This article is an excerpt from David Torkington’s new book, Passport to Perfection. This little book is a guide to living the sacrificial, contemplative spirituality of the early Church. It offers practical, orthodox advice for serious seekers, providing a step-by-step blueprint for prayer, from meditation to contemplation.
Context and Our Destination
In the Lord’s Prayer, Christ gave us the pattern of all prayer. The first two words, ‘Our Father’, sum up the rest of the prayer and are the key to understanding the basic context and direction of all Christian
prayer. Our trouble is that familiarity has anaesthetised our minds, dulling our intellects so that the depth of meaning with which these words are charged simply passes us by.
Take the word OUR. This one word sums up the whole context of allprayer. Prayer lifts us up out of ourselves and gradually takes us more deeply into Christ into whom we were drawn up at Baptism. In Him we are drawn into the total community of all those who are alive and loving Him here and now.
The Gospel is the story of what happens to those who open themselves totally to the power of uncreated love which leads them to perfection in Christ, when our weak human love finally becomes
filled with the infinite power of God’s Love.
The Resurrection shows the inevitable consequences of this process in the life of Christ. It all who are prepared to follow Him, to do what He did. His Resurrection means that those who continually open themselves to love, come what may, will in the end be possessed by it. As this process reaches its climax, we will be lifted out of ourselves into a new mode of being altogether. We can see this happening to Christ at the end of the Gospel story. The Resurrection pinpoints the moment in time
when Christ is so possessed by love that He is raised up outside of time into a new form of existence, beyond all the laws and limitations of the space-and-time world to which we belong and into which He
was born.
Before the Resurrection, Jesus was subject to all the restrictions that bind the rest of us. He too could only be in one place at any given moment. Contact with Him therefore was necessarily limited to
where He happened to be, how long He was going to stay there and how many other people wanted to see Him. Once love had lifted Him out of the world of space and time, however, He was freed
from all those limiting laws and restrictions. In the eternal dimension, He could be present to countless numbers of people at any given moment because He could be present to them, not from the
outside, but from the inside, through love. Now, He was not just the ‘Man for all Seasons’, but the man for all times, for all ages, for all generations simultaneously. This is why He is sometimes called
the Eternal Contemporary. And since Christ can come into contact with everyone through love, then everyone can contact each other in Him. Just as the spokes of a wheel automatically come closer to one another as they draw nearer to the centre, so everyone automatically comes closer to one another as they draw nearer to Christ.
The Kingdom of Love is the only place where genuine community really exists. It is here, in, with, and through Him that we begin our journey to perfect love. As the journey unfolds and we pray in, with,
and through Him, then we draw closer and closer to Him so that in, with, and through Him, we can become more and more open to the Father whose infinite loving will finally totally possess us and make us perfect in Him. Here, all our deepest hopes and desires will find their fulfilment and completion.
However, always remember that when we say, ‘Our Father’, we do not just mean that we pray with Christ and in Him, but also that we pray together with all our brothers and sisters who are alive in Him, with the whole Christian community living or dead, because in Him there is no death. We pray with Mary too, with Peter and Paul, with Francis and Dominic, and all the saints. We pray with loved ones now dead, who have been reborn in Christ. When we pray with them, their prayer helps keep our supreme prayer united with God and His perfect love on track, despite the many distractions and
temptations that try to turn our hearts and minds elsewhere.
This is why the first word of the Lord’s Prayer is OUR. There is no place for the self-conscious ‘I’. It is OUR Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on
earth as it is in heaven. Give US this day, OUR daily bread, and forgiveUS OUR trespasses, as WE forgive those who trespass against US, and lead US not into temptation, but deliver US from evil.
The whole Christian prayer tradition follows this pattern of prayer and is exemplified perfectly in the liturgy of the Church. There is no such thing as private prayer for Christians, although they may be
praying in solitary confinement. The context of prayer is so important, both theologically and psychologically, that we ought to begin prayer by mentally reminding ourselves of the all-embracing world into which we enter, of the vast community of believers with whom we are identifying ourselves, in Christ in His mystical body. The whole point of prayer is that it takes believers out of themselves into another world where they no longer live for themselves but for others, in a community that supersedes the barriers of space and time.
If you would like to follow a free retreat or a course on prayer given by David Torkington, simply click on https://metanoia.org.uk or subscribe at https://essentialistpress.com for our newsletter.
