Sunday 27 Ordinary Time, 5th October 2025
Today, at last we find the Twelve on the right track, asking that the gift of faith they have received may be strengthened. They had heard Our Lord describe people as being of little faith and were dissatisfied with their own faith. We may recall that other request we find on their lips in St Luke’s gospel: Teach us to pray. We do well to make these requests our own, not just once in three years when these texts come before us, one day in a thousand, but every day. We accept the Gospel by repentance and by believing. Our intellectual assent to the truth of the Gospel, if it is genuine, goes along with keeping the commandments, while failure to avoid sin is sure to erode faith. Prayer is the great work of faith, and it is fed by devotion to holy reading and works of charity. Our hunger for prayer should reassure us that we, too are on the right track.
Even in the monastery there can be those who are discouraged in their efforts to pray, most often because of continual distractions. It is always worth remembering that wanting to pray is prayer. Prayer, after all, is wanting God. It is the admission of need. It is the expression of love. It is the celebration hat we each offer to the Holy Spirit present with us.
In the first reading the prophet Habakkuk urges his hearers to await the divine deliverance on which they depend. God’s almighty power is carrying his eternal plan forward to reveal his eternal wisdom and love in due time. In Advent we shall recall the long ages that the world had to wait for the Redeemer. Abraham, our father in faith, believed God’s promise to him, and, by growing strong in faith he gave glory to God. A long education was needed to dispose of the false ideas of God that beset humanity after the sin of Eve and Adam. Humanity, even, or may we say especially, in our day, has to learn that merciful love of God and his fidelity to his promise are what rules the world, so graphically described in the first reading.
This is indeed the test of whether we have faith or not. Our humble duties assume their dignity form our determination to correspond with God’s will, building up the Church where we are. The noble souls the Church is setting before us, St Francis and St Therese whom we celebrated during the week, the new saints, SS Pier Georgio and Carlo, and the example of others, such as Sean Devereaux of our own Diocese of Portsmouth, invite us to seek the face of God in prayer so that we may establish in ourselves and in the world around us the peace and joy which reflect the love and fidelity of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.