The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today urge us to trust that the Word Made Flesh continues to bring life and connection to the Divine to us on our journey.
Prayer and Life
The reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah declares the efficacy of the Word.
* [55:10–11] The efficacy of the word of God recalls 40:5, 8.1
Psalm 34 is praise for deliverance from Trouble.
* [Psalm 34] A thanksgiving in acrostic form, each line beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In this Psalm one letter is missing and two are in reverse order. The psalmist, fresh from the experience of being rescued (Ps 34:5, 7), can teach the “poor,” those who are defenseless, to trust in God alone (Ps 34:4, 12). God will make them powerful (Ps 34:5–11) and give them protection (Ps 34:12–22).2
In the Gospel of Matthew, the Lord’s Prayer is expressed.
* [6:10] Your kingdom come: this petition sets the tone of the prayer, and inclines the balance toward divine rather than human action in the petitions that immediately precede and follow it. Your will be done, on earth as in heaven: a petition that the divine purpose to establish the kingdom, a purpose present now in heaven, be executed on earth.3
Larry Gillick, S.J. asks if God is changed by our requests and maybe even more by the sincerity or intensity and love of our words and feelings?
God’s “Will” is to be the God, who does not love, but is Love and can only be Who God is. Yes, I pray for Lisa to recover from cancer, but more truthfully, I pray that she receives her “daily bread” of God’s being God each day. We pray that the Kingdom of God’s Love come all over the world as God’s “will” is in God eternally. For the most times, because we are loving, relational, caring persons we want to pray when our “crying” does not work. That “crying” is a wordless prayer from our hurting hearts and is also a prayer blessed by the Holy Water flowing from our eyes and spirits. This Reflection ends with my still crying/praying, because I am not God. Crying is not babbling, but the wordless admission of our dignity as belonging to the family of God whose on-going Creator, Jesus called Father. 4
Don Schwager quotes “Pardon your brother and sister,” by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 354-430 A.D.
"Pardon, that you may be pardoned. In doing this, nothing is required of the body. It is the will that acts. You will experience no physical pain - you will have nothing less in your home. Now in truth, my brothers and sisters, you see what an evil it is that those who have been commanded to love even their enemy do not pardon a penitent brother or sister." (quote from Sermon 210,10)5
The Word Among Us Meditation on Matthew 6:7-15 comments that by teaching us the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is offering us more than the right words to say. He is giving us the keys to a more intimate, fruitful, and fulfilling relationship with his heavenly Father.
Love, trust, obedience, dependence, and repentance. Today, as you pray the Our Father, consider how it contains within itself the ingredients for the kind of relationship that God desires with each one of us, his beloved sons and daughters. Thank him for the ways you’ve experienced his fatherly care in your life—and then keep the conversation going! “Jesus, thank you for teaching me how to pray ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).6
Friar Jude Winkler comments on the consolation in the passage from Deutero-Isaiah during the time of the Exile in Babylon. The liturgical form of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew is compared to the disjointed petitions in Luke’s Gospel. Friar Jude reminds us of the intimacy and surrender in the Lord’s Prayer that leads us to forgive others as we comprehend their need in their brokenness.
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, fleshes out the Five M’s, five stages of change that have taken place historically in religious and cultural institutions, with Franciscan writer Ilia Delio, who asks whether the Church is stuck in a “machine” stage of change. Delio writes about open systems, like those found in the natural world, as a model for the Church to reconnect with the dynamism of the gospel. She writes about her own call as a religious sister to follow where God was leading.
I had come to a point of inner freedom where I knew God was calling me to do new things; thus, I was impelled to step out of the comforts of institutional life and, with another Sister, take the risk of living religious life in a new way. I think the term open system best describes our way of life. We live in a working-class neighborhood in DC and financially support ourselves (we pay taxes); if we don’t work, we don’t eat. We discuss the aims of the community together; we try to share responsibilities for the community as much as possible; we pray and play as community, but we respect the autonomy of each person and the work of the Spirit in each life. . . . An open-systems way of life works best on shared vision and dialogue and least on control and lack of communication. Trust is an essential factor, but trust requires kenosis, emptying oneself of control and power, and making space for the other to enter in. . . . An open-systems community, like the physical world itself, is based on relationships, not roles or duties but bonds of friendship, sisterhood (or brotherhood), respect, charity, forgiveness, and justice. Where these values are active and alive, life evolves toward richer, more creative forms, never losing sight that wholeness—catholicity—is at the heart of it. [2]7
Our frequent contact with the Father through the words of the Lord’s Prayer, guides our transformation to trust in the Way of self emptying love and compassion.
References
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