Father Help Us, Send Some Guidance from Above - Part IV

Thy kingdom come…

The “kingdom” here is obviously the “Kingdom of Heaven.”  But that’s a tricky term to take at face value.  “The Kingdom” was here on earth when Jesus was made man.  “The Kingdom” comes alive when we hear the Gospel proclaimed at Mass.  “The Kingdom” has come in Christ’s death & resurrection.  “The Kingdom” has been coming into our midst ever since the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.  So why do we pray that God’s kingdom should come to us?

St. Cyprian suggests that it may be that the “Kingdom” refers to Christ, himself, who we desire in our daily lives, so we should ask for the “Kingdom” to come to us in the form of Christ:  “For as he is our resurrection, since in him we rise, so he can also be understood as the Kingdom of God, for in him we shall reign.”  That may be a cool side thought, but it seems that this 2^nd petition of the Lord’s Prayer refers to the final coming of God’s reign through the return of Christ Jesus at the end of time.

When we stop and think about it in those terms, we might be a little more hesitant with this line.  If we’re praying for Jesus to come again, we need to be ready to face the consequences that come along with that.  Ever see those bumper stickers that say “Jesus is coming…look busy”?  Well, this petition is sort of reminiscent of that idea.  We’re asking that Jesus would fulfill his promise and come again one day, but what that implies is that we’re confident enough to think that we’re actually READY for that.  I don’t know about you, but I’m rarely in any shape to get a front row seat to the Parousia (Greek term meaning “arrival” but used in the Catholic faith with a capital letter to refer to Christ’s second coming…impressive word to know). 

Remember, this whole “Lord’s Prayer” did come straight from Jesus, himself.  He said, “This is how you are to pray.”  He didn’t say, “Here’s an easy way to pray so you can get whatever you want with no work on your part aside from just saying the words.”  It’s a dangerous prayer, and the words “Thy kingdom come” are three of the most powerful in it.  Almost as powerful as the next petition: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  WOAH!  Big “ask” there…we’ll check that one out next post.

Father Help Us, Send Some Guidance from Above - Part III

Let’s just get right into it (if you’re lost, go back a few posts and get caught up).

Hallowed be thy name…

First of all, let’s clear this up:  we’re not saying “hollowed”—we’re saying “hallowed.”  That second letter’s an “a”…not an “o.”  “Hollowed” (with the “o”) means that something is made empty, which is the exact opposite of the infinite nature of God.  “Hallowed” (with the “a”) means that something is made holy.  “Hallowed be thy name” is pretty self-explanatory once you clear up that confusion.  The other confusion is that crazy word “thy.”  We see words like this a good bit in our traditional Catholic prayers.  Basically, these words translate like this:

Thy/Thine: your

Thee/Thou: you

Some people like to translate these to the more common English words of “you” and “your”…nothing wrong with that.  The only “problem” comes in when one person is saying “you” and “your” while praying with a group where everyone else is saying “thy” or “thee.”  Remember, if you have a strong conviction about some aspect of prayer, be sure that your strong conviction doesn’t distract others from the focus of their prayers.

Now we’re looking at this phrase meaning “May your name be made Holy.”  Great…now we have to clear up another issue:  Isn’t God the only one who can make things holy?  In short, yes.  This isn’t really meant in the “causative” sense, as if we are praying these words in hopes that God’s name will be holy—I mean, come on…seriously?  How are WE going to make God holy?  Not really possible since he’s already the perfection of holiness by his very nature.  This is meant as more of a recognition of the holiness of God’s name, although, it is also a petition (i.e. a prayer asking for something in particular) of sorts that draws us into the greater plan of God by asking—albeit (that’s a weird word) a circular request—that his name be perpetually holy.  By the way (*Tangent Alert*) that little “i.e.” thing you sometimes see in writing just before something that was just said is better explained…yeah, that’s Latin, too.  Go figure, huh?  It stands for id est, i.e. “that is.”  (See what I did there, using “i.e.” to further explain “i.e.”?  Don’t think about that too long…you might hurt yourself.)  Now back to the show…As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, this petition “draws us into his plan of loving kindness for the fullness of time, ‘according to his purpose that he set forth in Christ,’ that we might ‘be holy and blameless before him in love.’” (CCC 2807)  There are seven petitions in all wrapped up into the Lord’s Prayer, and this “Hallowed be thy name” line is the first one.

