The Our Father is described as invoking’the Father by the one Word He always hears’
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
Times seem hard on multiple levels: personal, national and global; technological, political and spiritual.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know that, in hard times, there’s a prayer God always hears?
It turns out that this is exactly how the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the Our Father: “[invoking] the Father by the one Word He always hears” (CCC 2769).
So, one of the best responses to the challenges of our time is to immerse ourselves more deeply in the prayer that Jesus gave us.
How can we do this? By studying and pondering the treasures of the Lord’s Prayer and letting Jesus’ word shape our words in deeper ways.
We might study and pray with the Surrender Novena. In its third day, commenting on “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” it says: “That is, in our need, decide as you see fit for our temporal and eternal life.” What a powerful way to surrender our needs! This is what Jesus did when He asked for the multiplication of loaves, the raising of Lazarus and that the chalice might pass from Him. The Father always answered Him, either in accord with the needs of this life or the resurrected life. What if we prayed that way — “thy will be done” — more deeply?
We might study the Catechism’s treatment of the Our Father. It’s no accident that the treatment of the Lord’s Prayer is the final section of the catechism: Jesus — the first Word of the Father from all eternity — is given the last word in the Church’s textbook. And this treatment contains important treasures for our spiritual life.
For example, paragraph 2795 notes: “The Father’s house is our homeland. Sin has exiled us from the land of the covenant, but conversion of heart enables us to return to the Father, to heaven.” There it is! We’re told where we are, what’s happened to us, where we’re going and what we need to do to get there. The pattern of the entire Bible — and the pattern of each of our spiritual lives — is laid before us in two sentences! What if we prayed with a deeper awareness of that pattern?
We might study any of the great commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer by the Church Fathers.
For example, in commenting on “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” St. Gregory of Nyssa takes special care to note how the usual biblical order is reversed. The Bible usually tells us to imitate God. In this case, Jesus tells us that God is going to imitate us: “He wants your disposition to be an example to God!”
The prophet Amos, like us, lived in hard times on multiple levels. Describing those times, he said: “There is a famine on earth — not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”
That sounds like an apt description of our times, too.
But if there’s a famine for hearing the words of the Lord — and that sounds right — then part of our response should be to immerse ourselves more deeply in the one Word the Father always hears and invite others to join us.
