guest at an inconvenient time. This is not to say that God is resistant to our prayers and is sometimes bothered by our requests, but rather it is to say that repetition can help us grow in our faith, further and further opening our hearts and souls to however God desires to answer our prayers, just as the man asking for bread did not give up asking, because each time he was more and more sure that his friend would pull through. Imagine the man’s joy and gratitude when his neighbor finally brought out the bread, realizing that his faith in his friend was not misplaced: if the man had come right away he would have accepted the bread and been on his way.
So our God asks us to persevere against doubt, against the thought that God does not hear our prayers simply because our seem to go unfulfilled. For Jesus promises that if we ask for anything from God, we will receive what we desire (notice this could be different from what we believe we “want”!), we will find what we seek, and the door will always be opened to us. We can, in other words, absolutely trust God with our hopes and dreams, our wants and desires, and we need not believe we are pestering Him, nor fall for the lie that He plays around with our prayers and arbitrarily grants those of some and not those of others, and the reassurance lies in this: “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”