More Trouble in Paradise

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Reflection – On last Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

‘Oh, we got trouble (oh, we got trouble). Right here in River City (right here in River City). With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool!’ Yesterday in the prayer we hit the trouble, trouble, trouble—not the fake moral panic type of Henry Hill in The Music Man, and not just in River City. Trouble in the depths of our hearts, the trouble of sin and moral failure in the life of every human being. And so to enter into the relationship of the Son to the Father, the heart and life of the Trinity, the healing of mercy and forgiveness is necessary.

Today we see that there’s more trouble-with-a-capital-T yet, and this time it’s not within us only. We live in a world of peril and are called to live out our divine filiation, our communion with the Father as his sons and daughters, not in the sublimity of the eternal Triune bliss but in a world of conflict, struggle, encounter with evil, temptation, death.

These last petitions of the Lord’s prayer are essentially an acknowledgement of our own weakness, and a humble request to God that our lives not be too hard, that we not be tested beyond our strength.

People get a bit hung up sometimes on the ‘lead us not into temptation’, and why on earth we would think God would lead us into temptation. Isn’t it bad to lead other people into temptation? Of course it is bad if I lead you into an occasion of sin for you. This is because I have no idea whatsoever what degree of virtue you have attained and what you are or are not capable of. It is grossly uncharitable of me to willfully expose you to temptations.

God, on the other hand, knows me better than I know myself, and so can justly allow me to be exposed to temptations, to confirm me in virtue and build up my resolve to overcome sin in my life… or to expose to me my own weakness and total need for His mercy and grace. What is utterly wrong for one finite limited creature to do to another finite limited creature may not be wrong for the All-Knowing and All-Loving One to do to us.

But really, the key of the intention here is that to be childlike and simple, to say in effect to God, ‘You know just how weak I am; you know I’ve already got trouble in my own heart with my own trespasses; please deliver me from assaults from outside, as much as possible.’ In other words, this is a prayer against presumption, where we go haring off into battles God has not asked us to fight and difficulties He is not giving us the grace to withstand.

It does indeed all come back to living as sons of the Father, living within the communion of the Son with the Father. To refer everything to God, to know that all is for Him, all is from Him, all is directed towards Him. Our very path through a truly dangerous world, a world of spiritual as well as physical dangers, is from Him and towards Him. These last petitions of the Our Father commit this path to His care, and beg Him for the grace to walk it successfully and not be brought down by the genuine difficulties of life.

One of my favorite desert father stories is of a monk who was shown by God all the snares the devil was laying for the faithful in the world, and it was such a morass of snares and traps and pitfalls that he cried out, “What can see us through this?” The answer came from heaven, “Humility.”

Humility is the key to this whole last half of the Lord’s prayer. We are called to a sublime life, a life of true communion with the Trinity, a true unity in love with Our Father in heaven. We are wholly unable to do this and need daily bread; we are wounded deeply in our own spirits by sin and need forgiveness; we are beset by difficulties on all side and need protection and deliverance from evil. We have to know all this, and cry out to God for help, and so help is given, and our lives become a beautiful reflection of Christ’s own life in and for the Father. Pretty nice prayer, eh?

 

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Trouble in Paradise

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us

Reflection – On last Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

But here in the prayer we come to something that is not exactly the Son’s experience with the Father, not exactly part of Jesus’ own prayer exactly. ‘Forgive us, Lord.’ Jesus does not need forgiveness. There is no sin in God. The son’s communion with the Father is perfect from all eternity.

So here we have a new dimension added to the prayer ‘just for us.’ There is trouble in paradise. Human beings are not just nicely rolling along in life, communing with God and neighbor in an uninterrupted flow of faith, hope, and love. Not quite, not exactly.

There is a breach, a wound, an estrangement, and it needs to be healed, if we are to live that first half of the Lord’s prayer I have been blogging about these past days. The Son’s communion with His Father is unimaginable, yet it is our destiny to share it, and we already begin to have glimpses of it here and there as we strive to respond to his grace in us. But always this grace and this sharing comes on the heels of an act of mercy, of the forgiveness of our sins.

I have been pondering all of this lately in the context of babies, of all things. I love babies and children (some have argued that they are the only people on my level). I had the great privilege of becoming a godfather this Sunday, to the daughter of two of my directees, so spent some time Sunday holding the baby, who slept soundly through the entire affair, both the ritual and the party afterwards.

But it got me thinking about, of all things, St. Augustine and some of his (in)famous writings about babies. A lot of our cultural affection for babies comes out of Christianity. He, a convert and a saint, came from a different culture, and babies were not, for him, cute or sweet. They were selfish little brutes with no control over their emotions and imperiously demanding in their needs. He does not have a trace of sentimentality in his view of them.

