DAILY PRAYER OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA
Lord Jesus, thou hast seen fit to enlist me for thy service in the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. I humbly entreat Thee, through the intercession of the most holy Virgin of Philermo, of St. John the Baptist, Blessed Gerard, and all the saints, to keep me faithful to the traditions of our Order:
Be it mine to practice and defend the Catholic, the Apostolic, the Roman faith against sacrilege. Be it mine to practice charity towards my neighbors, especially the poor and sick.
Give me the strength I need, to carry out this my resolve, forgetful of myself, learning ever from Thy Holy Gospel a spirit of deep and generous Christian devotion, striving ever to promote God’s Glory, the world’s peace, and all that may benefit the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Amen.
Lex orandi, lex credendi is an old saying which goes back at least to the eighth century. It is translated literally as “the law of praying is the law of believing.” In other words, what we pray is what we believe.
And so, it is informative, especially for those beginning formation in our most august order, to spend some time listening to what we say to God in our daily prayer, to understand what the Order of St. John of Jerusalem is really all about.
A helpful hint: You can tell, then, whether this homily is almost over, by figuring out how far I’ve gotten through the prayer at any given moment.
The first line of the prayer is:
Lord Jesus, thou hast seen fit to enlist me for thy service in the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
It is God who has chosen you for service in this order. The same Lord who has set out a plan for your life, the same God whose holy will we are constantly seeking to discern, always remembering that he chose us and not the other way around. And conformity to his will is the only road to happiness, for we believe that he and he alone is the way, the truth and the life.
The prayer goes on:
I humbly entreat Thee, through the intercession of the most holy Virgin of Philermo, of St. John the Baptist, Blessed Gerard, and all the saints, to keep me faithful to the traditions of our Order:
The traditions of our order: Defense of the Church, Care for the poor, the sick and prisoners, best understood by the example of our chief patrons, the first of whom are the most blessed among women and the greatest man ever born.
The Order first embraced the Mother of God and Saint John the Baptist in the sixteenth century, when, at the battle of Rhodes a vision of the Blessed Virgin and Saint John threw the invading Muslim Turks into a panic and the Christian city was successfully defended. An ancient image of the Virgin under the title of Our Lady of Philermo has been venerated from that time.
She is “full of grace,” the mother of our salvation, who in her lowliness brings forth he who will raise up the lowly and humble the proud. Her son is the one for whom the Baptist will prepare the way and in whose words I will declare in just a few moments when I hold the Body of Christ before you: “Behold the Lamb of God: behold him who takes away the sins of the world!”
And to their heavenly patronage is added that of Blessed Gerard, founder of our Order, a Benedictine lay brother who dedicated his life to the care of the sick in Jerusalem during the most turbulent of times, as his epitaph declares: He was “the humblest man in the East, the slave of the poor, hospitable to strangers, meek of countenance but with a noble heart.”
And so we invoke these three heavenly patrons in our daily prayer in the hopes that we might grow, by God’s grace, to be like them.
Next, the prayer asks God to help us fulfill our role in the Order. First:
Be it mine to practice and defend the Catholic, the Apostolic, the Roman faith against sacrilege.
Have we ever known in a time when the faith needed more defending? Probably, but then again, they didn’t had the internet.
Ours, sadly is a time of decline in real numbers, as the practically giddy news reports from last week gushed. Let me quote from one newspaper: “the Diocese of Providence says Catholic Churches across the state experienced a steep decline in the number of parishioners in recent years...The number of parishioners dropped by about 200,000 to roughly 321,000 in 2018…Fewer students attended Catholic schools and fewer men became priests. Rhode Island's population grew over that time period and the church faced sex abuse scandals worldwide.” And that’s from the San Francisco Chronicle!
Meanwhile, the number of Catholics getting married and baptizing their babies is plummeting, a national poll tell us the average Catholic no longer believes in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and we are cast by social media as tone-deaf, abuse-enabling remnants of a by-gone age. Interesting times we live in.
Yet we know different. We know this faith into which we have been baptized and to which we give our lives is the Church of Christ and not of our own making. We know it is guided by weak human beings, but under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We know it is true, because Jesus has revealed it to us by his Life, Death and Resurrection. And we know that he promised us that it would withstand the gates of hell and that he would remain with us until the end of time.
Do you want to know the truth about life? The Church is your infallible guide. Do you need to be nourished with God’s grace, her Sacraments are God acting in your heart. Do you want to get to heaven? She is the Gate of Heaven and the way to him he who is our life and our only true hope.
