Part 1 of “Learning to Pray to Our Father”

The Lord’s Prayer contains all we need. St. Augustine ventured to say that if we “run through all the words of the holy prayers [in Scripture], I do no think you will find anything in them that is not contained in the Lord’s Prayer.” St. Thomas Aquinas added, “the Lord’s Prayer is the most perfect of prayers. … In it we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence they should be desired.” This prayer should change us, stretch us, form us.

Instead, we often take this prayer for granted. It’s “old hat”. Both when teaching children and talking with adults about prayer, I have found a consistent view that praying the Our Father is something like reciting your ABCs. Once you know it you know it, and sometimes you recite it to remember what comes before what, but otherwise the point is to move on. “Real prayer” wouldn’t rely on something expressed through rote memorization. To be honest, I recognize this opinion in myself, just as I sense it in others.

I want to help us begin again with the Lord’s prayer – taking on a different approach and a new perspective. I want to see if you and I can learn how to humble ourselves in praying this prayer so that we may be formed by it. This is the prayer to “Our Father,” which means that by praying it we are, above all, allowing ourselves to be his children. That is the gift Jesus gives us: he gives us his Father as our Father.

In the weeks to come, I will provide a short teaching or reflection on each of the lines and petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. I think it is important that what I offer be short because the point of all of this is that we be able to take what we read and allow it to seep into our prayer. To do this, I invite you to pray the Lord’s Prayer each day, but to pray it slowly and thoughtfully. For an entire week, practice dwelling on one particular line or petition. In the next post (released October 11) I will provide a teaching and reflection on the words “Our Father” that open the prayer. The idea is to especially contemplate those words for the following week, and to do so everyday when we pray this prayer. You might even keep a prayer journal, writing directly to the Lord out of your prayer. “Who Are in Heaven” will then become the focus in the next post (released October 18), and so on for every Monday until the end of December.

I believe in this way of learning (or re-learning) how to pray. It is important to take on a small but consistent commitment. It is important to focus on small things. It is important to be patient. And it is important to stick with it. So let’s do that together. And if you find this late and start late, just begin from the beginning and dedicate a full week to each line or petition that we focus on in this series.

All the time we spend praying in this way is time spent with the Lord, following the Lord. This is the Lord’s Prayer because the words Jesus gives to his disciples are words he received directly from his Father (see John 17:7). At the same time, the petitions that Jesus recites and hands over to his disciples come from the depths of his heart, where he knows the needs of his brothers and sisters whose humanity he shares (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 2765). This prayer is, at once, the revelation of the Father’s will for us and of our own needs.

Thanks for joining in this journey of prayer. Now let us pray.

Find more: This series draws on sections of my book Into the Heart of the Father: Learning from and Giving Yourself through Christ in Prayer. I am grateful to my publisher, Word Among Us Press, for allowing me to share these sections with you here. If you are interested, I hope you will check out the book – I think you’ll like it.

Study and pray with others: I have also designed a reading, prayer, and discussion guide for groups that would like to read the book and learn how to pray better together. This is ideal for parishes, schools, and families.