Living the Father

By calling God my Father I respond to his word which tells me: you are my son. Therefore the Our Father is not a prayer that is recited, but a prayer that is lived, that we learn to live little by little, day after day, for the entire time of our life. Learning the Our Father means learning to abandon ourselves to him in total abandonment, not only in words, but in the reality of daily life.

There is no point in reciting the Our Father once, ten, a hundred, a thousand times, if we do not translate it into a way of life, a way of being.
Take for example our relationship with life itself. If we believe in God our Father, if we truly believe in his love, we can no longer live feeling life as anguish, because we feel surrounded, protected by his paternal presence. Of course this will not make the pain, the various forms of evil, our unworthiness disappear. However, beyond all appearances, there will never be failures in our lives, the word failure no longer exists.

This attitude truly demonstrates our faith because, turning to the concrete aspects of daily existence, we find ourselves faced with illness, death, abandonment, desperation, hunger, ignorance, many things that seem in contrast with the fatherhood of God. Does a Father do this? Does a Father abandon you like this? How is it possible that he is truly our Father?

The only answer we can give ourselves when faced with this truly terrible problem is to remember that Jesus, Jesus himself, went through suffering, knew abandonment, cried out to God all his desperation, brought upon himself , and much greater, the same anguish that every man experiences sooner or later in his life.

P. Mario Nascimbeni
by Progetto (now NP) October 1992