Postscripts From The Catholic Spitfire Grill

I think I will add at this point that the whole concept of a Catholic "Holy Hour" comes from Jesus' agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and his rebuke of the disciples "So you could not keep watch with me for one hour?" And as a convert to the Catholic Church, once I got over the whole "praying to Saints" thing and really understood in implications of the "Communion of Saints" it never occurred to me that I shouldn't be praying for Jesus! Another non-Catholic contributer asked me to help her make sense of why I would be praying for someone or something in the past and so I fleshed it out still more...

Changing the outcome isn't the only reason to pray. Because of our location in time, we know that the outcome of say....an early Christian martyr being thrown to the lions, will be the lion having lunch.




So in the sense that God is not going to deliver that Christian brother or sister from the lions, it makes more "sense" to pray for something in the here and now. (And please don't misunderstand me, just because I pray for those who have gone before me doesn't mean that I don't spend the majority of my prayer time focused on here and now sorts of prayers. I am a creature of this body and as such I am often focused....probably overly so....on the temporal.) But just like Jesus, who prayed for the cup to be taken away from Him but WASN'T DELIVERED there is perhaps a greater need for the Kingdom at stake and what Jesus needed, the martyr needed and I NEED , is the grace to endure the present trials and offer them for the Glory of God.

So continuing with the death of our martyr. We know that the witness these brothers and sisters in faith had by meeting their death with grace...even JOY!...spoke to the hearts of those who saw it. Their deaths won souls for the Kingdom but it wasn't just their death but the Grace of God that people saw in those moments. Why NOT pray for them? And my pray for them changes me too as I become more aware of the reality of the Kingdom of God and of the temporary nature of this life and my trials.

It comes back to the whole belief in ONE body. I am apart from these brothers and sisters in time and space but because we are all part of the Body of Christ and because Jesus is Divine and the same yesterday, tomorrow and forever, and is present in ALL places and all times I am still just as much a part of them as they are of me. You see it doesn't make any sense to me to say of that God can answer our prayers for our brothers and sisters in India because distance is no obstacle for Him but that He can't answer our prayers for our brothers and sisters facing a Roman executioner because time....well that's too much of a barrier for God. Is the same God present then as now? If that same God is present now AND then, if He is present in all times and places, and if He hears my prayers....then what barrier is a little thing like TIME?! He created it!

By the same token, I don't see the death of the physical body as any sort of barrier to my prayers either. Jesus has only one Body and we are united within it. Freedom in Christ? There it is! We are only temporarily limited by these bodies but our souls are not. Not by sin, not by the bonds of time and space because we have become souls bound for heaven. That's liberation! Life in Christ? Yes truly!! Life beyond what we perceive. We are alive now and forever because of Christ and His Sacrifice and the death of our bodies does not separate us from the Living Body of Christ.

Stay tuned....part III is coming.

If you followed a link to this post, part one is here. Part three is here.