Mark 6:30-34
Gotta Pray
by Rev. Steven G. Oetjen
Reprinted by permission of "The Arlington Catholic Herald"

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Mark wrote to explain Christ
to the new Gentile converts.

The apostles gathered together with Jesus and reported all they had done and taught.  He said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while."  People were coming and going in great numbers, and they had no opportunity even to eat.  So they went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted place.  People saw them leaving and many came to know about it.  They hastened there on foot from all the towns and arrived at the place before them.

When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.

St. Francis de Sales once said that everyone needs at least half and hour of prayer a day, unless you are busy, in which case you need a whole hour.  Along similar lines, Mother Teresa made sure that her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, made prayer a priority and that they did not let busyness become an excuse for cutting prayer time short.  As one story goes, a certain sister came to her saying that she had too much to do and not enough time each day to do it.  They began each day with Mass and a holy hour, so this sister's request was to be able to reduce her holy hour to half an hour so that she could get an earlier start to her apostolic work each day.  Mother Teresa denied the request and told the sister to pray for two hours instead of one.  All the other sisters finished their holy hours and went out to start their work for the day, while that sister stayed behind to pray for a second hour.  That sister suddenly found that she was able to get everything done, with one fewer hour in the day to do it.

In today's gospel, the apostles return after having been sent out two by two.  They gather together again to tell Jesus about all they did and taught while going form town to town.  At this point, Jesus says, "Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while."  He calls them back from the busyness of ministering to others to spend time with him alone.  After being channels of grace for others, he calls them to return to the source of all grace.  Even if this attempt to find rest is frustrated by the clever crowd, Jesus shows that it is his desire for his apostles, and for us too, to seek him out regularly in a "deserted place."

The need to rest with Jesus is not only something we need to do to avoid burnout.  Sure, that is one reason we must not neglect prayer.  But prayer is also the very thing on which the fruitfulness of our work depends.  The Trappist monk, Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, calls prayer the "soul of the apostolate," and he wrote a book by that same name.  The presence of a soul in a body is what makes it a living body as opposed to a lifeless corpse.  And so, to say that prayer is the soul of the apostolate is to say that without prayer, one's apostolate is lifeless and bears no fruit.  Here is the danger of "activism," that we spend all our time doing external works - as good as those works may be - but we neglect the interior life.  We may fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing good and that this should excuse the neglect of our prayer life, but the reality is that we are merely flailing around.  Our work will bear no fruit, as hard as we might flail, because it lacks a soul.

In "The Soul of the Apostolate," Dom Chautard writes, "The extent to which you yourself are able to live on the love of Our Lord will be the exact measure of your ability to stir it up in other people."  You cannot give what you do not have, and if you yourself do not have an ardent love of the Lord interiorly, you will not be able to share it with others.

When we are tired and overworked, it should be most obvious to us that we need to rest with the Lord.  And yet, it is often not to the Lord that we go.  We easily run to the lowest hanging fruit, whatever entertainment, pleasure or comfort that is quickest or most readily available.  Our lives become a back and forth between activism and laziness.  We throw ourselves entirely into our work, and then entirely over to the nearest source of dopamine. Meanwhile, payer is nowhere to be found.  Our work is lifeless, and our rest is not really restorative.  What we really need is to search out that deserted place to be alone with the Lord.  We need to speak to him from the heart, and to listen to him.  There we find our true rest, and our hearts are once more enkindled with the fire of his love.