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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
Learn more about our faith | Seasonal Reflections
We’ve probably all had times when we’ve been trying to tell a story or explain something that it goes off the rails…we might even classify it as babbling. In Jesus teaching the disciples about prayer, He makes several points. The first is don’t pray to God the way that the pagans pray by babbling on…. more words don’t equal better results. Jesus isn’t telling them or us not to pray persistently throughout the day but rather to avoid what the pagans did in praying to their gods, invoking names and formulas…trying to get the attention of the pagan gods; in a sense trying to rouse the attention of those whose attention is elsewhere.
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Learn more about our faith | Seasonal Reflections
A few years ago, a bus driver in Seattle named Marcus made headlines—not for any heroics, but for noticing people. Every day, he would watch passengers board his bus, many were his regular passengers, and most of them eyes glued to phones, avoided an older woman who was also his regular passenger in a frayed coat muttering to herself. One icy morning, Marcus saw this elderly woman shivering and he handed her his own thermos of coffee. She stared at him, then whispered, “You’re the first person who has looked at me in weeks.” Turns out, she wasn’t “crazy”—just a widow grieving her son, quietly unraveling. Marcus didn’t fix her life. He just saw her. And in that moment, he glimpsed eternity. That’s the scandal of today’s Gospel. Jesus says the final exam of faith isn’t theology or piety—it’s whether we recognize Him hiding in plain sight, disguised as the people we have trained ourselves not to see.
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Learn more about our faith | Seasonal Reflections
In Mathew 25 the Lord paints for us a scene of the Last Judgement. The criteria he uses in passing judgement is a simple – “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The Lord does not judge people by how many Bible verses they knew, or whether they knew the Catechism of the Catholic Church by heart or not. While knowing all that is of great benefit to an individual, he reduced it to the basics of love being put into action.
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Learn more about our faith | Seasonal Reflections
A while ago, there was an annoying commercial, for some product I can’t remember that had a woman who no matter the situation always had the same statement: “More!” It didn’t matter whether it was her dentist showing her the post-whitening process of her teeth, the waiter applying grated cheese to her meal, or a boyfriend who arrived with a bouquet … her response was consistent: “more!”
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Learn more about our faith | Why pray?
A few years ago, a hospice nurse shared a story about a patient named Margaret. Margaret had no family, no accolades, no social media presence. But in her final days, she handed the nurse a worn-out journal. Inside were close to a thousand names—people she had prayed for daily, strangers she had read about in news clippings, neighbors she had silently helped. “I wanted my life to be a quiet, silent song,” she wrote, “not a noisy performance.” When she died, the nurse said the room felt holy, as if “the walls had absorbed decades of whispers to God.” Margaret’s journal is what Ash Wednesday looks like when it bleeds into real life: secret and sacred but surprisingly alive. Today, Jesus warns us not to turn faith into a theater act. “When you pray, go into your room. When you fast, wash your face. When you give, don’t let your left hand know what your right is doing.” In other words—Hide your holiness. Not because God is stingy with His grace but because love grows best in the dark, like seeds in the soil.
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In today’s gospel, Peter’s statement to Jesus comes right after Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich--to enter the Kingdom of God.” We hear how the disciples were astonished and spoke among themselves asking “Then who can be saved?” Peter and the others have left behind their families, work, boats, and tools and everything else that was part of their lives before meeting Jesus. This is why Peter can tell Jesus that they have left everything to follow Him.
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