The “Our Father”
1. Our Lord exhorted His disciples on many occasions to pray often and
with confidence if they wished to be heard. Everything which they asked
His heavenly Father in His name, He said, they would obtain. Ask, He
said, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find, knock, and it
shall be opened to you. Finally, He insisted that we ought to pray and
never to give up. In other words, life can be a continuous prayer if we
offer to God all our thoughts, words, and actions.
The ideal
Christian prayer is to do the will of God at all times from the motive
of pure love. The Apostles, however, who had not made that much progress
in the spiritual life, asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. (Luke
11:1) It was then that Our Lord composed the most beautiful of prayers,
the “Our Father.” (Mt. 6:9-13) When we recite it, we speak to God in the
words of Jesus Christ Himself and unite our weak voices with the
powerful voice of the Son of God. We address the Eternal God, moreover,
by the name of Father. Even in the Old Testament God is often referred
to in this way. Then, however, He figured as the Father of the chosen
people, whereas now He is the Father of all. He is our Father, the
Father of all mankind and of all races, whom He has willed to redeem
from the slavery of sin. The term “Our Father” has taken on a new and
fuller meaning. Our weak prayer becomes united to that of Jesus, our
first-born brother, and to the prayers of the Apostles, Martyrs,
Virgins, and Confessors, who form and have formed throughout the
centuries the Mystical Body of Christ which is the Church. We need no
longer feel that we are on our own, for through the Communion of Saints
our entreaties are joined to those of the entire Church, militant,
suffering, and triumphant. We can be confident, therefore, that our
prayer will be heard.
2. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven.” Heaven
is God Himself, Who reveals Himself to the souls of the blessed. If a
man lives in God, his mind and heart are already in Heaven, even though
he is still an exile upon this earth. It is a wonderful experience to
lead a bodily existence upon earth while our minds are with God in
heaven, for, as St. Paul says, “our citizenship is in heaven.” (Phil.
3:20) As we are aware, God is everywhere, in Heaven and on earth. When
we invoke our Father Who is in Heaven, however, we manifest our faith in
Him and in His generosity, whereby He reveals Himself in all His glory
to the blessed and shows His mercy to us poor exiles when we come to
Him. In the first words of the Pater Noster, we express not only our
faith, but also our hope of being happy with God for all eternity.
3. God is truly our Father because He created us from nothing and
because He caused us to be born again through the Incarnation of His
only-begotten Son and the work of the Redemption. In this way He is
doubly our Father.
Can we claim, however, to be true sons of God?
It is not enough simply to make this claim by reciting the “Our
Father,” but we should prove it in a practical way in our daily lives.
We can do this by accepting God’s will in all things, by obeying His
commandments and the precepts of the church, and especially by loving
Him more than anything in creation.
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