 Brothers, we meditate upon the Our Father today, the Sermon on the Mount, the heart of Matthew's Gospel, the Lord's teaching, the Lord's prayer, the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, and that the Lord Jesus is revealing to us, is showing in his teaching, he's showing us the face of the Father, and he begins with the Beatitudes, and the Catechism tells us so beautifully that the Beatitudes are the face of Christ. Everything that Jesus is teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, he is witnessing to us, right? This is how he is. This is how he loves. He draws us into the very center, into prayer, into his relationship with the Father. He draws us into that by teaching us how to pray, St. Augustine says, and I'm just going to be taken from the Catechism, meditating upon the Catechism, and who gave us the Catechism? Our Father, right? Our spiritual Father, the Pope gives us the Catechism, you know, final stage, he promulgates it. It's our Father teaching us. Of all the prayers, you know, throughout the Old Testament, the Psalms, our spiritual food for our Christian prayer, you know, all those scriptures fulfilled in Christ, every word, and as it says, through all the words of sacred scripture, God speaks only one single word. He's one utterance in whom he expresses himself completely, it's the Lord Jesus. As Jesus then teaches us to pray, he not only teaches us, of course we know not words to say, but he's giving us a prayer, but he's also giving us his spirit, is giving us a new form to our desires. Catechism says, the Sermon on the Mount is teaching for life. Our Father is a prayer, but in both the one and the other, the Spirit of the Lord gives new form to our desires, those inner movements that animate our lives, right? Every day, why do we do what we do? Because of our desires, in some way, and the Spirit of the Lord gives a new form to them in praying, in this relationship with our Father. Jesus teaches us this new life by his words, he teaches us to ask for it by our prayer, and listen to this, the rightness of our life with him will depend on the rightness of our prayer, amen? But his prayer, it's our relationship, our relationship with the Lord, and the Lord has done it all, it's the Lord's prayer, but Catechism says that the Lord gives us the words that the Father gave him, I don't know if you've ever thought of it this way, I certainly didn't before reading this, but in John 17.8 the Lord says, for I have given them the words which thou has given me, so he's the master of our prayer, he has given us these words, he has given us from the Father, and then the Lord is the model of our prayer because as the word incarnate, he knows in his human heart the needs of his human brothers and sisters and reveals them to us, we say well I know my own needs, no we don't, in his human heart he knows our needs, and he reveals them to us in this prayer, in this relationship, and it's all coming from God, right? Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, give us our daily bread, and then what do we contribute? Trust passes, and forgive us our trust passes, God gives us everything, what do we have that's uniquely ours that's not given to us from God, our sins, and he forgives those, but it's all coming from God, just as Jesus receives everything from the Father and gives it back. It goes on to say that Jesus not only gives us the words of our Philly or prayer, at the same time he gives us the Spirit by whom these words of the our Father in us become in us Spirit in life as Jesus says in John 6, 63, 64, it is the Spirit that gives life the flashes of no avail, the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life, Jesus has given us his Spirit, so that these words in us bring us to life in Jesus, because this is who we are as we have been hearing, this is our identity as sons of the Father in Christ, even more the proof and possibility of our Philly or prayer is that the Father sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying what? Abba Father, since our prayer sets forth our desires before God, it is again God the Father who searches the hearts of men who knows what is in the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God, the prayer of our Father is inserted into the mysterious mission of the Son and the Spirit, what is that mission? To bring us back into the life of the Trinity, and this is the prayer of the church, isn't it? This is the prayer of the body of Christ as it's been prayed and lived from the beginning and rooted in our liturgy, what we're doing here at this moment, what the Lord is doing. Catechism points out beautifully what we do for the Catechumans as they're preparing for baptism and confirmation, what do we give them as part of the ritual? We give them the Lord's prayer. Since Christian prayers are speaking to God with the very Word of God, those who are born anew through the living and abiding Word of God, learn to invoke their Father by the one Word he always hears, isn't that beautiful? Just like a father and a mother teach their children those first words, mama, dada, and it's a race, like who's going to say, the child's going to say dada or mama, or I try to sneak in there and sit uncle Danny, that in, when we're bringing new children, when God is gathering new children into his life, and we teach them the first words in a sense, the first prayer, the our Father, sacraments, as Dr. Bob talked about up here, sacraments in this separation drawing us back in the communion with the Father into this life, this relationship that we were born out of. In the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Lord's prayer appears as the prayer of the whole church, and there reveals its full meaning and efficacy, placed between the anaphora, the Eucharistic prayer, and the communion. The Lord's prayer sums up on the one hand all the petitions and intercessions expressed in the movement of the Epoclesis for the Holy Father and the church and the faithful departed, and on the one hand sums up all those petitions and on the other knocks at the door of the banquet of the kingdom, which sacramental communion anticipates, isn't that beautiful? Right at that moment, we're knocking on the door, we've gathered all these petitions, our needs in our cries and our longings for communion for the Lord, and then in the Eucharist, the Lord's prayer also reveals the character, the eschatological character of its petitions. It is the proper prayer of the end time, the time of salvation that began with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and will be fulfilled with the Lord's return. That's this time, as we've been reflecting, as we realize that our identity is as sons, whether it's priests, deacons, seminarians, that we're wounded, it all we have is our trespasses without God, but Jesus revealing this life, revealing our desires, forming them in us, providing for everything. We see in a beautiful way in the first reading, Paul as a father, writing to the Corinthians, and I know fathers, you who are natural fathers, deacons, special moment it is for you when your daughter gets married and you walk her down the aisle and you present her to her husband. This is what St. Paul, the father of the church in Corinth, the bride, the church in Corinth, as we are fathers, as pastors and pastor work, deacons and seminarians, and he says, I am jealous of you with a jealousy of God, since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ, and a beautiful to be fathers, as pastors and in pastoral work as deacons, collaborating with your pastors and seminarians, to present, to betroth our parish, the bride, to one husband, to present them as a chaste virgin to Christ. So what a mystery, brothers, that Jesus has drawn us into by teaching us to pray and to say our father.