Praying with Confidence: Aquinas on the Lord's Prayer

123 Pages·2010·0.35 MB·English

by  Paul Murray

Praying with Confi dence
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Praying with
Confi dence
Aquinas on the Lord’s Prayer
Paul Murray, o.p.
Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London New York
SE1 7NX NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © Paul Murray, O.P., 2010.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission from the publishers.
First published 2010
British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978- 1441-14713-4
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
With gratitude
to three Dominican Brothers and Friends:
Robert Ombres, Jim Quigley
and
Philip McShane
The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot
conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It
is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it
once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word,
without a change . . . taking place in the soul.
Simone Weil: Waiting on God
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 ‘Our Father’ 21
2 ‘Who Art in Heaven’ 31
3 ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ 41
4 ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ 49
5 ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ 59
6 ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ 65
7 ‘And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those
who trespass against us’ 71
8 ‘And lead us not into temptation’ 83
9 ‘But deliver us from evil’ 89
10 ‘Amen’ 97
Appendix 101
Index 107
vii
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Foreword
As we meditate on the words of Fr Paul Murray’s book, we have
the privilege of listening in as one Dominican master interprets
another. There is something distinctive about the Dominican
approach to the spiritual life. Unlike the Carmelites, who place
a great stress on the stages of development through which the
spiritual seeker moves, and unlike the Jesuits, who empha-
size the role that the human will plays in giving glory to God,
Dominicans customarily speak of the God who is always already
present to the one who prays. Accordingly, the Dominican
writer Simon Tugwell famously extols ‘the way of imperfection’,
that is to say, the path trod by the humble sinner whom God
has deigned to address and lift up. Fr Murray, a quintessential
Dominican, analyses the thought of his Order’s greatest theo-
logian, Thomas Aquinas, in regard to the prayer that Jesus gave
the church – and therefore we are not surprised that, through-
out this book, themes of gift and grace are paramount.
The title of our text – Praying With Confi dence – is instructive.
Fr Murray tells us that Aquinas, speaking to a crowded church in
Naples in the early 1270’s, declared, ‘Of all the things required
of us when we pray confi dence is of great avail.’ This is why, in
teaching us to pray, Jesus put the invocation of God as ‘Our
Father’ fi rst. When we pray, Aquinas held, we approach the
One who, out of sheerest love, created us from nothing and
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