The Lord’s Prayer urges us to forgive as we expect to be forgiven. We understand that only refuge in the Holy Spirit will protect us from giving in to temptation, and we learn to trust God that He will, through Christ, release us from the stronghold of Satan, once and for all, at the end of time.
This petition has a specifically Christian sense. The CCCC (593) says: “Since ‘man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4), this petition equally applies to hunger for the Word of God and for the Body of Christ received in the Eucharist as well as hunger for the Holy Spirit….”
A prayer like the Our Father certainly challenged the age-old beliefs of the Jews. It also prompted a change in the way we approach prayer, in the sense that its transformative value is foremost in the eyes of the Church.
As we enter the month of April, we are proffered a glimpse of the arrival of Easter. A time that calls for a deepening of our spiritual life. To that end, we have turned to the prayer given by Jesus: the Our Father, under the guidance of Dr. Scott Hahn.