Dante uses an interesting literary device to depict the suffering of the wicked in hell, a device called Contrapasso. Contrapasso means the punishment fits the sin. For example those who in hell unrepentant of the sin of lust are caught blown about the second circle of hell by this terrible hellish whirlwind. How does the punishment fit the sin? As the lustful allowed themselves to be carried by the winds of their passions on earth, in hell they are subject to these uncontrollable winds for eternity—without rest.
In purgatory, for Dante, the purification also fits the sin. 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. For Dante, every sin can be traced back to pride. Pride turns away from God, pride claims to know better than God, better than the Church. We commit pride 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. Our self-centered pride keeps us from loving God and loving neighbor as we should.
So if for Dante, the purification fits the sin how did he depict the purification of the prideful? Well, what is the opposite of pride? Humility. The purification of the prideful of purgatory involved a very specific act of humility, an act of humility prescribed by the Lord Himself. Their purification, the healing of their willfulness, their self-centeredness, their sinful egotism, was to recite over and over, humbly and devoutly, the prayer we find at the beginning of the Gospel today, the Our Father.
Why does Dante see the Our Father as a fitting purification for pride? Sinful Pride claims “MY WILL BE DONE”, the Our Father prays “Thy Will be Done.” Sinful pride asserts its own self-sufficiency and control; the Our Father approaches God with open hands, seeking the daily bread that can only come from God. Sinful pride refuses to forgive, never forgiving an affront to our almighty egos, the Our Father asks God for the grace to forgive, allowing the wounded ego to heal. Where sinful pride does not acknowledge that it could ever make a mistake, could never sin, the Our Father pleads mercy for our sins, mercy that can only come from God.
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. In Dante’s purgatory, the Our Father is prayed over and over as an act of purification from pride, until these souls truly learn to pray it from the heart, with a heart in union with the heart of Jesus.
The Our Father is one of the first prayers we learn as Catholics: we commit it to memory, we pray it every week at Mass. I remember committing it to memory in first grade PSR. Now, once committed to memory it becomes easy to rattle off the words, barely thinking about what they mean. So, there is certainly 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, by the way, 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.Let’s just like at the first word of Jesus’ prayer. Where pride focuses on me, me, me. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to focus on us, on we. We are to address God as part of a community. The first word of the Our Father is Our.
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. For 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 Christian Church is a communion, a community, a family of souls on earth united in faith and prayer to the souls in purgatory who both receive the help of the blessed souls of the saints in heaven. And the Our Father, to be prayed by every Christian every day, opens us, reminds us, recommits us, to being a faithful members of this communion. It humbles our egocentrism, opening us up to new vistas of charity and living in harmony.
Seek and Ye shall Find. And in the Our Father, the Lord teaches us a prayer of perfect and unselfish love offering ourselves entirely to God and asking from Him the best things, not only for ourselves but also for our neighbor.
May this Holy Eucharist help us to truly be purified from all earthly pride, to grow in humble surrender to the holy will of God in all things, to pray with the hearts and minds of Jesus, united with all of the holy souls and the saints, that Our Father may truly be hallowed on earth as He is in heaven, for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls.
No comments:
Post a Comment