"Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me." (Ps. 138)
I recall one of the stories of the Desert Fathers in which a young monk asks his spiritual father, his abba, why his prayers are so ineffective; he prays, but rarely gets what he asks for. The monk asks his disciple to take an old, dusty basket and bring him some water. The disciple obliges, but gets no farther than a few steps before the basket leaks the entire contents of water out, and so he must return to refill it. He does this several more times and soon realizes the futility of using the old basket to carry water. He returns, sullen, unable to accomplish his abba's request. He explains his great effort to try and keep the water secure, but that the basket will not hold the water. His abba nods in agreement. He asks the disciple if he noticed anything different about the basket since he took it to the river. The disciple says "Yes, it is now clean." The abba says "Yes, it has been cleaned by the water passing through it while you were filling it. God answers our prayers by first purifying our hearts, not granting us our desires. Only a pure heart can say with faith, "Your will be done."
What we usually mean by "God does not answer prayer" is "I didn't get what I asked for." For some Christians (and anyone in a fix), prayer can be little more than a spiritual ATM. Not to discount the need to ask God for those things we need, and we desire, but all prayer should be with the proviso Jesus used in the Garden: "Not my will, but your will be done"(Luke 22). If Jesus, who was in perfect communion with the Father, humbly submitted to his Father's will when scared, anticipating a gruesome death and feeling abandoned, how much more should we be willing to pray under the condition that it is God's will.
In today's gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is asked how we are to pray, and Jesus follows up with the "Our Father"--a prayer not invented by Jesus but passed along from John the Baptist who taught his disciples a prayer from the wilderness. The Our Father can be used not simply as a text for our prayer, but is a small catechism on how to pray:
"Father hallowed be your name."
Prayer begins with acknowledging God as Father, or more accurately, Jesus uses the word abba---" daddy" to bring into sharp focus the intimacy with which we can approach God. God is both supremely holy, but though Christ and the Holy Spirit, supremely accessible to us; we should begin every prayer not only with the awareness of God's holiness but with the great gratitude that we are, as St. Paul says,"heirs of God", God's children (God has no grandchildren).
"Your kingdom come."
Other gospels add "your will be done, etc..." To first pray for God's kingdom is to honor Christ's central mission, to make the kingdom realized by his disciples, and to spread this grace to all. We must, as Thomas Merton wrote "will the will of God"; our prayer must first raise our consciousness to seek first the Kingdom before all else. It is, as my spiritual father said many years ago to me, necessary "to pray for the Kingdom of God to come, not the Kingdom of Todd"!
"Give us each day our daily bread."
The "bread" is understood by biblical scholars to point to the Messianic banquet, the eschaton, the final culmination in history of the establishment of the Kingdom for all eternity. The prayer asks for that realization to be daily; the eschaton isn't only historical, it is eternally present and accessible by grace. We should earnestly pray for this spiritually sustaining need as we realize the need for physical nourishment.
"Forgive us our sins for we forgive everyone in debt to us."
This part of the prayer isn't so much a quid pro quo as it is an admonition to be mindful of the need to avail ourselves of God's mercy so we can extend it as part of building up of the Kingdom. We need to continue to seek God's merciful grace, not as a reward for forgiving others, but we need to seek God's grace so that we can forgive others. If we live in the gratitude of God's mercy to us, forgiveness can be genuine because it is an extension of the divine forgiveness of God. If this dynamic was working perfectly, I doubt we'd need to include it in our prayer, but it isn't, and we continue to find forgiveness tough at times; so, our focus ought to be seeking God's mercy for our lack of mercy towards others. The "Jesus Prayer" is a great help: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner". This ancient prayer, far from being self-abasing, abounds in the awareness of God's great mercy and our constant need of it.
"Do not subject us to the final test."
The Greek word used for "test" is peirasmos, which suggests the trials of the Messiah; the afflictions of the mission of Christ; it isn't suggesting that God is the source of our temptations (God never is the source of temptation--James 1:13). We pray to be fortified in the life of trials for the sake of the Kingdom and that we might not "be subject"...or perhaps a better word would be "subjugated" to the final test---be overcome by our struggles. Make no mistake, anyone seriously considering confronting the evil of the world would do well, to begin with, the evil in one's heart. Satan rejoices in the self-righteous protester who can use an agenda of "social justice" to embitter the heart, and render it lifeless in the pursuit effectively hating one's enemies, but for a "good cause". Real spiritual combat takes place in the recesses of one's heart, not on the street facing one's enemies. Do you want to destroy your enemies? Love them! Where is the enemy now?
The second part of the gospel sets up the short narrative of one who, because he was persistent in appealing to his friend got what he needed. So "For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened". We need the persistence in prayer to cleanse our hearts like the water sifting through the dirty basket; it takes a lifetime of seeking and knocking to realize whom we sought was always with us, and the door has always been open.
