If we ever think of true prayer, there is nothing better that what the Our Father taught us in today’s Gospel reading. The “Our Father” is the most beautiful and most complete prayer we could have.
First, we acknowledge our key relationship with God: he is our Father; we are his children. We know what a father is in a family: the protector, the provider, the care-giver, the powerful one. The father represents the family: without him the family is without a head.
Secondly, we proclaim the holiness of God, “holy be your name,” and thirdly, we pray that God’s “will be done on earth as in heaven.”
Only after our confession in God do we beg God for our own needs: we ask for our physical need of food to live and sustain ourselves; we ask to be forgiven in the way we forgive others; and we pray to be strong in temptation and to be delivered from the evil one.
The prayer emphasizes the need to forgive others: “Forgive us our debts just as we have forgiven those who are in debt to us.” Do we understand this when we pray the Our Father? Do we mean it when we ask God to “forgive our debts just as we have forgiven those who are in debt to us”?
Let us mean what we say when we pray of the Lord’s Prayer.
