Friends, today’s Gospel assures us of the power of prayer. When some people ask in a spirit of trust, really believing that what they are asking for will happen, it happens. Just as Jesus suggests in the Gospel, “Everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
The power of prayer is the confidence that we are being guided and cared for, even when that guidance and care are not immediately apparent. It is what allows someone to live in detachment from all of the ups and downs of life. In the language of St. Ignatius of Loyola: “We should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. . . . Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created . . . to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord.”
Someone that lives in that kind of detachment is free, and because they are free, they are powerful. They are beyond the threats that arise in the context of this world. This is the source of dynamis, real power. This is the power that Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and John Paul II wielded: world-changing power.