Contemplating the Our Father

 

For the last thirty years or so, severe, chronic illness, ever progressing, burning, throbbing has smashed my wife’s life apart into screaming shards of never ending agony, has torn her apart on every conceivable level. How probable is it then, I ask, that when she cried out in torment, to Jesus, decades  ago, to show her how to pray and survive, that Jesus might reveal the Our Father to her in a new and deeper way?

This is something of what she has been shown:

“And I saw in the praying of the prayer of the Our Father, that it was not just my prayer, in that moment, but that it was that prayer, prayed in all moments, adding together and cascading over to reach God’s ear; the sum total of all the times the prayer has ever been prayed, the words spoken, uttered in reverence, proclaimed, beseechingly, genuinely, hopefully, desperately, totally, as if following some sacred Holy Path that leads ever up the mountain to the summit. And each time you pray the prayer of the Our Father, you arrive at that summit of the prayer, which connects you to God, yet each further time you pray that prayer, the pinnacle is higher, closer, larger, somehow even more pure, swathed in beauty, in power, in spiritual richness. Each word a glistening jewel that reaches out from you and sparkles in God’s mind.”

Through unimaginable pain and suffering, it is her contemplation upon the greatest of all prayers, that has sustained her and protected her.