Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Introduction to the Perfect Prayer (Our Father...) [Catholic Caucus]
CatholicExchange.com ^ | August 18, 2010 | Mark Shea

Posted on 08/19/2010 5:10:21 PM PDT by Salvation

Introduction to the Perfect Prayer

August 18th, 2010 by Mark Shea

Fr. Simon Tugwell notes that the very first thing we should know about prayer, according to St. Paul, is that we do not know how to do it. Paul makes this fact clear when he tells the Romans that:

[T]he Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8:26-27).

Because we don’t know what we are doing when we pray, God sends us help. The principal help he gives is the Spirit who, if you will, prays through us and in union with us. That doesn’t mean we are empty vessels and that every prayer that pops into our head is an oracular utterance of the Very Mind of God. It means that God the Holy Spirit guides and helps us to pray more and more like Christ in the power of his Sonship. And that, in turn, directs us back to the fact that Christ is our teacher in the school of prayer, especially in and through his inspired word in Scripture. With his disciples, we say, “Lord, teach us to pray!’ and he does, especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

When we turn to Christ’s teaching on prayer we discover something odd: One of the many curiosities of the Christian tradition is that when Jesus undertakes to teach about prayer he begins by waving us all away from meaningless repetitive prayer…

And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. (Matthew 6:7)

…and in the next breath gives us a prayer which he obviously expects us to repeat—a prayer we have indeed repeated for 2000 years: the Our Father. Is this a contradiction?

No. For Jesus is warning against meaningless repetition, not meaningful repetition. He has in view a sort of magical notion of prayer in which we can somehow gain power over The Unseen by mere repetition, or by getting just the right magic words so that God has to knuckle under to our will, like a djinn. There’s something at once childlike, superstitious, and savage in such a picture of prayer, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to fall into. It reduces God to something more like a capricious sprite who spends his days scrutinizing trivialities (“Was that ten ‘Hail Marys’ you said this decade or only nine? Denied!”) rather than a God who is Father and filled with love for his children.

Curiously, it is children who are most likely to fall into this way of praying because they are the ones who really want what Evelyn Waugh referred to as “little systems of order”. It is the same spirit which half-believes that if we step on a crack we’ll break our mother’s back that constructs superstitious prayer practices that promise us “discipline” and deliver instead captivity to scruples and a vision of God as a kind of cosmic vending machine demanding correct change.

Against all such temptations to reduce God to a sort of faceless inscrutability awaiting the correct magic spell to subdue his power to our will, Jesus drives us in exactly the opposite direction: toward personal relationship. He wants childlike disciples, not childish ones. He makes this plain when he tells us to avoid the ways of the pagans, “for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8).

That’s an odd thing to say if you think like a Greek logician. After all, if the Ground of Being knows what you need before you ask him, then why ask? But Jesus’ logic was different. For Jesus, it is precisely because God knows us already that you can tell him anything. In short, it’s all about a personal relationship for Jesus. Prayer is not addressed to a God who has faded into a faceless inscrutable Power. It is addressed to a thunderbolt who has revealed to us a Father’s face. That is why the prayer begins “Our Father” and not “In the Name of Allah, Master of the Universe”. Jesus’ whole counsel on prayer can be summed in the words, “When you pray, say, “Father!” When he gives his disciples the model prayer, this is where he begins.

And therefore, so will we in the coming weeks as we look at this most personal and intimate of prayers in order to understand better how to pray in the Spirit of the Son of God. Stay tuned!

 

 

Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange and a weekly columnist for the National Catholic Register. You may visit his website at www.mark-shea.com check out his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!



TOPICS: Catholic; General Discusssion; Prayer; Worship
KEYWORDS: catholic; catholiclist; prayer
Probably the prayer most often repeated by all, but especially by Catholics.
1 posted on 08/19/2010 5:10:25 PM PDT by Salvation
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway; NYer; ELS; Pyro7480; livius; ArrogantBustard; Catholicguy; RobbyS; markomalley; ...
Catholic Discussion Ping!

If you aren’t on this ping list NOW and would like to be on it, please Freepmail me

2 posted on 08/19/2010 5:17:48 PM PDT by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Salvation

The Mass fulfills the Lord’s Prayer, word for word:
In the Mass we renew our baptism vows in our Creed and make the Sign of the Cross as we are signed in Baptism. We can now call God “our Father.”

We are in Heaven with Him because we have lifted up our hearts to Him.

