The request of spiritual life: "Lord, teach us to pray"
by Angelo Forti
After months of training, dialogue and community recitation of the psalms, the cry of the apostles explodes: "Lord, teach us to pray". The disciples did not ask for prayer formulas, they begged to be taught the "heart" of prayer, the path that leads before God. In the prayer of the "Our Father" Jesus opens the door onto the panorama of God. Praying is not convincing God gives us something, but it is a dive into the ocean of his mercy and feeling that, as it says in the first line of the book of Genesis, the same Spirit hovers over those waters to fertilize our lives.
Don Guanella's spirituality is based on the certainty that God is father and establishes a "parent-child" relationship with man. In the introduction to his commentary on Jesus' prayer, which he entitles "Let us go to the Father", he writes in conversation with the reader: "We will discuss with the loyalty of a friend and with the affection of a brother as is customary between confidants".
And in this confidential tone he writes: "Your carnal parent, because he loves you, seems unable to live without you." God, truly, longs for the company of man.
In Don Guanella the relationship with God the Father echoed his experience as a son with his father Lorenzo, a man of such moral stature and wisdom that even in his role as mayor "no one was better than him" and in the family - it is always Don Guanella who he writes -: «he was like a priest and a king, because he read everyone's hearts and wanted his children to grow in virtue, obedience and work». At the school of such a parent it was easy to trace the excellent qualities of God the creator and father. From a religious point of view, the growth of the child's relationship with his earthly father is an obligatory and very delicate step in developing a trusting relationship with God.
A theologian wrote: «To understand the prayer of the “Our Father” (and I dare say, to understand every Christian prayer), it is necessary to seek the meaning of this “Father” to whom we direct ourselves. What is a father? My father is outside and inside me. He is a person of flesh and blood, who has a history, a style, a temperament, who has had a series of fundamental exchanges with me."
In fact, each of us carries within us the image of our father. The growth of this sometimes harmonious, other times conflictual relationship with one's parent is an obligatory step in the development of one's personality.
«In truth, to grow, to gain the indispensable trust, we all had the need to host our father within ourselves, and not just outside. And we incorporated it. Later we projected ourselves into him, we tried to imitate him, to be like him, to reach his level."
Psychology treatises state that even in our singularity as a person, some form of "incorporation" of the mother and father remains within us. «This “gestation” allows the child to structure himself internally and proceed in what will be the art of a lifetime, trust».
To demonstrate this reality, in one of his books, the psychoanalyst João dos Santos tells an interesting story.
«The children of the “Casa da praia”, an institution he founded, had been summoned to play a game: storm a castle. The teachers had organized everything and the class would storm the fortress, in broad daylight, with cardboard swords and helmets. A game more or less similar to many others that we have also played. But when the fight begins, a four-year-old boy refuses to take part. And when he is urged to take courage, he starts whining and says: "I'm scared, I don't have the strength, I can't fight, my father is in Paris."
The parents of the other children were not present either, and therefore the location of that specific father must have been irrelevant. But what the child wanted to express has another dimension. In reality, he struggled like this: “My father is not yet strong enough inside me for me to fight as if he were at my side. My father is far away, and I am, consequently, a more fragile being than others, I don't feel capable of facing the risk" This boy would have been courageous if his father's presence had been sufficiently rooted in him so as to radiate strength and courage" .
For Jesus, praying means creating bonds, involving faces, names, circumstances and, in particular, the Father. In fact, if we have the positive figure of the father in our soul everything becomes simpler.
Our experience reminds us of when we were little and were ashamed to look at strangers. "Without dad or mom nearby, we didn't know how to take a step, we walked attached to their clothes, we fed on their closeness."
The growth of the father figure in a boy's life creates communion and security. For this reason Don Guanella wisely wrote in Let's Go to the Father: «When the son copies the virtues of the father within himself, a single thought and a single will is formed in the two. When they converse, they do so with cordial familiarity, because they know they are united in love."
To conclude this reflection on prayer, we can share what Father Ermes Ronchi writes: «The “Our Father” must not be recited, it must be learned anew day by day, on the knees of life, in the caresses of joy, in the scratching of thorns and in the hunger of the brothers. You have to be very hungry for life to pray well."