7 January 2023
Christmas Weekday
Saint Ignatius has his retreatants ask God for certain gifts at particular moments of the retreat. His Spiritual Exercises train retreatants to focus and articulate their desires, sharing them with God and with saints who intercede for them. Permission is granted to ask for specific things, even things that may seem petty. If a retreatant thinks his own desires are really not worth mentioning, he should listen to the first epistle of John: “We have this confidence in God, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” From today’s gospel, we can infer that this even includes party supplies. When the Blessed Virgin Mary prayed for wine at a wedding reception in Cana, her prayer was answered.
Our prayers should not be only for the greatest and most important things, as Ralph Waldo Emerson might say. In his 1847 essay “Self-Reliance,” he wrote “Prayer that craves a particular commodity, —any thing less than all good, —is vicious… Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft… As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.”
While Emerson criticizes those who are not self-reliant enough, he errs on the side of excessive self-reliance. Was he ashamed to be a beggar before God? He need not have been. We do depend on God’s mercy and love in every aspect of our being. That is not a source of shame but of gratitude, because we can turn to God in faith and ask Him for all the things we need. We can do this, of course, without excusing ourselves from laboring toward the very same ends. Our petitions to God never justify our laziness. They only express our confidence in God’s boundless generosity.