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The Gravity of the Father’s Love in Heaven and on Earth

The Lord taught us to call on our heavenly Father not because God is distant or inaccessible, but because the Father is awaiting for us with love. This means that heaven is near and dawning on us even now.   This means that we are the objects of a particular joy, a special and un-repeatable delight that has lived in the Heart of God from the beginning. He respects our freedom but no power from above or below can thwart the hidden purpose of His exceeding love. He is making His will on Earth as it is in Heaven.

The Lord’s prayer reveals that the Father Himself is not passive or absent, that heaven itself is not indifferent to our struggles here below. Similarly, the Lord’s prayer has nothing to do with spiritualizing away the painful ambiguity of life.  Even when overwhelmed with crushing hardships and painful sorrows, even when our dreams are dashed to pieces and we feel left in total darkness, it is not escapism to remember that our present problems do not have an ultimate claim on us. Instead, we see our hardships in a broader context, a difficult but brief moment in a beautiful story that is raising us on high.

What most defines our existence is the specific gravity of the Father’s love.  To turn to this love is to choose to confront what is most essential in reality, what is most painful in our existence. Here we know the mystery of the Cross. All longing and disappointment, all guilt and injury, and death itself fall in prostrate silence before this threshold of Heaven. Following in the footsteps of our Crucified Master into this great mystery, we discover the dynamism of the Father’s love as an unvanquished force even when disguised by the obscurity of great suffering.  

His heart is pierced by our plight. He watches for us eagerly even when we are still a long way off.  He is ready to rush to us as soon as He sees us turning home.  He cries out with His Eternal Word and by His Holy Spirit implicates Himself in our lives to welcome us home.  His Love aims for nothing less.

This new presence of the Father working through the Word and Spirit cried with love into our hearts makes our spirits increasingly more heavenly.  This beautiful presence is is in the form of a celebration, filled with the joy of banquet, a feast too wonderful for this world to contain,

If the Father cries out to us in love and truth, how can we do anything other than cry out to Him in faith and confidence? We must never be afraid to allow Him to welcome us home.  Faith and confidence are the most beautiful way of welcoming God and showing hospitality to the one who rushes to us.  The more we makes space and welcome this heavenly reality, the more powerfully this divine indwelling moves us to cry out with trust “on earth as it is in heaven.”

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The Lord’s Prayer and its Structure of Hope

Those who pray the Lord’s prayer with faith take up the effort to see our struggles with the light that is from above, the understanding that comes from God. That is why when it is prayed carefully with devotion, the unvanquished light of heaven shines through each syllable into the depths of one’s life and current situation, if only we allow it to.  This is true in the very structure of the prayer Christ entrusted to the Church.

The structure of the Lord’s Prayer proposes the primacy of heaven over all other earthly things in our existence, no matter how urgent and insurmountable they seem. Unmet needs (our daily bread), broken relationships (our need to be forgiven and to forgive), and all threats to our dignity and integrity (temptations and the power of evil); all this concerns our life in this world below. These visible realities are subordinated to what is more important, what is more spiritual, more immense, and more beautiful.  No matter how catastrophic or tragic the trial we endure, we must train our hearts that the holiness, the will, the kingdom of the Father all come first.

The beautiful truth in the sacred order Christ laid out for us is that nothing in this world can make absolute claim over our existence.   Our difficulties, failures and inadequacies do not ultimately define who we are or what we are about as people of faith. Something else, from the world above, where the Father dwells, has hold of us and draws us up. The structure of Christ’s prayer turns our hearts to the Father, to heaven, even as we confront the difficulties and challenges of this life.

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The Lord’s Prayer and a New Solidarity for Humanity

Although rancor, contention and strife threaten our communities and households, it is not delusional to believe that enmity, alienation and futility are not the last words concerning all that is good, noble and true about humanity. This is as true for our cultures and societies as it is for each one of us individually.  Indeed, in the face of our broken sinful habits, the quiet murmuring of the Lord’s prayer in the most forgotten alley in even the most heartless metropolis is a sign, like a flickering votive candle in a sanctuary, that misery is not limitless. Those words, “Our Father,” even when they rattle out from trembling lips at life’s final moment, declare an unvanquished hope that God Himself entrusted to the world.

The Lord’s prayer is not a prayer we ever master by our own industry and cleverness. It is a gift from heaven we humbly learn from someone who has gone before us in the faith.  Just as the Father relies on Him for everything, the Word of the Father chose to rely on those who believed him to teach those who would come after them how to pray. He did this when He entrusted the first disciples with these holy words.  When he ascended into heaven, this prayer was part of the Good News He commanded them to go out and preach to the whole world.

In point of fact, what is taught in this prayer (our solidarity with the Father) and how it is taught (through solidarity with one another) safeguards the new solidarity Christ offers humanity through faith in Him. The Lord’s prayer is passed on to each of us in the Church as a prayer uttered with Christ, in Christ and through Him. It is a prayer that the Risen Lord offers before the throne of the Father in the sanctuary of heaven itself and that animates His work in the world that continues even now.  It is the prayer that resounds from the very heart to the most extreme periphery of the Lord’s Mystical Body, in the silence of the most secluded hermitage or forgotten hospice to the piercing cries of those tortured and publicly humiliated for His sake.

No one who utters this prayer with faith ever prays alone.  Whenever a Christian joins himself to Christ by faith and dares to utter these holy words, the Risen Lord animates this prayer with a love that is stronger than death. This love no power on the earth, or under it, can quench. It is a love that does not come from this world, but from the Father who is in heaven.  The divine love born on the words of this humble prayer binds the believer with every other believer, overcoming every form of alienation and enmity, establishing communion, giving birth to mission.

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