When I was a young boy I somehow came to understand that our Catholic faith is ultimately about relationships. This realisation was a gift I did not earn or deserve, and it is not a gift I have always made the most of. It is, however, a precious insight into the mystery of human life, as our Christian faith presents it to us.
The first and most important relationship we have is our personal relationship with God, which for us as Christians, is centred on our relationship with Jesus. As he himself says, “no-one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). As we enter into a genuine relationship with Jesus, we will find that what is important to him gradually, becomes more and more important to us. When he therefore says to us, “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34), we come to understand that our love for him will inevitably, and joyfully, lead us into relationships with those he himself loves – and that is everybody! We begin to see, in other words, that everyone is our brother or sister, deeply loved by the Lord and, in and through him, deserving of our love as well.
In many ways the journey of our Christian lives is all about learning to live this truth in our particular context – and humbly seeking forgiveness, from God and from our sisters and brothers, when we fail to do so.
Because this commandment of love will be lived out in the concrete reality of our lives, the Pope’s recent Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, represents a precious gift to us all. More often than not, the people closest to us are the members of our families, and the Pope’s Exhortation offers many beautiful reflections and many practical proposals to help us live our family relationships, even in times of great difficulty, with serenity, with joy and with hope.
One expression of our love is our prayer. We show our love for God by spending time in God’s presence, and we show our love for each other by praying with and for those we love. Not everyone finds prayer easy. Indeed many people would believe that they do not really know how to pray at all. The first disciples of Jesus experienced something of this. Saint Luke’s Gospel tells us that on one occasion, seeing Jesus himself in prayer, his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray”. In response Jesus taught them what we now call the Lord’s Prayer (cf Luke 11: 1-4, also Matthew 6: 7-13). In our tradition we often speak of it as “the pattern of all Christian prayer”. This is undoubtedly both because of its content and because of the spirit which animates it. Ultimately it is a prayer of complete trust. We ask that God’s kingdom (rather than our own) might come and that God’s will (rather than our own) might be done. We ask for all that we need (our daily bread) rather than for what we might selfishly want, and we pray, rather dangerously, that God will forgive us our sins in the same way that we forgive others their sins against us.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the Lord’s Prayer is that it is a prayer for a community rather than for isolated individuals. I may well find myself alone when praying this prayer but I nevertheless address it to our Father, not to my Father. I ask the Lord not to give me my daily bread, or to forgive me my trespasses, but to give us the bread and forgiveness we need. The Lord’s Prayer does not allow us to forget our brothers and sisters when we pray. It does not allow us have a relationship with the Lord which isolates or separates us from others.
Yes, our Christian Faith is about relationships, with God and with others. As we open ourselves to God and his people, especially in prayer, we become the people God created us to be. The Amoris Laetitia – the joy of love, takes root and begins to grow within us. Thus God answers the prayer Jesus taught us: thy kingdom come, thy will be done.
From page 3 and 4 from Issue 2: ‘Family: What does it mean in 2016?’ of The Record Magazine