Saturday, July 27, 2013

Homily: 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Dante's Purgatory and the Our Father



The poet, Dante Alighieri, wrote a famous poem, almost 800 years ago now, called the Divine Comedy.  In the three books of the Divine Comedy, Dante chronicles a pilgrimage he makes through hell, purgatory, and heaven.   He describes the horrific sights and sounds of the punishment of the wicked in hell for their failure to repent from their self-centeredness.

He then makes his way up the mountain of purgatory, where he meets those who still need to be purified of the effects of their sins before entering heaven where amidst glorious celestial light he meets the blessed saints who free from all selfishness now enjoy the beauty of being in God’s presence.

At the base of the mountain of purgatory, the largest group of people Dante meets are those who need to be cleansed of the sin of pride.
According to Dante, every sin can be traced back to pride.  For Pride is when we turn away from God, when we claim to know better than God, when we act as if we were the center of the universe.  Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their pride and traced their inability to recognize him as the Son of God back to pride. 

Jesus in the Gospel says, those who exult themselves shall be humbled, and those who humble themselves shall be exulted. 

In Dante’s poem, those in Purgatory are cleansed of their pride by making a very specific act of humility, they recite over and over, humbly and devoutly, the Our Father. 

A good priest once suggested to me that our holiness as a Christian can be measured by our ability to pray the Our Father from the heart.   

The Our Father is a prayer of true humility.  In Dante’s purgatory, the Our Father is prayed over and over until they really learn to pray it from the heart.

Do you pray the Our Father from your heart?

The Our Father is one of the first prayers we learn, we commit it to memory, we pray it every week at Mass. I remember committing it to memory in first grade PSR.

Once committed to memory it becomes easy to rattle off the words, barely thinking about what they mean.  There is a difference between praying the Our Father from memory and praying it from the heart, isn’t there? 

To pray the Our Father from the heart means to pray it from your very depths, to mean every phrase of it, to pray it with the heart and the mind of Jesus Christ. 

As a spiritual exercise it is helpful from time to time to pray the Our Father, very slowly, reflecting upon every word, what those words really mean for us as Christians.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a wonderful resource for this, the entire final 100 paragraphs of the Catechism deal with each line and each phrase of the Lord’s Prayer.

Where pride focuses on me, me, me.  Just teaches us to focus on us, on we.  We are to address God address God as part of a community.  The first word of the Our Father is Our. 

The prayer would be very different if it were only about ME.  “My Father, who art in heaven…give me this day my daily bread and forgive me my trespasses, as I forgive those who trespass against me, and lead me not into temptation but deliver me from evil.”  Yuck. What a different prayer, it sounds so self-centered!
In teaching us to pray, Jesus teaches us to focus not just on ME, my life, my needs, my desires, rattling off my wish list. Christianity is not a mere private affair.  The Church Jesus founded is not just a gathering of isolated individuals, but persons who have been brought into a new communion with God and one another.  We go to God together. 

Look at Sunday Mass.  We cannot fulfill our Sunday obligation by sitting in a room, by ourselves, communing with God.  We are meant to come together, at least every week, in united prayer.
Someone who claims that they don’t need the Church to be Christian needs to reexamine the data and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The second word of the prayer is Father.  The word Father here doesn’t just mean that God is the Creator.  Yes, God is the creator of everything, including human life.  Everyone who has ever existed or ever will exists owes their life to God.  But Christians use the word Father in a different sense.

Through Baptism, the Christian is brought in to a new relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  We heard this in the second reading from St. Paul to the Colossians: “You were buried with him in baptism” and even when you were dead because of sin, “he brought you to life along with him”. 

A new life and a new way of relating to God—through Jesus Christ the Son, the Christian becomes a Son of God.  Other religions cannot claim this.  Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims cannot call God Father in the same way as Christians—for through Christ we share in the Sonship of Christ.

And since we have been given this new life—this new relationship as sons of God—we need to behave that way.  St. John Chyrsostom said that “You cannot call the God of all kindness your Father if you preserve a cruel and inhuman heart”  Our Father is revealed as full of compassion, and that means we need to be full of compassion. 

As the Catechism states, praying to our Father should develop in us the desire to become like Him, to behave like Him, to strive to become Holy like Him, and free from selfishness like Him.  

The Our Father is the prayer that conquers our pride, admitting that God’s will is more important than my will, that my greatest happiness is making God’s will my own.

Jesus promises in the Gospel today that those who ask will receive, those who seek will find.  Those who seek the will of God will receive it, those who ask for their daily bread from God will be nourished.

May we learn to truly pray this prayer from our hearts, that Our Father may truly be hallowed on earth as it is in heaven, for His glory and the salvation of souls.


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