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.
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