1 Sam 1:9-20 / Mark 1:21-28
The main reason for us to come to church is to pray. The church is the House of God and we come before God's presence to offer Him our prayer.
So besides coming for Mass, we also come at other times to spend a time of prayer with the Lord.
And when we are burdened with difficulties and worries, we will certainly pray, not aloud but with words from the heart that are uttered under our breath.
Like Hannah in the 1st reading, we are also speaking under our breath with our lips moving but our voices are not loud enough to be heard by those around us.
But God is listening to our prayer just as He listened to Hannah's prayer. And like Hannah we too will be consoled and uplifted after that time of heart-felt prayer.
Yes, we want to pray and God wants to listen to our prayer.
But there are times when the burdens of our hearts are just so heavy that they block out and suppress any voice of prayer that we want to make.
In the gospel, the unclean spirit that possessed the man not only blocked out and suppressed his voice of prayer, it even had a voice of its own.
But Jesus expelled it with this command: Be quiet. Come out of him.
Jesus is also commanding the other "voices" in our hearts to be quiet - the voice of difficult, the voice of worry, the voice of anxiety and the other voices that drown out our prayer.
Let us also command these "voices" to be quiet and to be expelled by Jesus, so that we can truly offer to Jesus the prayer of praise and thanksgiving and to be uplifted by His love.