To Pray Always and Not to Lose Heart

To Pray Always and Not to Lose Heart 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples about the need to pray always and not lose heart.  To demonstrate this, He gives a parable about a widow who persistently keeps coming to an unjust judge to get justice, until the unjust judge finally relents and does what he’s supposed to do. 

At first, it may seem like this parable is saying to us: if you really want something from God, you just have to keep asking – like the persistent widow – and eventually you’ll get what you want.  But I think that interpretation has more to do with our own attitudes toward prayer – like a magical formula – than it does with what Jesus means to teach us through the parable.    

Because what if this parable was not meant to communicate some sort of technique or method of praying in order to get what we want, but instead to encourage us in that most basic foundation without which we will never really learn to pray – which is what we are told at the beginning of today’s Gospel that Jesus is trying to tell us through this parable? 

“Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” 

It’s not so much about “how” we are praying – what means, what methods – as much as it is about our faith.  Because it takes faith to keep praying, especially when it seems like God “isn’t answering”.  In other words, to persevere, to keep coming back to prayer and not to quit, and to do this until the end – it takes faith.  And Jesus ends today’s Gospel with this question: “…yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” 

Some of the most meaningful moments in our lives are the fruit of honest, persevering prayer.  Even if we quit sometimes and come back and begin again – that’s still persevering.  And especially in the matter of one’s vocation in life, at the end of the day, it’s a question of perseverance, and at the end of the day perseverance is a question of faith.