In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
In the Gospel today, Jesus goes into Jerusalem and he casts out the money changers.
Apparently this is the first time or the second time.
Scholars think he did it twice, going into Jerusalem two different years.
But this time he says, perhaps the second time,
this is my house shall be called the house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.
He goes into the temple and they're selling money.
They're concerned about money and selling all these animals.
And it is taking out of their mind and the minds of the people going there
that this is the house of prayer.
It should be conducive to prayer.
Imagine going into a church and there's all kinds of distractions and noise and activity
and setting up things and selling things, even worse.
And this is supposed to be a house of prayer.
It's supposed to be a quiet place, a place where you can go and kneel down and pray
and not be disturbed.
And, you know,
this is that's what it's supposed to be.
Really, we have the house of prayer and our house of worship and churches we go to.
But our our own body is supposed to be a house of prayer.
This the world is really supposed to be a house of prayer, a place to commune with God,
to serve God and to think of God and to ask him for so many things.
And prayer is our is absolutely essential.
It's like breathing.
It's like eating.
It's absolutely essential for our spiritual life, for our life of holiness and goodness.
And the very purpose of our being is to to be in communion with God.
It's one of the things the Vatican, too, stresses in Gaudium et Spes that our dignity is rooted
in our communion with God.
And if we don't talk to God, we don't pray to God, where is our dignity?
It starts to corrode and corrupt.
And we become undignified and become less human, become more animalistic and less what
we are created for.
So we are created for communion with God to pray.
We're made to pray.
We are made for that.
And we need things to conduce us to pray, especially churches and churches should be
places of of prayer.
We're fortunate here in this lady of Guadalupe Chapel in Griswold.
Connecticut, where it's perpetual adoration and it's a it's a it's conducive to prayer.
The church was made for that.
It was made to be conducive for prayer.
You know, I one of my parishes that I grew up in the church, the first church I attended,
which was in my hometown, was that way.
It was conducive to prayer.
They had places to pray.
You could light candles.
You can kneel down before the statues of God.
It was conducive to prayer.
It was a place of Mary and Joseph and could go and it was quiet place and it was that
way.
And then a new church was built and it was much bigger and much wider and it was made
in like a stadium type place and there weren't any statues anymore.
But it was kind of a beautiful church and it was nice looking and I didn't even think
about the way it was made and the purpose for it.
And I found it very beautiful.
You know, later that it was made not to have any devotional space.
That's one of the architectural heresies of today.
Some of the many of the churches are made that way.
Not to be a place to pray and to have devotion in your church, you're supposed to go there
and get married there and baptized and and that's it.
It wasn't really made for staying after church and praying.
Lighting candles and having adoration and just being there to pray to God and being
lost in God and in prayer wasn't made that way.
What a sad thing it is.
And yet our Lord says my house is called called the house of prayer.
So we are we are made to pray and and prayer is our strength.
Prayer is our reason for for one of the purposes for for living.
It's to be in communion with God.
So you know, we we find our strength in prayer and we are to be men and women of prayer.
You imagine that being men and women of prayer and imagine telling that to other people in
this day and age is saying you're a fanatic, you're going too far, you're too religious
and all of this.
And yet we are made to made for that.
Jesus says we should pray unceasingly, pray unceasingly.
This is where our dignity is.
This is where our strength is.
And you know, you're looking throughout the world, who who are those who make it through
difficult times?
Who are those who make it through crises, through the sad times, through depressions
and through this?
Those who are prayerful, those who are prayerful are, you know, we're in a certain sense omnipotent
in prayer.
We can have anything we want in prayer.
All we have to do is ask for it as long as it's good for us and we can have many, many
good things.
All we have to do is ask for them and we can not have many good things by not asking.
Or we can have some good things by sometimes asking.
Or we can have many graces, many good things by asking all the time.
You know, it doesn't hurt to ask, does it?
And yet when we ask a good father, we know he was going to give it to us.
So we can ask.
But prayer is not just about asking and about getting things and me.
And getting things.
But prayer is giving too, is giving to God, giving our time, our love to God, our attention
to God, our relationship to God.
You know, we have to think about God too.
We think about his needs, so to speak.
God doesn't need anything, but he acts as if he does and he wants our attention.
He wants our love.
He wants our time.
He wants our effort to be with him and to be with him.
That's all he asks from us.
It's our love in the form of time spent in prayer, and yet it's in our best interest
because it is from prayer that we gain strength to get through the day, to do good, to stay
away from evil, and to have the strength to practice charity.
We live on prayer and we need to be men and women of prayer and we will find all our answers
in prayer, all the graces and strength we need in prayer for ourselves, but we're also
trying to lift up the world.
Lift up our neighbor.
Lift up our family.
Lift up our neighbor.
And we see so many problems in the world and we have to, we have to and we're called to
and it's only a matter of charity to help other people and we can help other people
more through prayer than in activity.
And so prayer should come first.
Prayer should come first before activity.
First thing we do in the morning is we pray some way, somehow, whether it go to mass or
pray a rosary or say our morning prayer.
Our morning prayers start the day that way, but it doesn't end there.
We should pray in the midday, in the evening, in the night.
We should pray throughout the day because we should be living in prayer.
That's what we were made for.
And the stronger, the more we pray, the stronger we get, the better we are and the more good
we do in the world.
So let us set that as our most important thing is to live a life of prayer.
And to do so much good that way.
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