The apostles gathered together with Jesus and reported all they had done and taught. He said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while." People were coming and going in great numbers, and they had no opportunity even to eat. So they went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted place. 

Introductory Prayer: Renew your faith in the presence of Christ in your soul through grace; renew your faith in the Holy Spirit who helps us to pray as we ought. Renew your faith in the Church, you are part of the Church and your prayer is going to benefit your brothers and sisters in the Church as well as yourself. 

Petition: Ask the Holy Spirit to help you put your whole mind, heart and will into your prayer, so that you can be changed by it. 

1.  Desire to Be Alone With Christ.  Contemplate the scene: Christ had sent out the apostles to preach, and now they returned. That was their first taste of their new call, the new activity that would occupy them to the end of their days. They came back tired but excited. Many unexpected, unbelievable things had happened. People believed in their message, people wanted to hear them, they had even performed miracles! Christ saw that they needed time to absorb this, they needed to rest, they needed to reorient themselves and they needed time to be with him. Time alone with Christ is prime time. The effectiveness of my Christian life, of being an apostle to my family, friends and others depends entirely on how close I am to Christ in my heart and soul. 

For his part, Christ is happy when we are happy. He is happy when we have done good things, he is happy even in our failures if we have strived to do our best and serve him in everything. And above all, he wants to spend time alone with me. True, we are called to be active. We have our friends and our studies, we have our mission to go out and bring others to Christ. But most important is to be alone with Christ in our heart and soul. Being alone with Christ not only teaches me about him, it also teaches me about myself. By looking at him I see what I need to grow in, where I need his help, what I need to change. 

Lord, grant me the grace of really believing that my friendship with you is the most important thing in my life. You want to be alone with me so that I can get to know you, and so that you can speak to me. If you want to be 'light of the world' I can only be such if I reflect your light. 

2.  Christ the Servant.  When his disciples go away with Jesus they discover something else about him. Their time alone with him was all too short because, "People saw them leaving and many came to know about it. They hastened there on foot from all the towns and arrived at the place before them."  Even Our Lord couldn't keep the problems of the world from beating a path to his doorstep. He didn't want to. The solution he found personally was not to give up seeking time to be alone in prayer with his Father, but to get up early and go out to pray, as the Gospel tells us, or to spend the whole night in prayer. Christ's prayer is never centered on himself. 

What was Christ's response to the crowds who came out? "...his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things." 

Indeed, we are called to keep living, to keep serving, to keep loving. The secret of the apostle is not his ability to disappear from the world, but rather to bring to the world the Christ he knows personally and who lives in his heart, the Christ he has gotten to know and love through prayer.  There are two poles in our life. The pole of prayer, love for Christ that attracts us and calls us away to be alone with him; and the pole of action, love for neighbor that calls us, moves us with pity, drawing us to send ourselves in service: teaching, feeding, healing? just like Christ. 

Questionnaire

1. How much time do I set aside each day to be alone with Christ? 

2. What shows that I consider my prayer the most important thing I do each day? 

3. How successful am I in making a prayer of everything I do during the day? 

4. Do I believe that Christ can give meaning to the seemingly least important actions of my day?