[00:00] Jesus goes into the temple area and casts out the money changers. People coming from different places with different kinds of money.

[00:36] They had to go and change them for the shekels to pay the costs in the temple. But they did all this in the Gentile area of prayer in the temple, where the Gentiles were supposed to pray. And they said, "Oh, they're just Gentiles. We can use their area and carry on a marketplace. Let's make money." The priests made, in

[01:07] some cases, lived in palaces. They were making money in the house of prayer for all peoples. "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples," for the Gentiles too. They should be able to come and pray without distraction. And you can imagine a marketplace being extremely distracting where you can't pray, where it's impossible to pray with all this stuff going on. Jesus is incensed by this. "My house shall be called a house of prayer." And Jesus

[01:42] speaks about that in His lesson. And because of this kind of corruption, the temple will be destroyed in a generation, 40 years later in 70 AD. And this fig tree that our Lord goes over to find fruit on it, He withers, He curses it, and it withers to its roots. Imagine a tree, a fig tree, which

[02:13] represents Israel. Very often in the Book of the Prophets, it's a symbol of Israel. It's going to wither to its roots. What would that look like? Just totally, totally dried up in one day after Jesus cursed it. Peter looks at it, and it's marvelous. And this is the, this is what you can do with prayer, Jesus says. "I will do, give you anything if you believe it. If you believe in Me, if you really pray, pray.

[02:47] Prayer is like a fish in water. Be a fish in water. Be immersed, immersed in the love of God, in the love of Jesus, knowing that He wants to answer our prayers. He knows what we want and wants us to ask Him, and to believe in Him, to trust in Him, to know His goodness and His power, His goodness and His love, His generosity. His goodness is really the generosity of God, which is enormous for

[03:19] us. When you stand to pray, forgive anyone whom you have a grievance. Forgiveness is very important. It's an obstacle. If we don't forgive, it's an obstacle to our prayers, thwarts our prayers, and even prevents our prayers from reaching God, so to speak. Prevents our prayers. So that's a sort of a starting point, forgiving our neighbor, loving our neighbor. St. Peter, in the

[03:49] first reading, says we should love our neighbor. Above all, let your love for one another be intense. Be intense, because love covers a multitude of sins. We are praying for that intense love for our neighbor, and I've heard it explained that the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of piety, gives us that intense love for God and neighbor as a family, and wouldn't

[04:27] that be worth having in praying for covers a multitude of sins? And so that is what we're doing, and as we pray intensely for that intense love for God and neighbor, and being immersed in prayer, we ask Our Lady to teach us how to pray, how to pray in an efficacious way, a way that pleases God and that helps us to bear fruit, to bear fruit.

[05:27] you