Wednesday, October 09, 2013
27th Week in Ordinary Time First Reading:
John 4: 1-11 Gospel
Reading: Lk 11:1-4
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” And Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say this:
Father, hallowed be your name,may your kingdom come,give us each day the kind of bread we need,and forgive us our sins, for we also forgive all who do us wrong,and do not bring us to the test.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
A story is told of two local religious superiors, one a Jesuit and the other a Redemptorist who had written to their superior generals inquiring about the propriety of praying and smoking at the same time. The Jesuit got a positive answer while the Redemptorist did not. When both compared notes it turned out that the Jesuit had asked if it was alright to pray while smoking. The Redemptorist, on the other hand, had asked if it was alright to smoke while praying. The two queries differ entirely from each other. Smoking while praying is one thing; praying while smoking is another.
This anecdote takes us to two kinds of prayer, namely, the formal and the informal. The Jesuit’s ‘praying while smoking’ in our anecdote refers to informal prayer which one can do anytime and anywhere. One can even do it by reciting the Psalms while doing the daily routine. While taking showers, for example, one can pray, “O wash me more and more from my guilt Lord and forgive us our sins” (Psalm 51:2). Informal prayer is our way of raising our minds to God while immersed in our daily activities. Mother
Teresa of Kolkata was expert in spontaneous prayers. Her hands were always on her rosary beads while she was busy with her charitable works.
The best pattern for formal and informal prayer is “The Lord’s Prayer”. It begins with the acknowledgment of God’s fatherhood, and proceeds to the expression of the desire that his kingdom be established on earth, petition for the daily bread, repentance, pledge to forgive others, and ends with supplication to be delivered from the evil one. Presumably this was the same pattern Jesus used in praying to the Father because the disciples asked him to teach them how to pray right after he himself prayed. In using the same pattern that Jesus used to communicate to his Father, we too exercise our identity as children of the same Father God. In this exercise, we renew our commitment to the age-old covenant God made with Abraham where God declared: “You shall be my people, and I will be your God.” – Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM . Email: [email protected]. Website: www.frdan.org.
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