The incredible gift of the Our Father

The last part of the Compendium of the Catechism is about a fundamental aspect of our Christian life: the Our Father. It is the ‘summary of the whole Gospel’ according to Tertullian and St. Thomas Aquinas said that it is ‘the perfect prayer.’

There is so much to be said about the Our Father! The first and most beautiful is that the Our Father is a prayer that has a divine origin. It was taught by Jesus himself after the request of his disciples: “Lord, teach us to pray.”

We can begin by mentioning the unheard privilege of being able to call God “Father.” In fact, St. Cyprian said: “How great is the Lord’s indulgence! How great his condescension and plenteousness of goodness towards us, seeing that he has wished us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father, and to call ourselves sons of God, even as Christ is the Son of God — a name which none of us would dare to venture on in prayer, unless he himself had allowed us thus to pray!”

God is a Father whom we call “our,” not only “my,” because we Catholics believe that we are a community of brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. We are the church, the people of God, the Mystical Body of Christ.

Furthermore, God is a Father to whom we say “hallowed be thy name,” not because he needs our praise. As we say this phrase we are not “informing” God of something he doesn’t know, nor are we paying him a compliment that he needs or expects from us. What we do is to ask that his holiness may be imitated and spread through the greater Christian family. It means that each one of us must strive to be as holy as he is.

When we say: “thy kingdom come” we are asking for Christ the King, who is the Word of the Father, to come to us. We ask for the Kingdom of Christ, the Son of God, to be present among us, in our life, in our society and in the world in which we live. “Before, we were slaves, but today we are empowered to reign under the protection of Christ,” St. Cyprian said.

Then, as we pray “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are joyfully accepting God’s will in our lives. We are willingly giving priority to everything that God has planned for us over our own personal plans and projects.

A Catholic author, reflecting upon the Our Father, noticed that the petition for the daily bread is at the center of the prayer. The bread is vital for us and God the Father is concerned with our nourishment. The bread that we ask for in the Our Father represents more than the mere material food we need for our physical health. It represents all the things that surround us, such as family, community and friends. Their presence and company make life pleasant and joyful. It is for this reason that the bread we ask for is “our” and not “my.” We would like to have the necessary material nourishment, but most importantly affective and spiritual sustenance — which reaches its fullness in the Eucharist — not only for each of us, but for all humanity.

The final petitions: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” are nothing more than the recognition of our frailty, of the mystery of sin that many times dominates us. It also acknowledges God’s mercy. Otherwise, we wouldn’t dare ask him to forgive us.

We Catholics recognize that we have many weaknesses, and that one of them is our resis-tance to forgive others. We know that we have a tendency to be lenient with ourselves and often unforgiving with others. And for this reason we need to ask God’s forgiveness, time and again, at the same time that we promise forgiveness toward others: so that we may unite the two commandments that Jesus wanted to be one: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … and your neighbor as yourself.”

“At the end of the prayer,” St. Cyril of Jerusalem said, “you say ‘Amen’ and thus you ratify by this word that means ‘so be it’ all that is contained in this prayer that God has taught us.”

Again, there is much to be said about this prayer that is so central to our Christian life. Reflecting on the words as we pray, we will become more aware of God’s love for us. As we focus on the meaning behind the words, we will be increasingly mindful that we are asking God to help us to renew our commitment to love him and our brothers and sisters.

Especially during this Year of St. Paul, may the Our Father be a simple but powerful roadmap that will guide each one of us to a deeper conversion and renewal in our commitment to God, our loving and merciful Father.