By Fr. Paul D. Scalia .
"Lord, teach us to pray." This appeal by the disciples arises from their immediate circumstances. They had just seen Christ Himself praying. And they knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray. It's reasonable now that they should ask the same of our Lord.
Lord, teach us to pray. This appeal arises, more importantly, from the depth of the human heart. It's an appeal that every disciple should make to our Lord. We are created for prayer, for that intimate conversation with God, to walk with Him in the cool of the day. But we don't know how to pray as we ought. We need to be instructed.
And because our wounded human nature goes astray, we need to be corrected as well. Until we recognize the futility of our own prayer, we won't really begin to pray. Implicit in the appeal of the disciples is that there's a right way to pray - and thus a wrong one as well. Indeed, human history is full of mistaken ways of prayer and worship - some silly, some dangerous, all unworthy of both God and man. Jesus has come to give us the way of prayer.
So Jesus gives us the first and last word of prayer: Father. "When you pray, say: Father." The bluntness of Luke's account shocks us into realizing the reality of the One to Whom we pray. He is eternally Father and has introduced us into His Son. Our divine sonship is the heart of all prayer.
Prayer is, first of all, the ascent of our heart and mind to the Father. That's fundamental to all prayer. "For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, 'Abba, Father!'" (Romans 8:15)
Saint Josemaria Escrivá experienced this gift of prayer when, travelling in a streetcar in Madrid, he suddenly felt a clarity about his sonship: "I had learned to call God Father, as in the Our Father, from my childhood. But feeling, seeing, being amazed at that desire of God that we be his children. . .that was on the street and in a streetcar. For an hour or an hour and a half, I don't know, I had to shout Abba, Pater!"
Abba. Father. If we go no further than that one word, spending all our time saying it with faith and love, then we have prayed well.
But we do go further. The simple acknowledgement of God as Father establishes the proper order of things. It provides the context in which all other prayer is made. Our prayer ascends to the Father so that His grace will also descend to us. The word "pray" really means to ask. Indeed, most of us think of prayer as only petition. Our Father doesn't mind our petitions. So the remainder of our Lord's instruction addresses the confidence we should have in asking, a confidence that comes only from knowing God as Father.
Jesus gives us an odd parable (typical for Luke's Gospel) about a not-very-good friend whose "generosity" is won over by persistence. Point is, God is better than that friend. If a bad friend can be won over by persistence, how much more your loving Father by a simple asking.
The instruction concludes with a surprising but logical statement: "If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" It's surprising because, well, He calls us wicked. He's not wrong, but maybe He could have been gentler?
Anyhow, the statement reminds us of the distance between our goodness and the Father's. We should not think of Him as being good to us as we are good to others, not like that friend in the parable. His goodness infinitely surpasses ours. We should not think of the Father's goodness according to our own constrained goodness. Nor should we estimate His Fatherhood according to our poor image of it. As Tertullian said, "Nemo tam pater quam Pater - no one is so much a father as the Father." (See CCC 239)
But the conclusion is also surprising, because our Lord introduces the gift of the Spirit at the very end of the instruction. How much more will the Father ...