Which is not to say that being a Catholic is easy. It never has been. For we are, each one of us as weak as Saint Peter denying the Lord or John Mark running home from the missions. It’s a bit like Flannery O’Oonner once wrote: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
But it is likewise like the disciples once said: “Lord, where else can we go? For you have the words of everlasting life.”
Secondly, in our daily prayer we ask God:
Be it mine to practice charity towards my neighbors, especially the poor and sick.
Maybe the most Maltese of all the Gospel parables is the story of the Rich man and Lazarus. You remember it. The rich man steps over Lazarus as he enters his mansion every night, where he feasted sumptuously, while the dogs licked the wounds of Lazarus. Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man to hell.
When I was young, I was convinced I understood this parable. The Rich man, or Dives, as we used to call him, went to hell because he refused to feed the poor man, over whom he would step each time he went home for dinner.
And I was right. But, not completely… as growing older has often taught me.
For, what if the rich man had simply slipped Lazarus a twenty each time he saw him. Maybe dropped it from his pocket as he walked over him on the way to dinner. Would that have made all the difference?
Well, it certainly would have made Lazarus $140 richer each week, and maybe even a little less hungry. But there’s something more going on here. For while Jesus tells us that Lazarus would have gladly eaten the scraps from the rich man’s table, was Dive’s only sin that he did not feed the poor man?
No. His real sin was that he did not love Lazarus. Not enough to feed him, to listen to him, to care for him and to recognize in him another human being. To see Jesus in him and to love him as a brother.
For you see, sometimes I am tempted to give the poor man five bucks to salve my conscience and to make him go away. Congratulating myself all the way home on how generous I was. But did I really love Lazarus?
Did I listen to Lazarus with love, to help him get onto Mass Health, to see beyond the smell and the craziness, and look into the eyes of a person not unlike myself (there but for the grace of God go I), and to love him as a son and a brother.
And that is what we are called to do as sons and daughters of Malta. To love the poor man and the prisoner, to care for the sick and those who alone. TO be the anti-Dives, the one who loves each one he meets in the model of Christ Jesus, our Lord.
Then the prayer concludes (and so will this homily, soon, I promise):
Give me the strength I need, to carry out this my resolve, forgetful of myself, learning ever from Thy Holy Gospel a spirit of deep and generous Christian devotion, striving ever to promote God’s Glory, the world’s peace, and all that may benefit the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
Strength, God’s grace… Where does it come from?
So often, as good, self-reliant Americans, and often as successful men and women in commerce and the economy, it is American self-reliance upon which we depend. The new Downton Abbey movie is out, and I heard a fascinating interview with Julian Fellowes the other day in which he suggested that Lord Grantham was missing something Lady Cora possessed natively: the American work ethic, the sense which was bred into everyone in this room that with the right amount of sweat equity we could accomplish anything. Or, as my grandmother used to say, “God never asks anything of you that he does not give you the resources to accomplish.”
But that’s just it, isn’t it. God gives us the grace. Without his grace we can do nothing. That is why the fundamental insight to any successful life is that there is a God and I am not he!
So, our daily prayer spells out the four ways we can secure the strength we need to carry our God’s work.
First, we are to be forgetful of ourselves.
Second, we are to learn from the Holy Gospels how to love others.
And third, we are to seek God’s glory alone. And the prayer makes use of a curious syntax here, connecting God’s glory and the world’s peace. So often when we think of world peace, we think of the absence of war, best accomplished through skilled diplomatic negotiations. But that is not the peace we are to strive for: we are to strive for a deeper peace: the peace the world cannot give: the peace which comes only from seeking the glory of God through obedience and love.
When Jesus comes into the chaotic upper room after his resurrection, a room filled with doubting Tomases and Apostles frightened that they too will soon be arrested, the first thing the Risen Lord says is “Peace be with you.” It is only by a personal encounter with the Risen Lord and a taking-up of the crosses he gives us to the glory of his name, that we can bring peace to this world.
This is the peace known by the martyrs at the moment of their death and of those who love at the moment of their sacrifice. It is what Saint Francis meant when he says it is only by giving that we receive and pardoning that we are pardoned.
So, congratulations, my death brothers and sisters in Malta. For, as the daily prayer teaches us, we have been chosen by God each day to take on this holy work.
May we who pray this prayer be like John the Baptist, ever pointing beyond ourselves and our daily concerns to the source of all meaning: to the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Amen.
