Podcast: 

homily20100725.mp3

4 Minutes Audio: 

4minute20100725.mp3

Whatever way one is facing is typically the way one will walk.  
It’s not that we can’t walk with our head turned sideways 
but we typically do not so easily.  
We walk whichever way our head is turned.  
It’s kind of hard to walk with our head turned sideways
or to walk backwards with our face front.  
It’s just the nature of the way;
our head is sort of positioned so we can move that way.

Life is very much like that.  
Whatever way we are facing, we tend to go.  
If for example we are facing always our work 
then we can typically spend all our time and energy in that.  
If we are facing our goal of having 
more money, bigger homes, bigger cars, 
then typically that is where we’ll go.  
Where our energy and our time will go 
is to whatever we are facing for good or for bad.

Prayer is the art of choosing to face God.  
It’s a deliberate turning of our face, 
our spiritual face, our whole being towards God.  
The art of choosing to face God with all our energy is prayer.
If we do choose God in prayer then it has an effect 
of transforming all other things we do 
because we are now facing that direction.  
It sounds so simple in theory, 
but the reality is there are so many distractions in our life 
that will quickly take our attention away.
We can easily find ourselves distracted 
and getting tripped up in life;
we fail to remain focused on our God.

Prayer is that focusing;
it is that choice of moving toward our God once again.  
It’s not easy because things can come at us in our life 
and things can happen to us that grab our attention away from that path. 
Illness can happen to us or to a friend or a family member 
and we get distracted in the midst of everything;
in those moments we often cannot find God.  
But it’s not so much “what” we do, but “how” we do it.  
Once we have turned and have faced our God, 
then what we do can “all” become a prayer.

Let me give you an example.  
There is a Philosophy professor called Barbara Taylor, 
and she is a popular writer, a philosopher, an Episcopalian Priest, 
a mother, and grandmother and much more beyond. 
How she finds time for all this is extraordinary.  
In one of her books she writes about where she finds the time to pray.  
She talks about how she prays as she puts the clothes on the line.
Do you remember when years ago, 
instead of putting clothes straight from 
the washing machine into the drying machine 
we used to take our washing and hang it out on the line. 
Did you ever do that here? 
We used to do that in Ireland all the time, 
with the wooden pegs or pins and on the line. 
She talks about how that is her prayer.  
That at the end of a long day she is able to 
take the heavy wet clothes from the washing machine 
put them into an old wicker basket creaking under the weight
and to put the wet clothes on the line.  
She writes how when she bends down,
she smells the grass and the beauty of Gods’ creation;
she can feel the heat of the sun and feels Gods’ presence all around;
she smells the fresh laundry and realizes the freshness of another day.
Something very concrete in putting the clothes on the line, she says.  
For her an ordinary day is full of brainy things at school
and for her, the idea of a simple concrete act of human caring and love 
is a transforming prayer for her. 
She recognizes that most all these clothes belong to her husband, Ed.  
She says he goes through more clothes than four toddlers in one week!
She takes out the t-shirts first, 
she flips it out, unwrinkles it and pegs it with the wooden pins.  
As she puts the wooden pins on it,
she says a prayer for a company back in Maine
who still choose to make the pins out of wood 
instead of the plastic colored ones.  
She reaches down in and sorts the clothes out by size:
t-shirts first, then the longer jeans, 
then the jockey shorts and then the handkerchiefs.  
Finally she says she gets to the socks, 
which are like exclamation marks on her prayer.  
What a gift, she says, that I can do something so simple and so prayerful.
“Yes this is my prayer and it is a good prayer,” she said proudly.

It is not “what” we do but it is “how” we do it.  
Something as simple as hanging clothes on a line 
can become an offering of prayer because the way she is facing.  
She is facing her God and waiting to experience, 
in every little thing, the presence of our God.  
In our lives we are called to reach 
that level of clarity and awareness of God in our lives.
We can take the simple things of everyday life 
and make them into a prayer.  
But it requires of us to choose to face God
and then “everything” can become our prayer.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching us how to choose God,
how to face our God, how to pray.  
In these very simple words Jesus reminds us
to focus our attention first on God
“God, hallowed be your name, 
may your will be done on earth.”
Then a simple request of three things we ask 
give us our nourishment, 
heal us from our sins 
and help us to sin no more.  
That is our daily prayer.  
It is to choose to face God
and choose to make that choice over and over again.
Then everything we do is a prayer. 

I don’t want to understate how hard it is to choose God.  
When things come at us:
when we have illness, or things go wrong at work, 
or things go wrong at home, 
it seems harder to choose God.  
In those moments it is all the more important that
we just need to turn and face our God 
and continue walking on with life, 
knowing that we are facing the right way.  
If we can do this daily 
then we can see God in the “ordinary things” of daily life. 

Prayer is the art of choosing God.  
Christ asks us once again to choose our Father in Heaven 
and to pray with everything we do.  
We need to be persistent in choosing our God
and again today we face our God and choose Christ.