Vatican Radio has a summary and quotes from Pope Francis’ homily at Mass Thursday, which focused on praying the Our Father:
To whom do I pray? To the Almighty God? He is too far off. Ah, I can’t hear Him. Neither did Jesus. To whom do I pray? To a cosmic God? That’s quite normal these days, is it not? … praying to the cosmic God, right? This polytheistic model that comes from a rather light culture.
Before reading this, I would not have thought to characterize our society this way, but saying that we have a “rather light” culture just hits the nail on the head. From the stuff we all lament (more people paying attention to Kim and Kanye’s baby than to the Constitutional-rights violations happening under this POTUS) to issues more germane to Catholics (secular music at Mass, a micron-deep understanding of Church teaching, perceiving of God as the cosmic Santa Claus, etc.), our culture seems to be suffering from a serious deficit. We have a deficit of taking things seriously. Or, better, we treat serious things as mundane and we take mundane things too seriously.
You must pray to the Father! It is a strong word, “Father”. You must pray to Him who generated you, who gave you life. Not to everyone: everyone is too anonymous. To you. To me. To the person who accompanies you on your journey: He knows all about your life. Everything: what is good and what is not so good. He knows everything. If we do not start the prayer with this word, not just with our lips but with our hearts, we cannot pray in a Christian language.
How necessary it is to recover prayer in a Christian language! I am the last person on earth to be giving prayer lessons, but I can point you to the first people on earth who do so: Jesus, Mary (points us to her Son), St. Joseph (silently self-sacrificing for the good of others), St. John of the Cross (the art of prayer), St. Teresa of Avila (St. John of the Cross for us left-brained folks), and Fr. Thomas Dubay (my introduction to the former two, but a master in his own right).
The Lord’s prayer – geograph.org.uk – 259096.jpg at wikimedia commons
We have a Father. Very close to us, eh! Who embraces us … All these worries, concerns that we have, let’s leave them to the Father, He knows what we need. But, Father, what? My father? No: Our Father! Because I am not an only child, none of us are, and if I cannot be a brother, I can hardly become a child of the Father, because He is a Father to all. Mine, sure, but also of others, of my brothers. And if I am not at peace with my brothers, I cannot say ‘Father’ to Him.
Not only is He the Father of all of us humans, He is also the Father of the Son. Jesus teaches us this prayer and gives us the incredible gift to call His eternal Father, our Father as well. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this three-stage scenario:
- We stress about a particular situation;
- We pause and offer the situation into the Father’s hands;
- Our stress subsides, and the situation resolves itself.
I just need to work on making stage 1 be of a much shorter duration.
Jesus has promised us the Holy Spirit: it is He who teaches us, from within, from the heart, how to say “Father” and how to say “our.” Today we ask the Holy Spirit to teach us to say “Father” and to be able to say “our,” and thus make peace with all our enemies.
Since it’s Friday, where we especially recall Jesus’s passion and death, take a moment to reflect on Our (ours and His) Father.