Mt 13,18-23 – Friday of the XVI Week of Ordinary Time
The memory of Saint Charbel, which the Church celebrates today, seems to offer us an extraordinary key to understand the page of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus tells the parable of the sower and says: «Every time someone hears the word of the Kingdom and does not understand it, the Evil One comes and steals what has been sown in his heart».
The problem, therefore, is not just listening. The problem is preserving what we have heard. Saint Charbel spent his life in prayer, until he himself became a man made of prayer. But praying does not simply mean multiplying words or religious practices. Prayer is above all attention. It is living with a heart alert enough not to miss anything that comes from God. Many times God sows something into our life through a word, an encounter, an intuition, a circumstance. But we are so distracted that that grace fails to take root. We listen and immediately forget. We receive an insight and immediately return to our old habits. We notice a presence and are immediately sucked into a thousand other things.
The great lesson of Saint Charbel is precisely this: to bear fruit you must learn to guard. His solitude, his silence, his hidden life were not an escape from the world, but the radical attempt to make room for God and not to lose anything that God entrusted to him. Prayer, then, is the good soil of the Gospel. It is that interior disposition that welcomes the Word, safeguards it and slowly allows it to transform life. We don’t always need God to tell us something new. Very often we need to take seriously what he has already told us. In conclusion, praying means keeping our gaze fixed on Someone who loves us. And when your gaze remains fixed on Him, even what seemed impossible begins to become possible.
