Fifth Sunday of Easter: Prayer, a narrow gate

Lessons: Psalms 24,29; Wisdom 7:22-8:1; 2nd Thessalonians 2:13-17, Matthew 7:7-14. 

Innocence is a quality we cannot maintain and mature. It yields its early fruit to wisdom as we mature and life throws its lessons in our path. But there is a deeper route in life and that is to pause, see where we are and open ourselves to a deeper journey. For people of faith this necessarily involves prayer, waiting on God's prodding and the deeper gift of a wise life.

Perhaps the most fundamental description of prayer we have in the New Testament (after the Lord's Prayer) is in today's reading of Matthew.

"Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." Matthew 7:7-14

There is no promise here that we get what we ask for or that we ask rightly what we truly need. Only we are promised that if we knock by prayer, seek by hope, ask what is deepest in our heart/mind, a response will come. What Jesus holds up is not the quick give me prayer but the diligent opening of our being to the Divine Being. It is as much a patient waiting as a momentary knocking.

Immediately following these verses Jesus tells us that there is a tendency to travel life by a broad way with distant boundaries that do not guide us well. So then enter God by a more tailored way. Let it be tailored by what is nourishing of a wise and faithful life as he is teaching it. Most of us have tasted both ways and found the former lacking what fully satisfies our quest for meaning and the good.

"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it. Matthew 7:13-14

So today I offer not my thoughts fully but yield to one of my favorite poets. George Herbert here meditates on the gift of infant Baptism and the claim of God early on our lives. The gift as he sees it is to hold this narrow way where God has claimed us and we have yielded to this calim.

H. Baptism II by George Herbert 1593-1633

Since, Lord, to thee
A narrow way and little gate
Is all the passage, on my infancy
Thou didst lay hold, and antedate
My faith in me.

O let me still
Write thee great God, and me a child:
Let me be soft and supple to thy will,
Small to my self, to others mild,
Behither ill.

Although by stealth
My flesh get on, yet let her sister
My soul bid nothing, but preserve her wealth:
The growth of flesh is but a blister;
Childhood is health.