Reading his thoughts on this matter is either amusing or irritating for us moderns. But… you know, he is kind of right. And I think the point he makes is not that ‘babies are jerks’, which would be a bit petty and silly of him, but rather that none of us start off from a position of great virtue. The starting point of human beings is, in fact, selfishness and that constant clamor of desire and will. The point is not what babies are like, but what we all are like… until the Father forgives us and begins to fashion his kingdom in our hearts.

In other words, where yesterday I wrote about the urgent and constant need for grace for us to persevere in good godly lives, today we see that this grace needs to heal us of our wounds.

Now what about this business of ‘as we forgive those…’? Does it mean, as some say, that God can only forgive us as much as we forgive others? I hope not—that would be a pretty bleak picture for the human race. There is no question that there is a correlation between our mercy and God’s mercy—many, many Gospel passages lay that out quite explicitly. We simply must practice mercy and forgiveness or we do shut out God’s mercy from our hearts.

But I don’t think it can be reduced to a strict mathematical formula or ratio. I forgive ten times, so God forgives a thousand. I forgive a hundred times; God, ten thousand—that kind of thing. I’m not enough of a Greek scholar to know the exact nuances of the word ὡς (hos), which is rendered ‘as’, but it cannot be that kind of mathematical thing.

If it were, God’s mercy would be reduced to a sort of bean-counting miserliness, and this is simply not the face of the Father revealed to us by Jesus. We must be merciful and forgive those who hurt us, but this is because only thus are we living out the first half of the Lord’s prayer – acknowledging God as our Father, bowing before his greatness, seeking his kingdom and doing his will, and receiving the bread of his grace. The fruit of all that is mercy—God’s mercy and forgiving love comes first, and makes us people of mercy, forgiving our enemies. And that’s the first fruit of our living as children of our Father in heaven.

 

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Are You Ready For This?

Give us this day our daily bread

Reflection – On last Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

So we’ve already looked at what we find so hard to believe (that God is our loving Father), what we find hard to maintain in our modern skeptical age (reverence and awe), what we just don’t wanna do nohow noway (God’s will, not ours). Now we come to the petition that offends us in our practical sensible selves.

‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Hmmph. Most people I know work pretty hard for their daily bread. In MH, while we certainly do live as a mendicant community, begging for alms from our benefactors, we also work very hard farming and doing everything else needed to put that daily bread on the table for ourselves and those we serve. God does not rain down loaves of bread or whatever else might qualify as subsistent fare for us. He expects us to work!

So what are we asking here, anyhow? Well, quite a lot really, and I don’t think a blog post will be long enough to exhaust it. It is true, isn’t it, that the first half of the Lord’s prayer is encompassing quite a program of life for us? Not to mention what we’re about to ask our Father for in the last petitions of the prayer. But to continually lift our minds and hearts to God in a continuous act of worship and love, to ongoingly surrender our will to His and give ourselves over to the building of his kingdom in our world—that’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it?

Are you up to that challenge? I’m not. I need help! And so the next logical petition in the prayer is, logically, just that. Helllllllllp! Give us what we need, Lord. My pantry is bare, my resources are simply not going to carry me through life in a godly, faithful, loving way.

When I was about to be ordained a priest, I had to fill in a ‘final evaluation’ – one small part of the endless paperwork seminary life entails. A question on it was ‘are you ready to be ordained?’ My answer began by saying that, while I was reasonably realistic about the demands and challenges of priestly life, and was quite happy to assume those challenges, I knew very well that my own ‘readiness’ would get me about as far as the seminary gates before I would collapse in a useless heap. They were OK with ordaining me, anyhow.

The first thing we need to know about living the Christian life is that we cannot do it. The level of faith, hope, love that God asks of us and that is the deep heart of living in the heart of Jesus, living in the heart of the Trinity, is so ridiculously beyond our capacity, that we simply must turn to God and say, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’

Is it the Eucharist? Yes. Is it the hidden working of grace in the depths of our soul? Yes. Is it the amazing reality that each day we do find it in us to serve, to love, to be kind, to forgive, when we’re not quite sure ourselves why and how we are doing it? Yes. Is it, even, practical help coming to us in ways that do not look miraculous—the kindness of strangers, the normal ebb and flow of human goodness in and around us? Yes, yes, yes.

