January 7, 2024 (Epiphany)

“Pray Less in the New Year”

by Fr. Dominic DeLay, O.P.

[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]

Do you like to make resolutions at the beginning of the year? Maybe at the beginning of the academic quarter? Do you hate making resolutions? Do you feel obliged to make resolutions then feel bad that you don’t keep them?

Resolutions can be a sign of hope. Are you feeling the hope of Christmas? Or is hope buried underneath the burdens of life or the mountainous challenges facing humanity? Is your goal simply to make it through 2024, with the limping hope that the world and time itself last another year?

The magi, in the midst of whatever burdens they and their contemporaries faced, foolishly lived in hope. They nurtured dreams and, fueled by hope, journeyed long and hard toward realization of their dream to discover where the star led. These professional truth-seekers lived with their minds and hearts open, and so they’re the ones who saw the star. They followed the star, even though they didn’t know where it would lead them. They didn’t know how long the journey would be or what obstacles they would face along the way. But they went.

Now if the magi were so smart, why didn’t they use the old SMART acronym for making goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound. The magi’s dream, their journey, had none of those. They simply followed the star.

What is your star? As Christians, our brightest star is Christ. As Christmas Christians, we believe that star shines in our midst and within us. No need to be magi and study the stars. Instead, we pray. Prayer is a simple embracing of the ever-present epiphany of God with us and the greatest adventure we can set out on, an adventure that tantalizes us with the hope of ever-greater epiphanies.

I bet lots of you have the resolution or goal of praying more this year, of re-committing to this greatest of journeys. I imagine some of you are being capital S-M-A-R-T smart about it. Perhaps you’ve decided on our local favorite specific and measurable prayer goal, to pray 1% of your day, 14.77 minutes. And you’re even specific about what you’re going to do with that time. You’ve outlined an achievable prayer goal and a way of praying that’s seems relevant to your life and personality. You’ve even crossed the T at the end of SMART and made it timebound: I’m going to do this for one month, or through Lent.

Some of you smarty-pants might be using one of the newer acronymed alternatives to SMART that have incorporated research and are designed for particular situations. One of the problems with SMART goals is that they can make us feel like failures if we don’t follow through just so. Surprisingly, some people claim more effectiveness to vague goals like, “I’m going to pray more.”

SMART goals can also be inflexible, unadaptable to changing circumstances. Most striking, they can be limiting, inhibiting bold action. What about embedding a challenge in a vague goal? I heard an Olympic sprinter say he realized he was limiting himself by giving himself a specific time goal. Instead, he set out to find out how fast he could go. A Stanford Olympic pray-er might say they’re going to see how many days in a row they can spend at least a tiny amount of time with God, or they’re going to see how many tiny periods of prayer they can find or create in one day.

Some of us more disciplined pray-ers set the goal to pray in several different ways each day and sometimes find ourselves checking off the boxes more than praying. We let prayers get in the way of prayer. We need to pray less, or more simply, not more.

I’m not saying that SMART or other-acronymed goals or vague but challenging goals can’t be helpful in prayer, but maybe some of us could benefit by casting these methods aside this year, as much as we Stanford people love our acronyms. Might some of us benefit this year from the goal of spending time with God each day, whenever and however we choose? Many of you know my favorite way to spend time with God is to just be there with God in the quiet, not trying to reflect on scripture or a problem – although this kind of prayer might precede or follow reflection – not trying to conjure feelings of devotion or of being loved, just letting God love me in the quiet, whether I feel it or not, noticing when I start trying to grasp at God, at epiphanies that come to mind, or other thoughts or feelings and just being. There’s no apparent relevance to this kind of prayer and no expected outcome. We acknowledge the epiphany of epiphanies, the only one that ultimately matters, that God is with us. Then we just sit there with God, not doing anything. This is the ancient way of prayer called contemplation.

Another classic form of prayer is lectio divina, divine reading, chewing on a short scripture passage, perhaps from that day’s Mass or the coming Sunday. No epiphany is needed. We already have the one great epiphany that God is with us. And the scriptures are the presence of Christ. Lectio divina is what our small groups do. Now there’s a resolution or whatever you want to call it that I can’t recommend highly enough, a commitment to try a small group just once in the next week or two.

Another tried and true way of prayer that’s a favorite around these parts is the examen, looking back on where we saw or missed the epiphany of Christ in our day. There’s the possibility of praying a bit of the rosary, rich as it is with 20 epiphany-laden mysteries. There’s walking the ancient Christian pattern of the labyrinth at Windhover or on Fridays right here in Memchu. There’s journaling, walking, dancing, or singing. Some of you need to start with a little St. Joseph’s meditation. You can figure that one out if you look at the first couple chapters of Matthew and notice what Joseph is doing when God is speaking to him. There are an infinite number of ways to pray. Is there a unique way of prayer that God inspires you to try? The important thing is that we don’t do prayer but be prayer, just spend time with God in some way.

I can’t believe I’m saying this but maybe some of us would benefit from not resolving to practice a particular way of daily prayer, simply praying in the way we’re moved each day and having some go-to approaches for when we don’t feel moved. And I really can’t believe I’m saying this: some of us might benefit from not having a regular prayer time but rather resolving to create one or more times of being with God as the day unfolds.

We’re finding out that resolutions and other goals aren’t accomplished through will power so much as designing our lives to include prompts and easy practice. This is true for prayer as well. We can identify a place to pray such as a beautiful spot outside or the church, maybe in front of the blessed sacrament. We can create a place to pray in our room, or we can simply light a candle wherever we are to create a place of prayer. We can ask a friend or family member to text us one a day or once a week to remind us to pray. We can arrange times to sit with others in the quiet or to pray in other ways with them.

Where might following the star of Christ through prayer lead us? What is our Jerusalem, where, like the magi, we encounter obstacles, perhaps obstacles disguised as help? Are there many Jerusalems along the way? Typical obstacles to prayer include busyness, hurry, boredom, disappointment in the results, looking for results, and trying too hard. Yet we keep our eyes on the star. We keep believing that Christ our star journeys with us in prayer. We keep showing up.

What is our Bethlehem or Bethlehems, where we arrive, even if only for a moment, to the place where we notice that God is with us, that God has been guiding us all along the way, where we realize that God has been leading our prayer and leading us whether we pray or not, carrying us through life?

When they saw Christ, the magi were moved to bring gifts out of their treasuries. What gift might we make to Christ from the rich treasury God has given us? As some of our favorite Christmas carols remind us, the best and truest gift is ourselves. We give ourselves to God, first by giving ourselves to God in prayer.

Finally, the magi were warned, in a dream no less, to go home by another route rather than return to King Herod to report where they found this upstart king. How does God invite you to take the unexpected route in your prayer? Whenever we arrive at these Bethlehems of prayer where we realize once again that Christ is already and always with us, we’re tempted not to move at all, to stay and hold on to the experience. Or we get back on the road of prayer ad expect to conjure the same experience, the same epiphany. Yet God is always leading us with the Christ star to new, even if sometimes apparently unremarkable, encounters with that Christ made flesh within us and others. We follow the star that burns brightly in the eyes of the other and in our hearts. We show up for prayer and for each other and remember that Christ is always there.