A Time Of Asking
Today is Rogation Sunday and marks the beginning of one of the Church’s shortest seasons, Rogationtide. This time of year takes us from the end of Eastertide proper and ends with the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, an event we celebrate this coming Thursday. Rogationtide, which can be loosely translated as The Time of Asking, is devoted to placing our requests at the feet of our blessed Lord, asking for all the things of which we are in need, and asking him to bring our intentions to his Father in heaven. For “whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name,” said our Lord, “he will give it to you.” So for the next few days, we should prioritize our thoughts, listing our needs and wants according to their importance to our spiritual and material life.
Our spiritual needs are many. We are all sinners and none are exempt from the need of God’s mercy. This he will show us on the coming feast of Pentecost, when, if we have asked God with sufficient fervor, he will shower us with an increase of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, each designed to help our souls become pleasing to our divine Creator. You’ll find the Seven Gifts listed on the front of the bulletin, with a little explanation of how each one can be applied to our own thoughts, words and deeds.
As for our material needs, here we need to be a bit more careful (the Holy Ghost’s gift of Counsel will help us here), distinguishing what we truly need from what we would merely like to have. So let’s sort out all those vague wishes and the more needful requirements of our life, remembering that anything physical or material, no matter how important they may seem, are all simply tools that we should use to improve our spiritual life. We may think we need good health so we can live longer. But of what use is a long life if we use it to commit more sins, or even if we use it only for lawful and limited self-indulgence? Think of our good health, or our prosperity, or even our happiness in general as things that will help us love God and our neighbor more fervently and with better results. “If only I had more money, I could help the poor better” is a far better motive for buying a lottery ticket than dreams of a beach house in Hawaii and a Rolex watch. So yes, we should identify our motives, think why it is we want this or that, and judge whether we want it for the right reasons, then humbly place our request before God, asking him to provide what is best for us and withhold the things it would be better for us not to have.
If God sees that we are asking for the right things and for the right reason, he will answer our prayers, especially if we are truly seeking for things that will improve our soul. But be careful what you ask for—sometimes God answers prayers to teach us a good lesson about praying properly. When we get that promotion at work we prayed for, will the new job take more of our time, hurting our family life, will it mean we can’t get to Mass on Sunday? Again, the gifts of the Holy Ghost such as Counsel and Knowledge will help us pray for the right things.
Finally, to increase the power of our prayers, we invoke the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the angels and all the saints in heaven. During each day of Rogationtide the clergy recite in their Divine Office the Litany of the Saints for this purpose. The faithful would find it very helpful, I’m sure, if we too invoke all the members of the Church Triumphant, asking them in the Litany of the Saints to join in our prayers of supplication during this time. On Ascension Thursday this week, the paschal candle will be snuffed out for the last time as we commemorate the end of our Lord’s dwelling among us in his physical body. Our prayerful requests to him in these last few days before he ascends are powerful, and the saints’ intercession makes them even stronger. Most of all though, let’s think of them as powerful because they will be placed before God the Father not just by the saints in heaven, as though that were not enough, but by the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ himself. He might be leaving us, but he takes our prayers with him. So as we say so many times during the Mass, “Let us Pray!”