All is from God ultimately, and all is ordered by God for our benefit ultimately. And even when the hunger pangs and seeming failure of our lives bite deeply into us, this too is ‘daily bread’ for us. This too is what we need, right now, to get deeper into Christ, deeper into God’s love. To experience painfully my utter poverty, my utter failure to love and be a Christian, the famine in the land, the starvation rations of my own frail and fickle humanity. All is, in a strange way, the bread of affliction I need today to spur me to turn to our Father in heaven in a new way, at a new depth, with a new purpose and a deeper sincerity of heart.

God gives us what we need—but this ‘need’ comes to us in strange packages and with sharp edges at times. So this petition calls us both to expectantly look to God for the help we need in life, but also to bow to His will with deep trust and faith.

Give us this day our daily bread.

A Matter of the Heart

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven

Reflection – On Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

So now we come to the cruncher of the prayer, where it all starts to get a bit ‘ouchy’ a bit ‘well, am I really praying this? Do I really mean this?’ We can at least make a leap of faith to God being our loving Father; we can acknowledge as a matter of sheer logic that He is transcendent in heaven and to be approached with reverence and devotion.

But… surrendering our will to Him? Ummm… can I get back to you on that one? Again, good ol’ logic kicks in here. We know that the kingdom of God is a way of saying a world ordered by perfect love, perfect truth, perfect justice leavened by perfect mercy. We know that God is all knowing, all good and all loving (well, we say we know this anyhow), and that therefore His will is our good.

But good ol’ logic only takes us so far on this path. We want to do our own will. We want to build our own kingdom. We like things arranged just as we want them. We may even have our own brilliant ideas about truth, justice, love and how to build God’s kingdom on earth. We’re not all sociopaths accruing personal power and wealth while cackling over the corpses of our enemies.

We’re nice people! Nice people who just want to do things our way! Nothing wrong with that. Oh wait… there’s everything in the world wrong with that. ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

Well, what is this will of God anyhow, that’s so all-fired important! I was just talking with someone about this recently. The person was agonizing over what God’s will was in a specific situation, and very disturbed at the prospect of doing something against God’s will. As I said to this person, you know, He doesn’t send us a registered letter each day detailing His will for our day.

We are meant to seek God’s will, long for God’s will, pray for God’s will, do it without question and without hesitation when it is revealed, and never do anything that we know is against His will (i.e. violate the moral law). But if God required us to perform His perfect will at every moment without faltering or stumbling or ever making the slightest mistake, He would be required as a matter of justice to, in fact, send us that registered letter each day, to make His perfect will perfectly clear at each moment to us.

I don’t know about you, but that is not the world I live in. God’s will is murky at times, somewhat clearer at other times. I live in a community where I have a superior and obedience, and this helps. Most of us spend our days with fairly obvious chores and demands in front of our noses, and that certainly helps.

But of course we can discern wrongly, and step outside his will, and He clearly allows us to do so and, I will be bold to say, doesn’t seriously mind. This is how we learn discernment, by doing things that were not quite it and stubbing our toes or bruising our noses on the brick walls of ‘not-God’s-will.’

It’s primarily a matter of the heart, this petition of the Lord’s will. To long for the kingdom, to long for God’s will, to ask for it, beg for it, desire it with fervent desire. And to know—really know—that our own will and our own kingdom are not really taking us to a happy place.

You know, this is how we live out that ‘hallowed be thy name’, that reverence to God. By seeking His will. He is our Father who loves us, is greater than us and worthy of reverent praise and worship, and so we are to cast aside all concerns but to do what He wishes of us. This how Jesus was with His Father, this is truly a reflection of the life of the Trinity, the Son from and with the Father from all eternity. And this is the true path of human life in this world, reflecting and destined to share in that divine life.

 

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Getting Real

Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Reflection – On Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

So right after the words ‘Our Father’ comes these next words, perhaps a bit remote to us, ‘who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.’ Children of the space age and the Copernican universe, heaven to us either means that place we go when we die about which we know precisely nothing, or the vast empty expanses of outer space, where William Shatner boldly goes where no man has gone before.

Neither of these is terribly helpful to praying the Lord’s prayer, nor has much connection to the Greek word ouranois, or the Hebrew shamayim. God is not someone who we only meet when we die, or someone living light years away from us, accessible only if the warp drive is functioning.

Without getting into the whole intricacies of ancient cosmology—the concentric heavenly spheres of the Ptolemaic universe and all that—I think the simplest way of understanding ‘the heavens’ and God living there is that it is a way of saying that God is of a different order of being than us. The earthly realm and the heavenly realm were seen as radically different in essential ways, and God is not of the earthly mode of being.