Now I’m SURE after reading that last sentence you’re asking yourself, “Why SEVEN peititions?”  If you weren’t, you probably are now.  If you’re STILL not, get up, go get a cup of coffee or some nice, hot herbal tea, come sit back down, and once you re-read that sentence and have your “A-ha!” moment, you can continue reading…

Seven is used throughout the Bible to signify “Spiritual Perfection.”  Think about it: seven days to create the world, seven days between loading Noah’s ark to the flood, seven parables of Matthew’s Gospel, seven miracles in John’s Gospel, seven years in Tibet…wait, nevermind—that was a Brad Pitt movie.  It seems fitting that if Jesus is teaching us how to pray, he would teach us the “perfect” prayer, and so would have a spiritually perfect number of things to ask for in that prayer, right?  I thought so, too.  Next time we’ll continue unraveling this perfect prayer.

Father Help Us, Send Some Guidance from Above - Part II

Last post was an entire post about just two words: “Our Father.”  I’m going to try to double my efforts here and go for 4 words, because at the rate of 2 words per post, it would’ve taken 27.5 posts, and that, even for THIS blog, is quite ridiculous.

The next 4 words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Who art in Heaven,” have pretty significant meaning, and are pretty confusing at the same time.  Paragraph 2794 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church paints a pretty good picture of the deeper meaning behind this phrase:

This biblical expression does not mean a place ("space"), but a way of being; it does not mean that God is distant, but majestic. Our Father is not "elsewhere": he transcends everything we can conceive of his holiness. It is precisely because he is thrice-holy that he is so close to the humble and contrite heart. (CCC 2794)

Addressing God the Father as being “in Heaven” can sometimes (for me, anyway) make God seem distant.  Unless Belinda Carlisle was some unexpected prophet, heaven is NOT a place on earth, which inherently makes us feel alienated from God.  We’re down here—He’s up there.  But we need to remember (as the Catechism points out very well here) that not only is Heaven not a place on earth, it’s not a place at all!  God is infinite and has no boundaries or physical limits.  Being in heaven with God seems to logically imply that heaven would have no bounds, because God has no bounds.  With me so fra?  FRA?? I meant to say “far.”  Typographical errors ARE a problem, but the REAL problem is why didn’t I just hit the backspace button?  Why did I go into this completely and ridiculously unnecessary tangent about a typographical error?  We can’t, then, legitimately call heaven a “place,” because our human (and even further, our English) definition of a “place” implies that there are boundaries that separate one “place” from another.  Saying that God is in a place called heaven implies that there is some other “place” where God is not.  This is not possible, because God is infinite and has no boundaries. 

Saying, “Who art in Heaven,” should not give us a feeling that God is distant, but rather that he is, as the Catechism put it, majestic.  Heaven is that state of being we are in after we die once we have accepted God’s ultimate forgiveness and have been freed from sin.  It is a state of perfect being, and we should have a deep and profound respect for all entities in that state of heaven.  THIS is the image we need to mentally remind ourselves of when we pray the Lord’s Prayer.  Remember: without fully understanding what we say when we pray, we CAN fall into the trap of what many Protestants call “vain repetition.”

Now that we know who we’re praying to—the guide and provider for the universal Body of Christ here on earth who exists in a state of perfect existence and majesty—we can move forward in the next post and dive further into the (obviously) super deep meanings behind each and every word of this prayer.

Father Help Us, Send Some Guidance from Above - Part I

When I say that the Lord’s Prayer is addressed in an entire section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I mean that there are over 100 paragraphs explaining it.  So when I say that I’m not going to be able to do justice to the Lord’s Prayer in one post, it’s the understatement of the millennium. I’ll try to do this in as few posts as possible, but I’m not making any promises.

