Gospel Meditations

Teach Us to Pray

Once I went to a hospice facility to celebrate Last Rites for an elderly dying man. His family had told me that he had been uncommunicative for days. At the conclusion of the ritual, we began to recite the Our Father prayer. To everyone’s surprise, his lips moved, clearly mouthing the words to the Lord’s prayer. Stripped of most of his faculties, the man could still pray those precious God-given petitions. A lifetime of prayer had planted the words even deeper than his failing consciousness.

Do we want the Lord’s prayer to be as deeply embedded in us? If we want to be people of hope, we should. Recall that our Lord immediately follows the prayer by saying: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9). We only ask, search and knock because we hope that the request is not in vain. Everything we could possibly hope for is contained in the prayer. Praying the Our Father deepens our hope.

We should consciously pour all our hopes into the Lord’s prayer; we should allow it to be an expression of hope, not simply rote words. Then, over time, it builds up our hope in God. It sinks deep into our souls and bodies. How blessed we are when these words of hope are on our lips, even when everything else seems to fail.

— Father John Muir

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