29 Sunday Ordinary Time, C, 20 October 2013, Luke 18:1-8

A good friend of mine told me this story about his grandmother. Her husband died when she was in her early seventies. The week before he died, he said to his son, as he watched his wife walking up the street with the groceries, that she wouldn’t last much longer. She would outlast him by some thirty years.

One evening, my friend was visiting his granny, and he noticed that she was sitting down in silence. He offered to turn on the telly: ‘if you want to son, you go ahead, but not for me.’ So he didn’t turn it on. He sat and read some of his books for college. She sat, sometimes twirling her thumbs, one about the other, sometimes thumbing through her prayer book, sometimes fingering through her rosary beads.

Annie, my friend’s granny, died at age 104. She had outlived many of her children, her husband, and many friends, acquaintances and neighbours. Annie wasn’t too interested in telly; she probably wouldn’t be too concerned about the internet or facebook or any of that.

Annie liked to sit in silence. Sometimes praying, sometimes not. Who knows what went through her mind, and through her heart, sitting in that chair.

A great story is told of how, when the barricades were on the streets of Belfast in the 1960s and 70s; Annie and the old Canon climbed up onto them and dismantled them in the face of very tough opposition.

Or another time, when she was collecting her pension, and armed robbers arrived to hold up the post-office. Annie chased them out with her umbrella and her handbag. ‘How dare you take my pension; out! Out!’

Annie was a lady with great hope. Great resilience. Amazing determination. Incredible fortitude.

Where did Annie get her courage? Her hope? Her strength? Perhaps those moments, quietly sitting, thumbing her rosary, twirling her thumbs. Moments of profound daily connection with her God. Grace-filled moments. Pain sharing moments. Endurance creating moments.

The parable that Jesus tells today of the unjust judge and the persistent widow exhorts us of “the need to pray continually and never lose heart.” It is not God who needs to relate with us. It is we who need God! It is we who benefit from the daily exercise of prayer; the daily exercise of showing our heart to the Lord, appealing to him for his concern, his mercy and his help. We can share our burdens, our daily, weekly, yearly or even our lifelong burdens; we can share them all with the Lord. And ask him, for the courage, to never lose heart.