In praying, do not babble like the pagans,
who think that they will be heard because of their many words.
The context of Christian prayer is not meant to be babbling or even bargain or negotiation. Forgetting this, we tend to feel the need to perform in some way, to be persuasive, to say or do things just so in order to win over a disinterested or perhaps hostile deity.
Do not be like them.
Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
We come before a Father who loves us and knows all of our needs. This might make us wonder, why pray at all? Why not just leave things up to God himself since he already knows what we want to ask? It is more for the sake of opening us to what God wants to give than for opening God to give what we want to receive.
The mental posture of prayer calms and purifies the soul, and makes it of more capacity to receive the divine gifts which are poured into it. For God does not hear us for the prevailing force of our pleadings; He is at all times ready to give us His light, but we are not ready to receive it, but prone to other things.- Saint Augustine
God desires us to pray in order to strengthen our relationship with him, to increase our affection for him. He delights to give good gifts to his children. Many gifts he has already given without consulting us. But he reserves some of these gifts until his children ask. He knows that these gifts he desires to give are for our good. But he wants to give his children some agency in receiving them, to help them to grow into maturity where they learn to will what he himself wills and so become more like him.
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
We pray to a Father, not a distant deity or a tyrannical ruler. In order to really occupy the Our Father with our entire being we need the help of the Holy Spirit who makes the fact of the fatherhood of God a reality for us. The Spirit himself is the one who teaches us the holy fear that allows us to hallow God's name, to treat it as precious, to not risk offending against the one who is so deserving of our love.
thy Kingdom come
The coming of the Kingdom is phenomenon that occurs in two different dimensions. The first is the inner reality of the heart. It was in this sense that Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you" (see Luke 17:20-21). But it would be inadequate to merely see the Kingdom as something internal and subjective, something that could be complete while the world continued in its ruinous ways. The priority of the Kingdom is the changing of hearts. But it is changed hearts that can change the world. When Jesus finally returns to restore his kingdom fully it will only be those whose hearts have changed that are fit to live within it. Hence, asking for the coming of the Kingdom asks also for all that is necessary for that complete restoration of the hearts of men and women and of the world itself.
thy will be done
We are called to prefer God's will to our own. Here, then is the heart of prayer, where are warped human nature is refashioned by God himself into the image of his Son. We learn to trust God in the midst of our own suffering, just as Jesus did in his agony in the garden. His will may contain many things which we would have preferred to avoid. But when it is truly his will for us it will also contain a resurrection which we could not otherwise attain. There may need to be a dying to our old self and our old ways. But this is only so we can live more fully the new birth of our baptism.
Give us this day our daily bread
We are meant to learn to trust God for our needs. When we internalize this we will be protected from the temptations of the evil one to make bread out of stones in the desert, or to grumble and put God to the test when we don't get something exactly to our preference. We need first the bread of his word to be in us, and then we will be able to trust in him to provide provisions enough for our needs.
There are several dangers to our relationship with God: unforgiveness of others, the temptations of the world and the flesh, and the lies of the devil. When we are protected from these there is nothing that the world can truly do to harm us.
Let us go to the Father who is waiting, who is longing, to pour out his good gifts upon us. Let us open our hearts to receive what he wants to give so that we can become the people we are meant to be, children of the Father, and citizens of the kingdom.
We conclude with the humble suggestion that if someone was fully able to pray the Our Father with appropriate focus, desire, intention and surrender, that they might in virtue of that prayer do greater things in the world than Elijah or Elisha or even Jesus himself, for he said, "whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father" (see John 14:12).
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