Jesus said to His disciples: "In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
"This is how you are to pray:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
Thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
"If you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions."
The Gospel of the Lord.
When the disciples of Jesus asked him to teach them to pray he gave them the Our Father, which is a model of brevity.
Has it ever struck you that in the Our Father, “the pattern of all Christian prayer,” there is no mention of Jesus, his life, death or resurrection, nor mention of any of the Christian mysteries? This absence indicates to me that it was his own prayer. In prayer he was seized by one single awareness: the Father; he was not thinking about himself. When we pray the Our Father we are not praying to him, but with him; we are praying his prayer. We are so close to him that we do not see him! We are (so to speak) inside his head looking out through his eyes and seeing, like him, only the Father and the world. We are praying in him. All Christian prayer and worship is “in Christ.”
When we pray the Our Father we are not outsiders and spectators, we are praying from within the whole Christ. We are looking out through the eyes of Christ. We are living from his mind and heart: “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 3:16); we are larger than ourselves.
Pope Benedict XVVI: Lectio divina constitutes a real spiritual journey marked out in stages.
(1) The lectio, which consists of reading and rereading a passage from Sacred Scripture and taking in the main elements. (2) The meditatio is a moment of interior reflection in which the soul turns to God and tries to understand what his word is saying to us today. (3) In the oratio we linger to talk with God directly. (4) Finally, the contemplatio helps us to keep our hearts attentive to the presence of Christ whose word is "a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts" (2 Pet 1:19).
No comments:
Post a Comment