We have hallowed His name by our prayers and listening to His Word.

We have united our sacrifice with Jesus’ eternal Sacrifice so God’s will is being done on Earth as it is eternally done in Heaven.

We have Jesus before us, our daily Bread.

The Eucharist forgives us our trespasses because it wipes away venial sin.

Through the Eucharist we know mercy, so we then give mercy by forgiving those who trespass against us. We offer peace to our fellow men.

The Eucharist gives us new strength over temptation and delivers us from evil.

Is it not beautiful and miraculous that Christ’s perfect prayer is mirrored in His perfect Sacrifice?


3 posted on 08/19/2010 5:44:07 PM PDT by Melian ("There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint." ~L. Bloy)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Melian

Excellent reflection.


4 posted on 08/19/2010 5:46:12 PM PDT by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Salvation

I found this site a while ago and thought that it be of interest.

http://the10com.org/lordsprayer.html


5 posted on 08/19/2010 5:50:08 PM PDT by RedMDer (Throw them all out in 2010... Forward with Confidence! Forward!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: All
Introduction to the Perfect Prayer (Our Father...) [Catholic Caucus]
The Hidden and Mysterious Word in the Lord’s Prayer

Why the Our Father is a Pro-Life Prayer, Part 3
Why the Our Father is a Pro-life Prayer, Part 2
Why the Our Father is a Pro-life Prayer, Part 1
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith. Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray, The Lord’s Prayer
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray, The Invocation: Our Father, Who Art in Heaven”
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray; First Petition: “Hallowed Be Thy Name”
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord,Teach Us To Pray, Second Petition: “Thy Kingdom Come”
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray, Third Petition: “Thy Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven"
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray, Fourth Petition: “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four:Lord, Teach Us To Pray, Fifth Petition: “Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us”

The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray, Sixth Petition: “Lead Us Not into Temptation"
The Essentials of the Catholic Faith, Part Four: Lord, Teach Us To Pray, Seventh Petition: “Deliver Us from Evil. Amen”
Our Father and Hail Mary, sung in Syriac-Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ
Our Father
Lord, Teach Us To Pray: The Lord’s Prayer [Ecumenical]
Ontario Premier's Plan to Scrap Lord's Prayer Backfires as Groundswell Grows in Opposition
The deity that won't stay dead
THY WILL BE DONE(Catholic/Orthodox Caucus meditaion St Peter Julian Eymard)
My Will v. Thy Will Be Done
The Our Father in the Catechesis of Teens

The Lord's Prayer
Lead Us Not into Temptation . . .
Our Father - In Heaven (Dr. Scott Hahn)
Praying in Jesus' Own Language
The Mass Explained
The 'Our Father': Appropriate gestures for prayer
The “Our Father” of “La Civiltà Cattolica” - (comparison to Muslim version)
Our Father
HOLDING HANDS AT THE OUR FATHER?
Our Father ... in Heaven

6 posted on 08/19/2010 5:51:32 PM PDT by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: Salvation

“Give us this day our daily bread” became much clearer for me last August, when I was preparing to be Lector for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The first reading was from Exodus 16. In verse 4, the Lord said to Moses, “I will now rain down bread from heaven for you. Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion . . .” In verse 15, when the Israelites asked one another what the fine flakes on the ground were, Moses told them, “This is the bread which the LORD has given you to eat.”

The Gospel reading was from John 6, which ended as follows:

So they said to him, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do?

Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

Indeed! Jesus Christ is our daily bread.


7 posted on 08/19/2010 7:08:58 PM PDT by rwa265 (Christ my Cornerstone)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Melian

Wow ... I’ve never thought of that. Thanks for posting.


8 posted on 08/19/2010 7:30:01 PM PDT by al_c (http://www.blowoutcongress.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: al_c

Isn’t it great!?! I got it from a wonderful book by Scott Hahn called “The Lord’s Supper.” In it, he takes Revelations and shows how significant that hard-to-understand book is when one applies it to the Mass itself. It is fabulous. I learned so much about Revelations when I read this book. I highly recommend it.


9 posted on 08/19/2010 7:34:17 PM PDT by Melian ("There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint." ~L. Bloy)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: Melian

I’ve read that book! Funny, I don’t remember the portion that you posted here. But I do remember the relations of the Mass to Revelation and to Isaiah that Hahn wrote about. Fascinating book.


10 posted on 08/19/2010 7:38:08 PM PDT by al_c (http://www.blowoutcongress.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson