We are so used to this idea of loving God as a father that we forget how new it was when our Lord preached it to His followers. In the Old Testament, the faithful had praised God in their prayers, had begged for mercy, had promised penance, and had given thanks. But they had not gone very deeply into the idea that God was the God of love. They feared Him as a judge more than they loved Him as a father. Then came our Lord, and the New Testament is full of the love of God. God is still a judge, of course, because punishment and pardon have to be dealt out to His creatures by a divine and just Creator, but His justice is that of a devoted parent.
Consider the fabled father who gave scorpions to his children when they asked him for eggs.3 How could a son love his father if all he got from him was a stone instead of bread? If the son pleaded to be given a fish and was handed a serpent, where would be the love in that family? Using these ancient illustrations of home life, deliberately exaggerated so that we should see how impossible would be such a father-and-son relationship, our Lord teaches us to feel at home with God. We are His children and He loves us. That is the first thing to grasp if we are to pray to Him.
Also from the Gospels, much more than from what had been said by the prophets and patriarchs, we get the idea of humility being needed for true prayer. This is shown especially in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, where the prayer of the ordinary humble sinner is judged better than that of the religious man who is proud, but it is shown, too, where our Lord scolds the kind of pious people who pray out loud in the streets so as to attract attention.4
Another thing. “And when you are praying, speak not much as the heathens do,” says our Lord, “for they think that in their much speaking they may be heard.”5 Words are all right so long as we mean them, but words just for the sake of words are not going to please God. He reminds us that there are people who can say, “Lord, Lord” all day long and yet who fail to do God’s will.6 So however holy our words are, they must have more to them than the sound they make. However many our prayers are, they must have more to them than mere numbers.
Our Lord also said (not in a sermon this time, but in a talk with a woman who was drawing water) that to worship the Father properly, you had to do so “in spirit and in truth.”7 This, coming on top of what was preached in the Sermon on the Mount, is very important. It means that what really matters in this question of prayer is what goes on in the heart and in the mind. It is the spirit in which we pray that counts. If our spirit is in line with the Holy Spirit — in other words, if we are responding to grace — we are bound to be praying right. The actual phrases we use may be clumsy or may be beautiful; we need not worry about them too much. All we have to worry about is what we intend inside. Am I being honest with God, or is my prayer untrue? Is my spirit straight before Him, one with His Spirit, or am I praying according to a crooked spirit of my own?
There are two more states of mind that our Lord particularly wants to see in us when we set ourselves to pray: the first is faith, and the second is the readiness to go on and on. (He also wants us to be at peace with our fellow human beings, forgiving them if they have injured us, but this we are going to deal with when we go through the Our Father.) You have only to think of it for a moment, and you will see that without either belief in the power of prayer or perseverance in its practice, there can be nothing on which your worship rests.
To begin with, then, faith. Faith has a lot of sides to it, and all of them have to find a place in the act of prayer. This is not to say that when you are praying, you have to remind yourself: “I believe that God exists, I believe He can hear my prayer, I trust His promises, I have confidence in the granting of my request, I am sure He is close to me at this moment although He seems to be miles away, I am convinced that what the Church tells me about Him is absolutely true, and I know that everything will be made clear when I get to heaven.” If your faith had to work like that, you would end up with a brainstorm. You do not have to make a list of the different ways in which to pray by faith. You simply have to trust completely in God, and throw yourself and your prayer upon divine providence.
Put like that, it ought to be so easy. Yet how many of us have the kind of faith God wants to see in our prayers? Do we honestly believe that God is caring for us at every moment of our lives, and that we have no reason to be anxious about anything at all? Yet it is evidently what He expects. “Be not solicitous for your life,” says our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, “nor for your body . . . Behold the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor do they reap nor do they gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value than they? . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow . . . and if the grass of the field, which is today and tomorrow is cast into the oven, God doth so clothe, how much more you, O ye of little faith? Be not solicitous, therefore, saying, ‘What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewith shall we be clothed?’ For after all these things do the heathens seek. Your Father knoweth that you have need of these things. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be added to you.”8 Ask yourself: have I got that kind of faith?
Then there is the famous “faith that moves mountains.” Certainly there can be few of us who have that kind of faith, or mountains would actually be moved. If we had that kind of faith, we would always — provided we were not praying for the wrong things — find our petitions granted. But at least there is this to be said, that even if we cannot claim to possess that wholehearted trust which does not worry about the future, nor that firmness of belief which works miracles, we have enough faith to enable us to pray. And to pray hard and well. By our baptism we have been given the grace of faith, and nobody can say that the supply of it is too small for the work of prayer. That would be no excuse at all.
