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Email a FriendPosted by Amanda on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 4:32 PM (EDT):
Thank you for sharing this! Looks great!
Prayer Expresses The Self
catechesis on prayer, parts 2-4
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 2:30 PM
Have to put in a plug for the Holy Father’s continuing catechesis on prayer!
Expect another installment tomorrow; meanwhile, here’s what he’s said so far.
The first two sessions in the series demonstrated that desire for God is indeed universal, and expressed across time and culture by every people.
The Pope is now embarking with us on a journey through prayer in the Bible, and says of the installments that follow:
I would like to invite you to take advantage of the journey we will make in the forthcoming catecheses to learn to know the Bible more, which I hope you have in your homes and, during the week, pause to read and meditate in prayer, to know the wonderful history of the relationship between God and man, between God who communicates with us and man who responds, who prays.
Abraham, he says, offers us the first example of prayer: his intercessory prayer on behalf of Sodom & Gomorrah.
The Pope notices something interesting. Abraham doesn’t pray only for the righteous. He doesn’t ask, “Lord, spare the innocent.” He asks the entire city be saved on behalf of the righteous.
Abraham’s thought, which seems almost paradoxical, can be synthesized thus: obviously the innocent cannot be treated as the guilty, this would be unjust; instead, it is necessary to treat the guilty as the innocent, putting into act a “superior” justice, offering them a possibility of salvation, because if the evildoers accept God’s forgiveness and confess their fault letting themselves be saved, they will no longer continue to do evil, they will also become righteous, without any further need to be punished.
It is this request of justice that Abraham expresses in his intercession, a request that is based on the certainty that the Lord is merciful. Abraham does not ask of God something that is contrary to his essence; he knocks on the door of God’s heart, knowing his real will.
It’s often said the Old Testament God is vengeful; the Holy Father shows that the intercession for Sodom & Gomorrah reveals precisely the opposite. Abraham’s prayer touches “the abyss of Divine Mercy” by asking for the entire city to be spared for the sake of fewer and fewer righteous men.
In asking this, Abraham is not opposing God’s will, but revealing it and uniting himself to it. God wants wickedness to come to a halt through conversion rather than through punishment:
The need to find righteous men within the city becomes ever less exacting and in the end ten will suffice to save the totality of the population. For what reason Abraham stops at ten is not said in the text. Perhaps it is a number that indicates a minimum community nucleus (also today, ten persons are the necessary quorum for Jewish public prayer). Nevertheless, it is a small number, a small particle of good from which to save a great evil. However, not even ten righteous are found in Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities were destroyed. A destruction attested paradoxically as necessary precisely by Abraham’s prayer of intercession. Precisely because that prayer revealed God’s salvific will: the Lord was ready to forgive, he wished to do so, but the cities were closed in a total and paralyzing evil, without even a few innocent from which to begin to transform the evil into good. Because it is precisely this way of salvation that Abraham also requested: to be saved does not mean simply to flee from punishment, but to be liberated from the evil that dwells in us. It is not the punishment that must be eliminated, but sin, that rejection of God and of love that already bears punishment in itself.
He concludes:
Dear brothers and sisters, the supplication of Abraham, our father in the faith, teaches us to open our hearts ever more to the superabundant mercy of God, so that in our daily prayer we will be able to desire the salvation of humanity and to ask for it with perseverance and trust in the Lord who is great in love.
The fourth session was a beautiful catechesis on Jacob’s wrestling with God, in which the Pope brings out hidden dimensions of a wrestling match that in many respects mirrors what the Catechism calls “the battle of prayer.”
our whole life is like this long night of battle and prayer that is meant to end in the desire and request for God’s blessing, which cannot be grasped or won by counting on our own strength, but must be received from him with humility, as a gratuitous gift that allows us, in the end, to recognize the face of the Lord.
Read each address on prayer in its entirety at these Zenit links:
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3/ Abraham
Session 4/Jacob wrestling with God
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Comments
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Posted by Gina Ramirez on Wednesday, Jun 1, 2011 2:16 AM (EDT):
Rebecca—you summerize the Pope’s statements beautifully! Prayer should be such a central part of our lives, helping us to express who we truly are. But I think we often get so “busy” with life, that we forget to slow down and commnicate with our Lord. Thanks for the reminder!
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