The Lord’s Prayer

Why We Pray the Lord’s Prayer

We have no other guide to eternal life, divine life, beatitude, than the life of Christ, the teaching of Christ, the Passion of Christ, and the prayer of Christ. The imitation of Christ is the way of love and of holiness. 

Thus the Lord’s Prayer, taught us by Christ, is the truest of prayers, the most completely and perfectly true, just and agreeable to God, the prayer whose flame must always burn within us.

There is no prayer, no contemplation, unless Christ be in the soul, and unless an imitation of Christ, a participation in his states and in his life, and in his prayer, what Saint Paul calls a reproduction of his image, be present in the depths of the soul. He himself is also present there, because all the graces received by the soul reach it through the instrument, conjoined to God, that is the humanity of the Savior. 

If it is a question of the particular goods, even the most justly desirable in themselves, for which, in the innumerable occasions of human life, we happen to ask God, but of which we do not know the role in the reverse side of things and the divine economy, we must believe Saint Paul: We know not how we are to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself pleads in our behalf with unutterable groanings (Rom 8:26). And what then does the Spirit do? He makes us cry, Abba! Father! (Rom 8:15). What is this to say if not that the Spirit, when he makes us pray as we must, reminds us interiorly of the example of Jesus and has us pray, as adopted sons, in the power of the Lord’s Prayer? Every prayer in spirit and in truth, especially infused prayer in all its degrees, proceeds in the power of the Lord’s Prayer.

Raïssa Maritain

Raïssa Maritain († 1960) was born in Russia. She was a convert to Catholicism and the wife of philosopher Jacques Maritain.