Prayer is personal, but our brothers and sisters participate in it. Recollection and interior solitude are not an obstacle for other people to be present in some way while we pray. The Lord taught us to say Our Father, because we share the dignity of children with all our brothers and sisters.
Our Father. And the Lord had already told us that if at the moment of prayer we remembered that one of our brothers had a complaint against us, we should first make peace with him. Then he would accept our offering.
We have the right to call God our Father if we treat others as brothers, especially those with whom we have the closest ties, those with whom we have the closest relationship, those who are most in need..., everyone. For if anyone says, "I love God, but hate his brother," writes St. John, "he is lying. For he who does not love his brother whom he sees, cannot possibly love God whom he does not see. "You cannot call the God of all goodness our Father," says St. John Chrysostom, "if you keep a hard and unhuman heart, for in that case you no longer have in you the heavenly Father's mark of goodness.
When we say to God: Our Father, we do not present to Him only our poor prayer, but also the adoration of the whole earth. Through the Communion of Saints a permanent prayer goes up before God on behalf of humanity. We pray for all men, for those who never knew how to pray, or no longer know how to pray, or do not want to pray. We lend our voice to those who ignore or have forgotten that they have an almighty Father in Heaven. We give thanks for those who forget to give thanks. We pray for those in need who do not know that the source of graces is so close to them. In our prayer we are burdened with the immense needs of the whole world. In our interior recollection, as we turn to our Father God, we feel that we are delegates of all those in need, especially those whom God has placed at our side or in our care.
It will also be of great consolation to us to consider that each one of us participates in the prayer of all our brothers and sisters. In Heaven we will have the joy of knowing all those who interceded for us, and also the countless number of Christians who took our place when we forgot to do so, and who have thus obtained for us graces that we did not ask for. How many debts to be paid!
The Christian's prayer, although personal, is never isolated. We say Our Father, and immediately this invocation grows and is amplified in the Communion of Saints. Our prayer merges with that of all the righteous: with that of the mother who prays for her sick child, with that of the student who asks for a little help for his exam, with that of the girl who wants to help her friend to make a good Confession, with that of the one who offers his work, with that of the one who offers precisely his lack of work.
At Holy Mass, the priest prays with the faithful the words of the Our Father. And we consider that, with the different time zones in the various countries, the Holy Mass is continually being celebrated and the Church recites this prayer unceasingly for her children and for all mankind. The earth is thus presented as a great altar of continual praise to our Father God through his Son Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit.
Hablar con Dios