We finish our look at the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer, excerpted from my book THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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The grace that lends us our borrowed dignity is always prior. Every movement of the heart toward God, no matter how feeble and flickering, occurs because God was already at work in the mysterious depths of our being, moving us toward himself. That’s why, at the end of the day, it only appears that Jesus was passively revealing himself in response to others’ comments and requests. In fact, requests like “Lord, teach us to pray” and insights like “You are the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” occur, as Jesus himself said, due to the power of his heavenly Father at work in our hearts. As he says, we did not choose him, he chose us (cf. John 15:16).
All of the struggles to understand the revelation of Christ, all the seeking, questioning, doubt and desire the apostles went through in their long, slow, stumbling walk after Jesus, all this was due ultimately not to “man’s search for God,” but to the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost sheep. The apostles cried out “Lord, teach us to pray!” because God put the hunger for him in their hearts, inspired them to freely seek him, and then freely answered them. The prayer “Teach us to pray”, simply by being a prayer and not a magic formula, assumed dialogue with God.
Yet not merely one-on-one dialogue. The “Our Father” is, paradoxically, an incorrigibly public prayer (that’s why it’s the “Our Father”) to an incorrigibly intimate God (which is why Jesus tells us “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6)).
What are we to make of a God who reveals himself to be secret, yet simultaneously reveals this prayer to the whole human race? Well, we cannot pretend that the Christian faith is some private, esoteric affair between Me ‘n Jesus. “Our” gives that the lie. To call the Father “Our” and not “My” is to say he is the God of the whole Church, not just of me as an individual. Why then the emphasis on secrecy? Because God meets us as persons in the intimacy of the soul. We approach him in secret because that which is personal is also that which is most universal. For the personal things like falling in love, fear upon the sea, wonder at the stars, joy at the laughter of children are not esoteric; they are common. But because we are weak, we often cannot reveal ourselves as persons to God in public due to fear of what people will think or the distracting desire to impress them. So God calls us to private prayer in order that we may practice at being persons, so that in our public practice of the Faith, we may share that gift of personhood with others.
Make no mistake; ours is a public faith. Jesus has that in view when he establishes his Church. The notion that the Christian faith should be “private” in the sense that it should be neither seen nor heard in the public square is as unintelligible to Jesus as it was to the Jewish tradition from which he came. To be sure, acts of piety such as prayer, fasting, almsgiving should not be done in order to gain the praise of human beings, but that’s not because “faith is a private thing”. It’s because our public witness to the Faith must not be compromised by even so much as the appearance of a faith that is offered in sacrifice, not to God our Father, but to Public Opinion. It is precisely because the Church is a visible body of believers and a sacrament to the world of the mercy and love of God that it must not be tainted by the mercenary attempt to leverage our “spirituality” into something calculated to win acclamation for ourselves.
Winning acclamation for Our Father is another thing entirely. That is why Jesus offsets the exhortation to do our acts of piety privately with another, less noticed command to make our faith a very public thing indeed:
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-16)
Precisely the point of this teaching is that glory is good, so long as we give it to God our Father and don’t divert it to ourselves. So Catholics are unabashed in public worship. The Mass is not all about us, but about the worship of God the Father in and through Jesus the Son.
That’s why the “Our Father” has always had pride of place at Mass. In the Mass, we live out what Jesus instructs us to do in the “Our Father”—enter into the total and perfect self-offering of his Son. Once again, we “dress up as Christ” and ride his coattails into Heaven by being joined with his life, death, and resurrection, first in the sacrament of Baptism and most profoundly in the sacrament of the Eucharist. We give him our little, broken, creaturely life and he gives us his “spirit of Sonship” whereby we cry “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15-16). Because we are now sons and daughters in the Son, we participate in the life of the Blessed Trinity to such a degree that God, in his Providence, actually takes our prayers into account as he continues his single ongoing act of Creation and Redemption. He chooses to make our prayers matter, for we pray as his own children. And because we are children, we can enter into prayer, not in the muck sweat of a half-panicked fear that a capricious deity might let us starve if we don’t get some magic formula recited just right, but in the confidence that Jesus himself had in his heavenly Father. It is this confidence that suffuses the “Our Father” and steers us, not to a prayer of petition (which is often the first form of prayer that we think of) but to the recognition that Our Father is in heaven.
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