St. Thomas Aquinas (smart dude…look him up) has this quote about the Lord’s Prayer:

The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect of prayers. . . . In it we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired. This prayer not only teaches us to ask for things, but also in what order we should desire them.

So let’s take a look at what that order of prayer is in the Lord’s Prayer and what each part of the larger prayer really means when we pray it…

Our Father…

You could write a whole book just on the importance of these two words in the context of this prayer.  I’ll try to keep it down to a (rather long) paragraph.  Let’s look at the word “Father” first.  In summary of this thought, we are “adopted” children of God as pointed out in Chapter 1, Verse 5 of St. Paul’s letter to the Church of Ephesus: “…he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will.”  So when we call God our “Father,” there is a deep, spiritual meaning to that.  We are all sons and daughters of God through our baptism where we make ourselves his, and receive the graces of the sacrament to carry us through our Christian life.  This gift of adoption by God requires us to be continually converted to new life in Him.  If we are going to call God our “Father,” we should strive to make ourselves worthy to be called His children.  There is also an important notion of being “children” at work here.  Children put their complete trust in their parents for their needs.  They look to their parents not only for the essentials for survival like food, clothes, and shelter, but also for the essentials for growth like how to speak, how to interact with others, and more profoundly, guidance on ethics and morality.  In the same way, we should look to our Heavenly Father for not only spiritual guidance (which seems to be easier to ask for), but also for our essentials.  In our society that puts a strong emphasis on “earning your keep,” so to speak, it’s easy to give ourselves credit for the things we are blessed with in this life, and forget that they are just that—blessings.  We need to constantly remind ourselves that we ARE children of God and that everything in this life that we get, we get only through his grace and love.  Now, directing this prayer to the Father does not negate, nor separate in any way the greater idea of the Holy Trinity.  The opposite is true, in fact.  By addressing God the Father, we are inherently recognizing the relationship of God the Son, and since they both exist because of the relationship of love (the Holy Spirit) that exists between them, we cover the concept of the whole Trinity just by using the word “Father.”  Then there’s the concept of “OUR” Father…which I don’t feel right about keeping it in the same paragraph, so I’ll just start a new one…here I go:

So there’s this “OUR Father” concept…pretty heavy when you think about it.  In the constant Catholic v. Protestant battle for integrity, authority, and authenticity, it often seems pretty difficult to focus on what we actually have in COMMON.  Here’s the big one:  we all have ONE FATHER in Heaven…OUR Father.  If we can agree on NOTHING else, we at least have that.  The word “our” doesn’t necessarily point to God as “our possession,” but rather as a unifying factor.  He’s not MY God…He’s OUR God.  We are all one body in Christ as baptized Christians, and we are united as children of this ONE God, so we say “our.”

That’s a lot to take in for only two words, so we’ll call it “good” for this post.  Next post will at LEAST cover double the words as this post with “Who art in Heaven.”  So until then.......ok, I can’t come up with anything clever.

And We Can Sing Just Like Our Fathers

There are a few things that Catholics and Protestants can agree on without question.  Most people would tend to think that The Lord’s Prayer is one of them.  Of course, if you talk with members of some Protestant churches (usually non-denominational churches), you might find the skeptical Bible reader who takes Matthew 6:7 ENTIRELY too literally: “In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words.”  From this verse, many Protestants have bought into the concept of “vain repetition.”  For the most extreme adherents to this concept, praying using ANY formal, written prayers is taboo.  And the Rosary???  Don’t get them STARTED!!

Well, apart from these few “prayer can have no structure whatsoever” Christians, most Christians can agree that when it comes to formal, pre-fabricated prayers, the ultimate is The Lord’s Prayer.  Why?  Well, it’s hard to argue with Matthew 6:9-13.  Jesus literally says, “This is how you are to pray...” then spouts off what we eventually called “The Lord’s Prayer” or simply “The Our Father.”  Now, based on how Jesus himself prayed throughout the Gospel, and the only mention of these exact words are in this verse, it’s pretty obvious that Jesus wasn’t saying this is the ONLY way to pray, but was simply giving us a guide on how to pray.  (Just more proof as to why you CAN NOT take the Bible literally, word-for-word, without SOME level of interpretation.)

