MY DEAR parishioners, speaking of prayer. When I was seven, I prayed to God for a pair of invisible wings. Big feathered ones. I promised God I wouldn’t fly in front of anyone, and I’d never say a word about them. Only in the middle of the night would I fly.
 
WELL, AS I’m sure you know, but if you don’t know, I’ll tell you now. God never gave me those wings. I prayed for several months, and all I received was heavenly silence. How far I could have flown with those wings! The places I could have seen! If I only had those wings, I would have been the best boy that God ever knew. After a while, with some disappointment, I put those wings out of my mind and forgot about my absurd dream.
 
YOU KNOW the old saying. God answers prayer before you realize it. To my amusement and delight, amid all the excitement of September 12, 1992, the day of my ordination to Catholic priesthood, my first priestly Mass and the receptions, I thought about those invisible wings and the little boy who asked God for them long ago.
 
I KNEW exactly why I remembered that boyish prayer. And while it’s credulous to connect Holy Orders with a pair of wings, well, that’s just what I did. I can’t help it. The expression “wings of prayer” surely express how one’s fervent prayers rise to heaven to plead pardon and favor before our loving heavenly father.
 
BECAUSE I'VE been “flying” for a number of years and only recently figured out that it had everything to do with receiving Holy Orders. How can one know this? As a Catholic priest, I’m truly more joy-filled and content than ever before in my life. I’m more fulfilled as a man than I ever thought possible.
 
AND I have done more, accomplished more, loved more, and lived more in these years of my priesthood than the sum of all my years and experiences preceding my ordination. When I offer Holy Eucharist, and our choir sings a beautiful communion hymn, I fly. When I baptize a baby and tell the story of how God chose to save his people under the sign of living water, I fly.
 
IN PRAYER, I traverse the world like an eagle, praying for our missionaries in the Middle East, China and Africa. I look down on the Vatican City State and the eternal city Rome and pray for our Holy Father’s health and happiness. I prayerfully voyage from city to city and house to house to all the parish families who implore me to pray for them. Be a swallow, says St. Francis de Sales, and gain your spiritual food in flight. And when, after Mass, I’m hugged about the knees by little children who love their parish priest, I feel the wings of my heart beating with joy. I love children.
 
I'M IN love with Holy Mother Church, my bride, who gives birth to all our beautiful children in the Sacrament of Baptism. And wings of prayer and God’s holy Word? What can I say, but that with these two great gifts, I soar over land and sea, staying aloft indefinitely, catching one spiritual breeze after another.
 
GOD DOES answer prayer. He answers all of them. And the wonder isn’t that God does, but that we actually can know that he does. Even though “we see in a mirror dimly” [1Cor 13:12], we may ask for the spiritual grace of knowing that, in God, prayers sincerely offered never die.
 
WE SHOULD pray always for eyes and ears of faith to discern the blessings of our good God along the way. God gave a little second grade boy a hearing in 1956 and answered his prayer 36 years later. But feathers would never do, you see. Our Lord Jesus gave me spiritual wings on the day I was raised to Holy Orders and vowed my love to his bride the Church, and after these many, many years of my priesthood, I’ve only begun to fly. Sincerely in the hearts of Jesus and Mary. Your pastor, Reverend Richard Barker.
 
 
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