Called to the School of Prayer in the Liturgy
The 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time C
February 9th, 2025
The Catechism of the Catholic Church highlights that God always takes the initiative in the Christian’s prayer life. We have already explained how prayer is an interior act of the virtue of religion that follows devotion. Whereas Christian devotion is a readiness of the will to give God the due worship out of love of charity, prayer is an elevation of the mind to God, asking for the things we need for our salvation.
Petitionary prayer glorifies God because it simultaneously manifests His Goodness and Majesty and the poverty of the praying soul. Of course, what we call mental prayer or meditation has an important role in Christian prayer life. Meditation or contemplative prayer precedes and feeds devotion and consequently, prayer in the proper sense, that is, petitionary prayer.
Contemplation and meditation presuppose God’s revelation and, hence, God’s initiative. As Saint Teresa of Avila reminds us, contemplative, mental, or meditative prayer is an act of the theological virtues. God has revealed Himself as Father and Friend who wants to have with us a familiar conversation (familiaris conversatio). Saint Thomas Aquinas describes the theological virtue of charity as that wonderful conversation.
Having a familiar conversation requires one to become family. Baptism introduces us into God’s family. We are spiritually sealed by a character that empowers us to be children of God and receive sanctifying grace, which is a participation in the divine life. In other words, we are adopted by God as sons and daughters.
God always initiates this supernatural yet familiar conversation. Otherwise, it would be simply impossible for us to address God in familiar terms. Hence, there is a priority of God’s Word, which we receive by the theological virtue of faith. It would be impossible to have hope and charity without faith. We get to know God first and the mysteries of the salvation He offers us out of an ineffable love. Only then can we respond by putting our hope in God and loving Him above all things.
The whole of Christian life is a response to God’s Love. Considering the wondrous proportions of this calling to become members of God’s family and have an intimate conversation with Him, it becomes easier to understand why we do not know how to pray. This ignorance applies both to contemplative and petitionary prayer. Therefore, as God wants to teach us how to pray, the liturgy is the privileged tool.
You could ask why we do not know how to pray. The affirmation can sound strange if we are too used to thinking we have open access to dialogue with our Father. However, careful consideration and maybe some examples will show us how the usual thought is that we have no clue how to behave or what to say in our conversation with God.
I have often experienced how nervous and lost we can be when we are invited to attend meetings with people in authority. Suddenly, we become super concerned with the protocol and the etiquette. We could even imagine how that feeling of having no clue would increase if we were invited to have dinner and an intimate conversation with a medieval royal family.
The comparison is ridiculous. Human authorities of the past, present, and future are people with the same fundamental dignity who are honored or recognized in a special manner because they serve society. When we talk about God, the distance between Him and us is simply infinite at all levels. God is infinitely good, wise, honorable, etc. How can I talk to the One who is infinite wisdom? How am I to behave in the real presence of the transcendent King of the Universe Who deserves nothing less than adoration?
In conclusion, we are called to a familiar conversation with God and need to learn how to live up to it in our prayer life. Pope Benedict XVI teaches us that the liturgy is a privileged school wherein to learn. The Word of God and the prayer of the Church shape the Christian heart in the liturgy, as we will explain in the following meditations.
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