Right after the Eucharistic Prayer, and our response of “Amen,” we all stand together as one church and pray the Lord’s Prayer.  The introduction from the priest goes like this:

Current Text:

1.      Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us.

2.      Jesus taught us to call God our Father, and so we have the courage to say:

3.      Let us ask our Father to forgive our sins and to bring us to forgive those who sin against us.

4.      Let us pray for the coming of the Kingdom as Jesus taught us.

Beginning in Advent 2011:

At the Savior’s command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say…

I don’t know about you, but there’s something about that new introduction that reminds me of watching Rudy.  I just get really pumped up with how solid that phrasing turns out.

At the Savior’s command…  Ok, obviously that’s a straight-up nod to that Matthew 6:9 verse we mentioned above where Jesus said “This is how you are to pray.”  So there’s our “Savior’s command.”

…and formed by divine teaching… Our whole lives are supposed to be formed by divine teaching, or “the Word of God” (the Bible), and so we know not only HOW we are to pray, but WHY we should pray.

…we dare to say…  Yeah, buddy…this is the kicker line right here.  Think about it for a second: there’s a HUGE difference between “having courage” to say something and “daring” to say something.  We can have courage because of our own merits.  We can give ourselves enough credit to say, “Yeah, I’m brave enough to do this.”  Daring to do something, however, assumes a certain level of humility in that we realize there are some things we CAN do, but how WILLING we are to do them is another story.  Daring to pray the Lord’s Prayer inherently recognizes our humility before God.  We know we can physically say the words, but to MEAN the words is another story altogether. 

What’s so daring about these words we are about to pray?  That’s another story for another day.

I Get Down on My Knees and I Start to Pray (Praise the Lord!)

There are certain parts of the Mass that act as sort of a prayer/response sort of deal.  By that, I mean that the priest, deacon, or reader will say one thing, to which we all respond together as a congregation.  Certain things are especially meant to be said by the priest celebrant who is acting “in the person of Christ”…or as we say in Latin (really, how shocked are you that there’s a Latin version of this phrase?) in personae Christi.  When you give this some thought, we see that it’s important that we all play our parts as part of the larger Body of Christ (“the Church,” in this sense) and that we remember the parts that others (namely the priest in this example) play apart from ourselves.

One example of when I notice several people “overstepping their bounds” in what IS and is NOT their part in the large prayer that is the Mass is our next, and final part of the Eucharistic Prayer: the Doxology.  The word Doxology, comes from the Latin Doxologia.  But since that clears up absolutely nothing, let’s break that word down.  Doxa, in Latin, means ”glory,” while the word logos means “word.”  Essentially, a “doxology” is a “word of glory,” or generally speaking, praising God through words.  Adding this concept to the Eucharistic Prayer was likely borrowed from our Jewish roots and the Kaddish, a prayer of the sanctification of the name of God found in Jewish synagogue services.  So what does the Doxology look like at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer?  Like this:

Current Text:

Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, forever and ever.

Beginning Advent 2011:

Through him, and with him, and in him, to you, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, is all honor and glory, forever and ever.

Now, we’ve been talking about Jesus right before the Doxology, so the antecedent to that “him” pronoun (sorry to make you reach WAY back in your grammar memory banks for those two terms) is Jesus.  The priest is essentially concluding the Eucharistic Prayer with an affirmation that what we are doing in the Mass is ultimately to give glory and honor to Him, who makes it all possible in the first place.

And, of course, after the Doxology, the congregation gives a unified, and emphatic (usually through song) AMEN!

Whatever You Do, Don't Put the Blame on You...Blame it on the Rain

Hey Everyone,

Just wanted to assure you guys that I HAVE NOT given up on this blog.  I know I haven't posted in a few days, but I've been pulling 12-hour shifts at the Terrebonne Parish Emergency Operations Center in response to Tropical Storm Lee.  Things should be getting back to normal fairly soon, and we'll scale back the EOC.  When that happens, I'll get back on here and get back to postings.  Until then, keep the people affected by this storm in your prayers.