God is transcendent, in other words. He is not the little god living in the shrine or temple, not a god who roams around like Zeus or Apollo seducing maidens or getting jealous of heroes. God is of an entirely different order of being from us, and this is the significance of His being ‘in heaven.’

He is not distant from us—He is our Father!—but he is different. And this difference calls forth from us a fundamental attitude which is reverence. Hallowed be thy name. This petition is so crucial, right at the beginning of the prayer, because we have this terrible human habit of reducing God to our size, cutting God up into the little bits that suit us and rejecting or at least ignoring the rest, and treating God as a hired servant here to do our bidding and arrange the world to our liking… that is, if He really loves us, He would do that for us.

Especially as Jesus reveals God to us in such intimate terms of fatherhood, we need an immediate salutary reminder that this father of ours is Father. We are not to tremble in fear of Him or keep our distance from His lest we offend Him, but we are to always approach Him on our knees, and with deep humility and reverence.

He is in heaven; we are not. We don’t really know all that much about God-as-God. We know quite a lot about how He wants us to live and what His fundamental attitude and action towards us is, but God Himself remains an unfathomable and awesome mystery.

And we acknowledge and live in the truth of this mystery by reverence. We of North America of the year 2013 have to work a bit to get there. We are so flippant, so irreverent, so ironic about everything. I am prone to that, certainly. To make fun of everything, up to and including God, is seen as a positive value, a virtue, something that establishes us (frankly) as the smartest person in the room, the one who can see through sham piety and cant, who won’t be taken in by anything.

Well, when it comes to God, if we won’t be taken in, we will have to remain outside. It is not really so smart to mock God, as it places us wholly outside the basic attitude necessary to be in communion with Him. It’s not that He gets angry with us and smites us; it is that we are so outside of reality when we do this that He who is the Real cannot reach us. We have to get real with God, and that reality is reverence and humble adoration.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Food and Drink, Foundation and Goal

The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were. This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much further than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus.

This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 132-3

Reflection – Well, this is certainly a mouthful to ponder, perhaps not just for a day, but for a life. I don’t know about you, but I can certainly rattle off the Our Father, in Mass, in the Office, in the rosary, with hardly a thought about any of it. Ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname… Inattention, habit, spiritual shallowness can all make of it an exercise with seemingly little value. So it’s good to read things like this, that remind us of just how deep this prayer is, just what depths of God it contains, just how far into the mystery of God it takes us, if we consent to be taken.

Our Father—perhaps the first two words alone are enough to ponder on. That God is Father, that the ultimate reality is not some nebulous ‘energy’ or some unfathomable unreachable mystery. He is Father—there is a relationship, a possibility of intimacy. There is provision and protection, care and concern, a rushing out of the house to embrace the son in love (cf. Luke 15). Everything good that we can say about the word ‘father’, all that we hope for and desire and perhaps experienced (or, sadly, maybe not) from our earthly fathers, all of this is who God tells us He is in a surpassing way.

But there’s more yet. God is Father in that our whole being comes from Him. He fashions us forth and shapes us into true sons and daughters, bearing his name and image. Our whole self and all it means is from Him and towards Him. God is Father… we can meditate on this one word for months without moving an inch further in the prayer.

He is also ‘our’ Father. And this too has great significance. I am not separated from you. We are not mere atoms bumping up against each other in the cosmic soup. I have a Father and you have a Father and He is the same Father of us both. So you are my brother, my sister. He is ours, and so this whole life of ‘from the Father/towards the Father’ is also a life of you with me and I with you. Called to communion with God, and in God, with one another. And this is the call of the Church.

And it is Jesus who ushers us into all these realities, not as mere words of some fool of a blog from some fool of a priest, but as a living reality, as food and drink for our souls, as a foundation we can live on, a height to which we can ascend. Jesus is the Son, and only in his Sonship and in our shared life with Him, can we know the Father in truth.

So that’s the first two words of the prayer. Perhaps the most important two words in the prayer; arguably the rest of the prayer is a commentary on how to live with God as our Father. But there is a call in all this, and a good call it is in this Year of Faith, to really slow down and look at these basic faith elements, these most common prayers and practices, and really delve into what they mean, why we do them, where they take us.

So… time for another series on the blog. I want to do something a little different for a few days. Since Pope Benedict here invites us to pay this close attention to the Our Father, I am going to let myself be ‘German Shepherded’ to do just that, and for the next days, rather than the usual blog format (quote the pope, discuss the quote), I will simply write meditations on each petition of the prayer. Hope you will enjoy it, and that it will be a spark to your own meditation and delving into the heart of Christ which is the doorway to the heart of the Trinity.