2022 Sun July 24

St. Josemaria Institute

We celebrate James the Apostle on July 25. With his brother, John, the Gospels (Matthew 4, 21-22; Mark 1, 19-20; Luke 5, 10-11) record that they were fishermen, the sons of Zebedee, partners with Simon Peter, and called by Jesus from mending their nets beside the sea of Galilee at the beginning of his ministry

Jesus nicknamed them ‘the sons of thunder’ – perhaps justified by the story (Luke 9, 51-56) that they once wished to call down fire from heaven to destroy a village which had refused them hospitality.

They made it to key events in Jesus life – the Transfiguration, Gethsemene and at various healings and miracles – Peter’s mother-in-law and raising of Jairus’s daughter. Obviously, James was of Jesus closest followers.

He is known as James the Great to distinguish him from James the Less, or James the brother of the Lord.

About AD 42, shortly before Passover (Acts 12), James was beheaded by order of King Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great (who tried to kill the infant Jesus–Matthew 2). James was the first of the Twelve to suffer martyrdom, and the only one of the Twelve whose death is recorded in the New Testament.

Tradition is he was a missionary to Spain in his life and, at his death, was buried at Compostela, a site of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. 

Relics of the saints were believed to possess great power. Spain needed it in the 8th century. Jerusalem fell to the armies of Islam in 636 A.D., and less than a century later, in 711, Spain was also invaded and conquered. Islam rapidly reached northern Spain, and sent raiding parties into France. In northwest Spain, however, a small Christian kingdom, including Asturias and present-day Galicia, emerged in the 8th century, and at this time James’ tomb was discovered near Finisterre. James was the most senior member of the intercessionary hierarchy whose relics remained undiscovered.  The discovery of his tomb helped to bolster the resistance.

In the 12th Century Santiago came to rank with Rome and Jerusalem as one of the great destinations of medieval pilgrimage. The first cathedral was built over the site of James tomb, and Benedictine houses were established.  The cathedral where he is buried was depicted in the film, The Way, at the end of the “Way of St. James”, a pilgrim’s path across Spain.  

The relics of St James are housed in a silver casket below the high altar, above which his statue presides over the cathedral. On the feast of St James on July 25, and other high days and holy days, a giant censer, the Botafumeiro, is swung on ropes by red-coated attendants in a great arc from floor to vaults, emitting clouds of incense over delighted crowds. It’s considered a symbol of both the cathedral and the city.

Here is the scene from The Way that depicts the pilgrims reaching  Santiago and venturing to the cathedral with the swinging of the censer or incense burner.  This has never been filmed before and the production crew had to get special permission to film it. They were allowed only 1 hour!

The “Way” is actually many paths across France and Northern Spain that has been followed by pilgrims for 800 years. In recent decades it has enjoyed a resurgence as a spiritual journey with many organized and unorganized journeys.  You can the take the route across Northern Spain (800km) taking 6 weeks or break it up into shorter journeys. 

Lord’s Prayer – Matthew vs. Luke

“Give us Today our Daily Bread” -James Hook (1866) 

Michael Foss (Power Surge) lists “daily prayer” as “The first mark of a disciple.”

From Yearning Minds and Burning Hearts: Understanding the Spirituality of Jesus by Glandion Carney , William Rudolf Long

“’Prayer changes us.’” The ultimate value of prayer is that it opens us to understand God and the world in fresh ways. Prayer gives us new spectacles to see the world–glasses that put the seemingly huge demands of contemporary life in a new perspective. Prayer helps us listen to the voice of God, accept the will of God and ask for the good things of God

“The practice of prayer is a standing rebuke to the wisdom of the world. The practice of prayer affirms a dimension to life that is unseen and unmeasurable, while the wisdom of the world considers something important only if it is visible and quantifiable. The practice of prayer proclaims that people are spiritual beings, rooted in the heart, while the wisdom of the world assumes that we are economic beings, concerned primarily with our personal net worth and an adequate retirement income. The practice of prayer indicates that God is the watcher, guide and protector of our lives, while the wisdom of the world teaches that unless we stand up for ourselves, no one will. The practice of prayer proves that “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37), while the wisdom of the world says we need all the resources ahead of time and all the right people speaking up for us or we will not be able to get what we want out of life. The practice of prayer says, “Don’t worry.” The wisdom of the world says, “Calculate.”

“Prayer is one of the principal ways of enlarging our awareness of God and of the universe. Prayer assumes there is more to the world than we can experience with our five senses. The great diversity of living things in the world should not only increase our sense of wonder, but also give us an awareness of our human limitations

“Prayer is the unique opportunity which God gives us to develop a deeper understanding of God and of the world

The latter is emphasized here -“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.” Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972).

Three Characteristics of Prayer

“What is the essential nature of prayer? First, prayer is the door or threshold to the spiritual world where God dwells in unapproachable light. It is the door to the inner world of the heart, whose contours have never fully been mapped. Prayer is the means to a “cartography of the soul,” to a process of spiritual mapmaking. When we pray, we pursue Jesus into the deep things of life, where light and darkness dwell together and neither fully extinguishes the other. Prayer is the door into understanding the heavenly realms as well as the inky abyss. It opens new realms to us.

“Prayer is also the anchor of our lives. It not only opens new vistas into the spiritual life, but also ties us ever more firmly to God in the process. One summer during college I worked at a large office building in San Francisco next to where a skyscraper was being built. It took the crew weeks just to drive the pilings deep into the ground. I still remember the ear-splitting crashes of hammers, the rush of pressurized air and the shouts of workers. They were anchoring the building, now among the tallest in San Francisco, deep into the bowels of the earth so that not even a major earthquake would topple it. Prayer is like that. It anchors us to God by blasting through the layers of debris and dirt of our lives so we might have a sturdy and strong life.

Prayer is, finally, a process of working the earth of the hearth, as the ancient monastic writers might say. In her book The Closter Walk, author Kathleen Norris writes about the ways that the Catholic monastic tradition provides a rhythm and depth for spirituality that many Protestants have never explored. When she says that the life of prayer works “the earth of the heart,” she means that prayer is like the act of cultivation. In order to work the soil, one must break up the hardened dirt clods, water the ground, free it from weeds and then plant a crop. Prayer is the way to “loosen up” the heart. During the natural course of our lives the “earth of our hearts” becomes parched, weed-infested and hard as flint. Unless we take care to break it up to run our fingers again through the rich soil that we know is there, our lives become as destitute and as desiccated as a desert.

Prayer is the means Jesus used to open himself to God, to anchor himself to his Father and to work the earth of his heart. Jesus prayed often and taught his disciples to pray. Prayer was as necessary to him as the air he breathed. I believe it was prayer that gave Jesus his powerful sense of awareness and insight into people and the world. It connected him to God, the source of life, and he began to see things so much from the divine perspective that he had no doubt that his work was God’s work. The practice of prayer gave Jesus an intuitive grasp of the truths of life as well as the political and religious realities around him. He could, figuratively speaking, see into another person’s heart because he knew both his own heart and the heart of God

“… We should, rather, yearn to imitate him and develop a similar commitment to prayer for ourselves. We should look at Jesus’ life as testimony to the benefits of developing a life of prayer. Jesus invites us, through prayer, to experience new, fresh, deep, true and permanent insights into the nature of God, the world and the culture in which we live.