And now, lastly, perseverance. There is hardly a mention of prayer in the Gospels that does not hammer upon the need to go on and on and never give up. Our Lord gives the example of a late-night visitor knocking so constantly on the door that the owner of the house at last gets out of bed and comes down.9 There is the other example of the judge who gives in because the repeated pleading of a woman has worn him down.10 These are just imaginary cases our Lord chooses, but there are actual incidents as well that tell the same story. The most obvious one to pick out is the occasion when the woman with the sick daughter refused to be shaken off by the apostles, refused even to be silenced by the words of our Lord Himself, which were spoken to test her spirit, and when perseverance was miraculously rewarded.11
As if examples and incidents were not enough to prove the point, our Lord preached perseverance when He told His hearers to ask, and seek, and knock in their prayers. Notice the stages: we are urged to ask first of all, and then to continue with our search, and finally to bang on the door until it is opened for us. At each stage, we are given the grace to go on to the next. It means that God wants us to go on praying whether our prayers are answered or not. If our petitions are granted, we make new ones; if they are not granted, there is all the more reason to go praying that they should be.
Those are the main things that should show up in our effort to pray: an understanding of the fatherhood of God, a humble admission of our sinfulness, a truthfulness before God, a living faith and the willingness to persevere. It is all there in the Sermon on the Mount, and notice that our Lord closes His discourse with the description of a man building a house. If the house is built on a foundation of rock, it will stand up to weather and flooding; if it is built on sand, it will collapse.12 Those who listen to His words and keep them are on solid ground; those who neglect His teaching will fall. It was the same doctrine that He was to teach on the last evening with His apostles before the Passion. “Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation.” If we keep on the alert, living up to the lessons He has given us, we are safe. But if we do not watch, and especially if we do not pray, we shall find ourselves entering into temptation. And temptation will be too much for us.
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nbsp; Chapter 4
The Our Father
When the disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray, our Lord gave them the pattern of prayer: the Our Father. Besides being a vocal prayer divinely inspired, the Our Father was an instruction on prayer. If we take it bit by bit, looking at each of its clauses separately, we shall see that it tells us far more about worship than we would ever learn from books. As our Lord’s own prayer, it gives greater glory to God than any other vocal prayer, and as a lesson on how to pray, it gives us all the information we need. Infinite Wisdom is speaking. It is for human minds to take in all they can.
“When you pray, thus shall you pray” — this is the sort of thing you must do. Our Lord did not say: “Here are some set phrases arranged in a sequence: learn them off, and recite them aloud to the Father.” (Nor indeed had the disciples asked Him for a set prayer they could write down, read over, and say by heart. They had asked, “Lord, teach us how to pray.”) Our Lord was giving to his closest friends — and over their shoulders, as it were, to every generation of man until the end of time — the secret of holiness. He was telling them how to worship the Father “in spirit and in truth.”
It was as if He was saying: “You want to pray as I do? You want to get into the habit of being united with the Father? You want to learn more about God’s will, about His love, about His mercy, about the way He wants you to behave toward Him and toward others? All right. I’ll explain how you go about it. You start off by calling upon God as your father and the father of all human beings. Something like this: Our Father who art in heaven. Then you think about that for a little while before you move on to the next stage, which is praise . . . And so on. So let us do just that.
Our Father who art in heaven. The our means we are not speaking for ourselves alone. We are praying with all mankind, and for all mankind. This makes the prayer more unselfish. Also, if it is prayed in the name of millions of other souls, it gathers force. It shares in millions of other Our Fathers that are being said all over the world. If it began “My Father who art in heaven,” it might be a more private prayer, but it would not have as much charity in it. And charity matters more than privacy. Our shows to God that you want to include everyone in your act of love.
The subject of Father we have thought about a lot already. But for this matter of prayer, we cannot think about it enough. If the second word of the most important prayer in the whole of creation is Father (and in the Latin version, it is the first word), then clearly it is something which gives the line on the other clauses that are to come. “Be as a child before God,” is what this opening sentence tells us, “and admit your dependence. Come to Him with the whole family of human beings. You are all His children, and He loves each one of you as a father would love an only child.”
“Who art in heaven” — to show that we, as creatures of a lower order, bow before His majesty. He lives in heaven, we on earth. But in case this should make us think of Him as up in the clouds, far away from the world He has created, we must know that He is very much present here on earth as well. If He wanted to be thought of as a distant master, running the world by remote control, He would not have called Himself a father. A father is someone who is ordinarily at home.
Hallowed be Thy name. Having addressed yourself to God — that is, having explained that you want to get in touch with the Father — you go on to praise His name. Hallowing means giving glory or worship. The Father’s name, our Lord’s name, the Holy Spirit’s name: it is all one name. You give praise before you start asking for things. God knows well enough what it is that you need, and that in a minute you will be asking for it, but He wants you to begin your prayer on a note of homage. It is like a father telling his son not to snatch. Later on, the son can pester, but he is much more likely to get what he pesters for if he is polite at the outset. Also it is possible to be mistaken about petition, whereas you cannot go wrong about praise. So get your praising done first, and be sure that you mean it every bit as much as you mean your petitions.
