Introduction to the Our Father and the Hail Mary, Part 1

I thought it might be beneficial to take a deep dive into what are arguably the two most important prayers in the Catholic tradition, the Our Father and the Hail Mary. What follows over the next few weeks is excerpted from my book THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER, which you can buy for yourself by clicking on the link. I will send it to you, signed and everything.

Here is the first installment:

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Author Simon Tugwell, O.P. notes that, according to St. Paul, the very first thing we should know about prayer is that we do not know how to do it. Paul makes this fact clear when he tells the Romans that:

…the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)

Because we don’t know what we are doing when we pray, God sends us help. The principal help he gives is the Spirit who, if you will, prays through us and in union with us. That doesn’t mean we are empty vessels and that every prayer that pops into our head is an oracular utterance of the Very Mind of God. It means that God the Holy Spirit guides and helps us to pray more and more like Christ in the power of his Sonship. That, in turn, directs us back to the fact that Christ is our teacher in the school of prayer, especially in and through his inspired word in Scripture and in the liturgy of the Church, since the Mass is the highest form of prayer. With his disciples, we say, “Lord, teach us to pray!” and he does.

When we turn to Christ’s teaching on prayer and the fact of the liturgy, we discover something odd: One of the many curiosities of the Christian tradition is that when Jesus undertakes to teach about prayer he begins by waving us all away from meaningless repetitive prayer: “And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matthew 6:7). But in the next breath he gives us a prayer that he obviously expects us to repeat, a prayer we have indeed repeated for two thousand years– the Our Father. Is this a contradiction?

No. For Jesus is warning against meaningless repetition, not meaningful repetition. In this warning, he has in view a sort of magical notion of prayer in which we can somehow gain power over the Unseen by mere repetition or by saying just the right incantation so that God has to knuckle under to our will, like a genie. It reduces God to something more like a capricious sprite who spends his days scrutinizing trivialities (“Was that ten ‘Hail Marys’ you said this decade or only nine? Denied!”) rather than a God who is Father and filled with love for his children. There’s something at once childlike, superstitious, and savage in such a picture of prayer, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to fall into.[1]

The same spirit which half-believes that if we step on a crack we’ll break our mother’s back constructs superstitious prayer practices that promise us “discipline” by laying out arbitrary rules and expecting them to save us. Such law-based notions of salvation deliver instead captivity to scruples and a vision of God as a kind of cosmic vending machine demanding correct change.

Against all such temptations to reduce God to a sort of faceless inscrutability awaiting the precisely spoken magic spell to subdue his power to our will, Jesus urges us in exactly the opposite direction: toward personal relationship. He wants childlike disciples, not childish ones. He makes this plain when he tells us to avoid the ways of the pagans, “for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8).

That’s an odd thing to say if you think like a Greek logician. After all, if the Ground of Being knows what you need before you ask him, then why ask? But Jesus’ logic was different. For Jesus, it is precisely because God knows us already that you can tell him anything. In short, it’s all about a personal relationship. Prayer is not addressed to a God who has faded into a faceless inscrutable Power. It is addressed to a thunderbolt who has revealed to us a Father’s face. That is why the prayer begins “Our Father” and not “Master of the Universe.” When he gives his disciples the model prayer, this is where he begins—with the fundamental fact of God as Father.

This shows us that the Our Father is a deeply covenantal prayer. But in our legalist culture of contracts, we don’t especially think in terms of “covenant” these days. So until we understand what a “covenant” is, we are ill equipped to understand what the Our Father—much less the “new and everlasting covenant”—is all about.[2]

In brief, a covenant is a bond of sacred kinship. Participants in a covenant become family. It differs from a contract in that it is not 50/50, but 100/100. In a contract, if I don’t pay the gas station their hundred bucks, they don’t owe me the tank of gas. If they don’t pony up the gas, I don’t owe them the hundred bucks. In a covenant, both parties pledge themselves to one another as family and even if one does not honor the covenant, the other remains family. That does not mean people are free to abuse covenants, for a covenant always involves an oath, the Latin word for which is “sacramentum,” and the oath always involves blessings for keeping the covenant and curses for breaking it (See the blessings and curses attending the Sinai covenant in Leviticus 26). In the Christian tradition, the blessings and curses involve nothing less than Heaven and Hell.

There have been a series of covenants in salvation history involving Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and, finally, Jesus Christ. Divine covenants in scripture are always mediated through some human agent who becomes a sort of father figure to the recipients of the covenant. In addition, the successive covenants build on one another (as we shall see, for instance, in the case of the relationship between Adam, David, and Jesus in Chapter 4). But all the covenants of the Old Testament are, in one way and another, incomplete without and looking forward to the new and everlasting covenant made through Jesus Christ and his passion, death, and resurrection. That is what he means when he tells us he is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets (cf. Luke 24:44).

In our Baptism, we become family with God and he with us; adopted sons and daughters who are children of God in Christ. Our foundational relationship in such a covenant is not merely to God as Creator or Lawgiver or Master, but as Father. And so the entire tradition of Christian prayer begins with the words, “When you pray, say, “Father!” (Luke 11:2).

More tomorrow.

[1] Curiously, it is children who are most likely to fall into this way of praying because they are the ones who really want what Evelyn Waugh referred to as “little systems of order.”

[2] For a thorough and accessible overview of the concept of God’s covenant relationship with us, see Dr. Scott Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1998).