ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI
Page change! - See preceding page for the posts on the pope's desire to modify a line in the Lord's Prayer...
Cardinal Sarah visits Benedict XVI
Oh to have been a fly on the wall!
I am obviously unable to reproduce the entire chapter that Benedict XVI devoted in JESUS OF NAZARETH, Vol. 2, to the Lord's Prayer, but I found an online source that excerpts much of it:
Chapter Five: The Lord’s Prayer
The Sermon on the Mount…draws a comprehensive portrait of the right
way to live. It aims to show us how to be a human being. We could sum up its fundamental insights by saying that man can be understood
only in light of God, and that his life is made righteous only when
he lives it in relation to God.
But God is not some distant stranger. He shows us his face in Jesus. In what Jesus does and wills we come to know the mind and will of God himself...
Christ, who is the truth, has given us these words, and in them he gives us the Holy Spirit….This also reveals something of the specificity of Christian mysticism. It is not in the first instance immersion in the depths of oneself, but encounter with the Spirit of God in the word that goes ahead of us. It is encounter with the Son and the Holy Spirit and thus a becoming-one with the living God who is always both in us and above us..
The first thing we must do is step outside ourselves and open ourselves to God. Nothing can turn out right if our relation to God is not rightly ordered. For this reason, the Our Father begins with God and then…shows us the way toward being human...
Our Father Who Art in Heaven
The gift of God is God himself. The ‘good things’ [Mt 7:9] that he gives us are himself. This reveals in a surprising way what prayer is really all about: It is not about this or that, but about God’s desire to offer us the gift of himself —that is the gift of all gifts, the ‘one thing necessary.’
Prayer is a way of gradually purifying and correcting our wishes and
of slowly coming to realize what we really need: God and his Spirit...
Jesus alone was fully entitled to say ‘my Father,’ because he alone is truly God’s only-begotten Son, of one substance with the Father. By contrast, the rest of us have to say ‘our Father.’ Only within the ‘ we’ of the disciples can we call God ‘Father,’ because only through communion with Jesus Christ do we truly become ‘children of God.’
In this sense, the word 'ouR' is really rather demanding: It requires that we step out of the closed circle of our ‘ I.’ It requires that we surrender ourselves to communion with the other children of God. It requires that we strip ourselves of what is merely our own, of what divides. It requires that we accept the other, the others — that we open our ear and our heart to them...
Hallowed Be Thy Name
[Jesus] says of himself simply, ‘ I am who I am’ — he is without any qualification. This pledge is a name and a non-name at one and the same time.
The Israelites were therefore perfectly right in refusing to utter this self-designation of God, expressed by the word YHWH, so as to avoid degrading it to the level of names of pagan deities... Translations were wrong to write out this name….By doing so, they have dragged the mystery of God, which cannot be captured in images or in names lips can utter, down to the level of some familiar item within a common history of religions….
Our only recourse is to try as reverently as possible to pick up and
purify the polluted fragments of the divine name. But there is no way we can do that alone. All we can do is plead with him not to allow the light of his name to be destroyed in this world”...
Thy Kingdom Come
With [this] petition…the Lord wants to show us how to pray and order
our action in just this way. The first and essential thing is a listening heart, so that God, not we, may reign. The Kingdom of God comes by way of a listening heart. This is its path. And that is what we must pray for again and again...
Thy Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven
The essence of heaven is oneness with God’s will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes ‘ heaven’ when and insofar as God’s will is done there….This why we pray…that earth may become ‘heaven’ ...
And in this light, we now understand that Jesus himself is ‘ heaven’ in the deepest and truest sense of the word — he in whom and through
whom God’s will is wholly done...
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
When we consider Jesus’s message in its entirety, then it is impossible to expunge the eucharistic dimension….This petition helps us to transcend the purely material and to request already now what is to come ‘ tomorrow,’ the new bread. And when we pray for ‘tomorrow’s’ bread today, we are reminded to live already today from tomorrow, from the love of God, which calls us all to be responsible for one another”...
And Forgive Us Our Trespasses,
as We Forgive Those Who Trespass against Us
The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing [because of] the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge [and because of] our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone...
The overcoming of guilt has a price: We must put our heart — or, better, our whole existence — on the line….This act…can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all.
[This] petition [is] a Christological prayer. It calls us…with him to work through and suffer through evil by means of love”...
And Lead Us Not into Temptation
The object of [this] petition is to ask God not to mete out more than we can bear, not to let us slip from his hands...
But Deliver Us from Evil
The Our Father in general and this petition in particular [tries] to tell us that it is only when you have lost God that you have lost yourself; then you are nothing more than a random product of evolution…. Evils (plural) can be necessary for our purification, but evil (singular) destroys….This is why we pray that…we ourselves may not be lost...
[This] last petition brings us back to the first three: In asking to be liberated from the power of evil, we are ultimately asking for God’s Kingdom, for union with his will, and for sanctification of his name [as we also beg him] to set a limit to the evils that ravage the world and our lives...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/12/2017 22:33]