Thy kingdom come. This carries on from what has just been prayed, showing that the kingdom of God must come first and the world of man second. Notice, too, that it is a kingdom and not a throne: there are people in it. So again there is this notion of all being together in the one prayer, under the one King, sharing the one love in charity with others. “When we pray,” says St. Cyprian,13 “it is not for one soul but for all souls, because we all are one. God teaches us peace, concord, unity. He bears us all in one Person, and wills that each should pray for all.” If everyone in the kingdom of God on earth took this to heart, we would be living in an ideal community. But our earthly community is not ideal, so we pray “Thy kingdom come.”
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Once we have adored God as King of heaven and earth, we move on naturally to the position where we fall in with His ruling on earth with the same sort of obedience to His will which is given by the angels and saints in heaven. We need not pretend that we are as good at this act of submission as the angels and saints, but at least we can pray that God’s will may meet with no resistance. Anyway, we mean to accept whatever providence arranges.
Now, the more this state of mind is kept up, the more glory we give to God and the holier we become. We take everything in our stride because we know that everything is somehow allowed for in the plan of God. If we can get into the habit of meeting every difficulty, every disappointment, every pleasure, and every problem with this clause of the Our Father, we are in a fair way toward reliving our Lord’s life. All the time we shall be echoing His words: “I came not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me . . . not what I will but what Thou wilt.”14 There can be no true holiness, and no true prayer, where the will of God is deliberately resisted. Our first duty as religious people, as Christians, is to try to live up to this fourth sentence of the Our Father. It is the hinge on which all the others turn. Examine yourself on it, do your best to use it so often that it becomes instinctive, and make a point of showing in practice that you mean it.
Give us this day our daily bread. Now, having got your will into line with God’s, you can start asking for things. This is not simply a piece of good manners — accepting the bread-and-butter before helping yourself to cake — but a piece of spiritual wisdom. Once the soul has learned something of the will of God, there is no danger of asking for the wrong things. You find yourself asking for the kind of bread that God wants you to have. The purpose of prayer is not to bring God’s will down to your level so that you may get what you want. The purpose of prayer is to lift your will to God’s level so that you may get what He wants.
Does this sound complicated? Well, put this petition in other words, and it will read something like this: “Lord, there are many things I would like to have, and quite a lot that I seem to need, but because I am a selfish, greedy person, I am probably fooling myself into thinking them so important. So I ask that You may judge what is best for me, and give me the things that have on them the stamp of Your will.” Such a way of looking at it should not put us off from begging for all sorts of unlikely things that we may perhaps not need but which we would very much like to have. God will decide whether they are good for us or not, and in the meantime, we can go ahead and ask.
Obviously the most important things to ask for are graces and virtues and the strength to resist sin — the greatest of all graces coming to us in the daily bread of Holy Communion — but we do not have to ask only for the best things. A child does not ask his father only for shelter, education, and support — in fact, these important things are usually taken for granted between father and son — but is perfectly free to ask for a bicycle or for money to go to a movie.
And that is enough for the moment about the prayer of petition because there will be more on the subject in another chapter.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. The rule is perfectly clear: in order to expect pardon, you must grant it. To show that no prayer can please God w
here there is a feud going on, our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount that if, in the act of offering sacrifice to God, you suddenly remember that a person has a complaint against you (and that supposedly you have a complaint against him), then you must leave the altar and make peace before going on with the act of worship. Injuries must be straightened out by forgiveness, or there is no prayer.
Again we seem to have a picture of children squabbling and being forgiven by their father only on condition that they agree to drop their resentments and make friends again. What we have to ask ourselves is this: Am I slow to ask God’s pardon for my sins — and if so, is it because I am not forgiving enough myself? I must get the idea of mercy right from both sides: God’s and mine. I must look out for chances of making peace with others, forgiving them in my heart at once if they have wronged me; I must also be quick to ask pardon of God the moment I know that I have wronged Him.
The trouble is, I misunderstand God and am far too slow with my acts of contrition. Do I think of Him as a stern parent who is likely to get angry, who has to be kept in a good mood, whose children have to walk on tiptoe and sit up straight? Do I think of Him as touchy, given to misunderstandings, liable to hold it against me that I have failed so often in the past?
Now, it is important that I should get all this right. Otherwise I shall never be able to go to God when I am in difficulties, return to Him when I have sinned, pray to Him properly, or feel at ease with him. I must know from the start that whatever other fathers are like, this Father loves me all the time and can never change. Not only does He always want me near Him, always want the best possible thing for me, always want me to call upon Him for help when I am sad or in trouble, but He always goes on loving me even when I have sinned against Him and am hanging back from repentance. Did I know this? Probably not, because the books do not say it much. But it is true — theologically true. It all turns on two facts: first, that God is love, and second, that God cannot change.
Prayer and the Will of God Page 2