In my experience, one of the most frequent and common needs I have found in the faithful is the desire to learn how to pray. Many Catholics say that they do not pray because they simply do not know how. This desire is as old as the Christian community itself. In fact, the Gospel of Luke reminds us that one of the disciples asked Jesus, when seeing him pray, “Lord, teach us to pray.” (Lk 11:1)
Jesus responded with the greatest of all prayers, which in a way sums up all the Gospels: the Our Father.
Certainly it is a prayer known by all Christians and repeated often. But perhaps the frequency has made us fall into a routine that has made us lose an awareness of the real value of this prayer.
Above all, we must remember that, unlike other prayers of the church, undeniably valuable, this is the one that the Lord himself taught us; and therefore the church introduces it at the most important moments, such as in the holy Mass, in the Liturgy of the Hours, in the Rosary.
The Compendium of the Catechism of the Church, the reading of which I continue to encourage among our faithful, clearly and beautifully sums up each of the sentences that make up this very simple prayer that is also so rich in meaning.
From “Our Father who art in heaven,” which allows us to acknowledge that we can get close to God as a Father, with the complete trust and tenderness of children; to “deliver us from evil,” where we ask that each of us and the human family be delivered from the devil and his works; the Our Father lets us sum up all the needs, desires, anxieties and hopes that exist in our hearts.
In fact, there is no material, psychological, emotional or spiritual worry in the human heart that is not reflected in one of the seven petitions that make up the Our Father: the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, the fulfilling of his will, being fed materially and spiritually, being forgiven, being defended against temptation, and deliverance from all evil.
That is why St. Thomas Aquinas called it “the perfect prayer.” And not only because in it we sum up everything that the human being yearns for, but because, above all, the Our Father is a prayer school, that leads us to learn how to talk with God.
In fact, if we pray the Our Father carefully from the heart, we shall see that calling him “Father” or any of the seven petitions will especially resound in our hearts, depending on the challenges we are experiencing at any given moment.
That “resounding” helps us to identify more clearly what we should ask for, what we need from God; and then we will be able to begin going deeper in our dialogue with him to ask for more for that specific need, or to praise him more for that specific gift we have received.
Then, the Our Father, prayed from the heart, with the intention and intensity that Jesus Christ taught, must transform our lives in a real way and lead us step by step to have our lives transformed as the lives of the apostles were transformed; who, with their testimony, and in many cases with their martyrdom, made their entire lives into an “amen,” that is, into a firm “so be it” that we pray in the Lord’s prayer.
At the start of the New Year, let our main resolution be to get back the true meaning of the Our Father, so that, in addition to saying it with our lips, we can also proclaim it with our hearts.
I ask that the Lord Jesus, who, with great love, taught his disciples to pray, grant us the gift of finding ourselves transformed each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer.