Daily Prayer
July 14th, 2010
Jesus exclaimed, ‘I bless you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned, revealing them to mere children’
Matthew 11 : 25
In today’s Gospel we are privileged to enter into the prayer of Jesus – a prayer of praise to his Father. ‘I bless you Father, Lord of heaven and earth’. It is interesting to note that this prayer of blessing comes just after Jesus has experienced rejection and failure in his ministry.
Blessing is a twofold movement. First of all God blesses us and then we in turn give him thanks and praise. Thanksgiving is usually centred on the gift received while praise goes straight to the giver. We have a good example of praise in the ‘Gloria’ where we pray, ‘we worship you, we give you thanks we praise you for your glory’ Here we are praising God for himself.
The psalms invite us to praise God at all times- not just when things are going well for us. Jesus himself gives us the example. We don’t have to feel good in order to raise our hearts and voices in words or even better songs of praise. It’s a question of the will.
Martin Carothers, an American Evangelist, has written a book entitled; ‘From Prison to Praise’. Having discovered the power of praise in his own life, the author encourages us to praise God in all situations, even the most difficult. We may not all be familiar with the psalms but we can all pray: ‘Glory be to the father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit’.
Prayer
‘I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise always on my lips.
Glorify the Lord with me, together let us praise his name.
I seek the Lord and he answers me, and frees me from all my fears’ ( Psalm 34 )
The prayer for each day has been prepared by various members of the Holy Family Association. All who visit our website are remembered in prayer. If you would like us to pray for a particular need, simply complete and submit the form on the right hand side of this page. You may wish to leave a comment in the space below.
Just a Thought
How the Holy Family prayer: A Reflection by Pope Benedict XVI
“I would like to invite you to reflect on the place of prayer in the life of the Holy Family of Nazareth. The home of Nazareth, in fact, is a school of prayer where we learn to listen, to ponder and to penetrate the profound meaning of the manifestation of the Son of God, drawing our example from Mary, Joseph and Jesus.
Pope Paul VI during his visit to Nazareth said “we come to understand the need for a spiritual discipline, if we wish to follow the teaching of the Gospel and become disciples of Christ.” And he added: “First, it teaches us silence. Oh! That there would be reborn in us the esteem for silence, that wonderful and indispensable atmosphere of the spirit: while we are deafened by so many noises, sounds and clamorous voices in the frantic and tumultuous times of modern life. Oh! Silence of Nazareth, teach us to be resolute in good thoughts, intent upon the interior life, ready to listen well to the secret inspirations of God and the exhortations of the true masters.”
We can glean several insights on the Holy Family’s prayer and relationship with God from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ childhood. We may begin with the Presentation of Jesus in the temple. St. Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph, “when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, brought the child up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord”(2:22). Like every observant Jewish family, Jesus’ parents go up to the temple to consecrate the firstborn son to God and to offer sacrifice. Moved by fidelity to the law’s prescriptions, they set off from Bethlehem and go up to Jerusalem with Jesus, who is now forty days old. Instead of a one-year-old lamb, they present the offering of simple families; that is two young pigeons. The Holy Family’s pilgrimage is one of faith, of the offering of gifts, a symbol of prayer, and of encounter with the Lord, whom Mary and Joseph already see in the son Jesus.”
