This weekend at Mass, I want you to do something different. I want you to offer your prayers, your participation in the Holy Sacrifice, and your intentions, at least in part, for somebody for whom you did not plan to pray. Please pray for a person near you in church who is not part of your family or group.
Let the inscrutable purpose of Providence choose the person for you. And do not simply note their presence and toss off a prayer; no, pay attention to the person, the identity, the appearance and other clues to life and needs. Take good note of this person, who is close to you in the sight of the Lord.
One aspect of being a priest is being privy to people’s secrets, good news and bad. Secret sickness or sorrow, secret fears and faults, but also secret joys and anticipation. It is a great privilege and a constant call to prayer for me when people share their secrets with me, and opens my mind to those who do not share them with me yet surely have them. It is this bearing of burdens both revealed and concealed that I want you to consider.
You know a lot of the people around you at Mass. You talk after Mass, maybe even hang out around the parish, field, or school, and possibly even have been to one another’s homes. Some you know only by sight and a friendly greeting. There is a familiarity, even an intimacy because of where you are together.
If today’s prayer assignment for you falls to these people, think first about all you know about them – maybe their busy lives, maybe just who they attend Mass with, how they present themselves, and how they look today. Look for clues to what they are placing before the Lord today: sorrows or joys, hopes or fears. Then allow for what you do not see, what they might be keeping secret. Then bring it all into your prayer and offer it to the Lord for them.
Alternatively, you may find your new “prayer partner of proximity” to be somebody you know only barely or not at all. This, too, is a gift of Divine Providence and reveals the mystery of the Church and corporate worship. Beyond our family or church-going group with whom we assemble in our pew, we have no control over and no prior knowledge of who will be near us in our worship of God. Sometimes it can be quite striking.
It has become quite clear to me that even here in our supposedly self-selecting suburban society, Catholic Mass is the place of greatest diversity and greatest unity of any experience available in the metropolitan area. You have a broader range of people than you would find together on any city bus or Metro car, in any dive bar or concert venue. And unlike those places, by and large we are all glad we are all there.
So you may find your prayer-gaze settling on somebody truly alien to you – unknown, unfamiliar, and unlike you, and therefore inscrutable in ways that others are not. Maybe a generation or two older than you; maybe much younger, even a child. A child’s fears and anticipations are childlike not childish, and real. Whoever it is, pause to search: good day or bad day – can you guess? Secrets heavy or joyful – what clue is there? Comfortable or cautious – what can you discern?
Now you have your mission, your assignment: pray for this person, friend or stranger, as if his concerns were your own, as if her joy depended on you. Because they are, and it does; in Christ, we are one body, and you will walk out of church today different: with that much more life in you.
Monsignor Smith
