Fifth Sunday of the Year, B 

      Yesterday evening I watched the movie Cinderella Man, a film which recounts the great comeback of the boxer Jim Braddock.  In the first half of his career by the year 1929 he was famous, well-off, and seemingly on his way to ever more fame and success.  And then the Great Depression settled over the world’s economy, and he lost everything, was reduced to poverty and lost his commission to box.  However, after a lucky break he was back in the ring, and by the middle of the 1930s he was the world’s heavyweight champion. 

      But the movie, beautifully directed by Ron Howard, portrays Braddock as far more than a boxer.  In fact, his whole motive for trying to make a comeback was in order to feed and care for his wife and children; for he was always in his own mind first and foremost a husband and a father.  Rarely has Hollywood been able to portray fatherhood in so rich a light.  Boxing was something he did; who he really was was another matter:  a man, the son of his parents, the loyal friend of his friends, the husband of his wife, the father of his children, a baptized member of the Catholic Church.

      Europeans love to point out the foibles of Americans.  And that’s okay:  I enjoy returning them the favor.  But one thing the Old World has accurately noted about us is our strong tendency to be more concerned with what we do than with who we are.  They, especially our English cousins, often remark that Americans will ask, while introductions are being made:  “What do you do?”  As in, what’s your profession, your work, your job? – sometimes asking this before names are even given.

      A good friend of mine from college days worked for many years in Saudi Arabia.  On one occasion he was visiting a Saudi friend, a married man with children, who introduced my friend to his oldest son, a boy of about 12.  The boy introduced himself in perfect English by giving his name and then by rattling off a good part of his genealogy:  “I am the son of so-and-so, the son of so-and-so…,” etc. much like what we read in the Bible’s genealogies.  My friend responded in like manner, but was only able to go back a couple of generations.  The Arab boy looked surprised and saddened, and turned to his father and said in Arabic:  “How very sad!  Your American friend doesn’t know who he is!”

      This raises an important, if troubling question, or series of questions:  Who are we, really?  Who am I?  Am I, are you, simply the summation of what you and I do?  For is it not the case that we enter this world with the ability to do almost nothing.  We cannot even name ourselves but receive the title of our person from someone else.  Like Job too, in today’s first reading, when we come to near the end of our lives in this world, we, as it were, make almost a complete circle and are able yet again to do very little.

      But, someone may insist:  but we become able to do more and more as we grow up, and normally have years and years of healthy activity.  Yes indeed, but this then raises yet another haunting question:  in all this doing, who am I becoming?  Not what, but who am I forming myself into with this daily laundry list of activities?  Am I a boxer – that is, one who boxes for a living and for the joy of the sport, something that even Braddock finally had to give up with advancing age and eventual death – am I a boxer, or a father, a brother, a husband, a son of my mother?  And even more importantly, am I a child of God, an identity I was born into through baptism; and if so, do I do what’s necessary to live out that reality of who I am? 

      Thus the importance of prayer, as portrayed in today’s Gospel – Jesus leaving off the good busyness of healing those who came to Him and getting up early, before dawn, to disappear from the crowds in order to pray, to commune with the Father, the source of His identity.  Of course, prayer is something else we do in a sense; but it has to do with the very core of being, who we really are as a Christian:  it is something we do because of who we are most importantly, and in doing it, we are formed ever more completely into the person we are supposed to be. 

      Prayer is neglected by many.  It’s something that seems to be of no real immediate effect.  We would much rather – especially we Americans – “do something now” rather than, strangely, commune with the very One who brought the worlds into existence – God. And yet it is God who has named us by bringing us into existence, and so through prayer we have access to the source of our identity. 

      We are born into this world able to do little; we leave it in almost the same condition.  Meanwhile, have we risen up early in those days between birth and death, and prayed?  And if we don’t pray, then who are we pretending to be by all this doing that will come to an end even though we will not, we who have eternity planted in our hearts by our Creator? 

      Pray.  Raise your hearts and minds to God in worship, praise, thanksgiving, and petition.  That is, let us do what is closest to who we are as children of God, and in the doing, be ever more and more the ones Christ died and rose again to make us.  Lay aside the work, the worry, the boxing and the calculating.  In the quietness of the dawn, seek the face of God and find out there in that vision who you really are.