The disciples ask Jesus today to teach them how to pray. There are so many different ways we can pray and communicate to God, aren’t there. Our Catholic faith has a rich tradition with written prayers, such as the rosary, the prayer of St Michael the archangel, or the litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that is traditional prayed on the first Friday of the month. We have so many other ways to pray in our faith traditions as well, such as centering prayer and lectio divina. I love the tradition of the different prayers we have in our Catholic faith.
Our rich Catholic prayer tradition kept me going as a missionary in Ecuador where I served with the Comboni lay missionaries. They are named after the saint whose feast day we celebrate tomorrow, St Daniel Comboni. Since this is Extraordinary Missionary Month and since Pope Francis wants us to learn from the missionary saints and martyrs this month, Daniel Comboni is a great missionary saint who is great example of missionary faith for us. Daniel really captured my imagination when I was out in the jungles of Ecuador as a missionary. He was born into a poor family of farmers in Italy in 1831. He is the only one of 8 children of his parents who made it past the early years of childhood. He was ordained a priest in the year 1854, the same year the Immaculate Conception was declared as dogma in our Church. He always dreamed of being a missionary to Africa. He went on his first trip to Africa to the Sudan, when he and his companions journeyed for 4 months on camel from Egypt to their mission site. Many of his missionary companions died along the way, but Daniel survived the journey. He was affected deeply by the severe poverty and hardship of the African people that he encountered on that journey and during his missionary service in Africa. Daniel eventually became the first bishop of the Sudan in Africa. He died at the young age of 50 from all of the hardships he went through as a missionary, but his love for God lives on in all priests, brothers, and nuns of the Comboni missionaries who work all over the world today. I remember some of the Comboni priests telling me how in 1964 all of the Comboni priests, brothers, and nuns were expelled from the south of Sudan when an anti-Christian government took power in the country. Thousands of missionaries returned to Rome, many of whom had been in the Sudan most of their adult lives serving the Lord in the missions there. Like the faith in God that Jesus expresses in the prayer that he teaches the disciples in the Gospel today, Daniel Comboni and so many of our missionaries had such a strong faith that never gave up through all their hardships and struggles. Many of them so willingly gave up their lives for their love of their faith and in service to the calling they received from God. We give thanks for the ways our missionaries have enriched our lives, for the way they still speak to us today. All of us have a calling we receive to God. And we are all called to be missionaries wherever we are in life.
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