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(LifeSiteNews) — In the 11th Chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, right after the disciples had found Jesus in prayerful communion with His Father and He had taught them how to pray in the words we call the “Our Father,” He then continued the lesson on prayer with these words:

And He said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything’?’ I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs.”

“And I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:5-13)

Jesus was talking about what I am calling persevering prayer. Persisting in prayer. This kind of prayer leads us into a life of loving communion with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit. We enter the very communion which Jesus has with the Father, through the Holy Spirit. This kind of prayer offers us the fuel needed for living our life in Him, with Him, and through Him. This kind of persevering prayer becomes the wind in our sails.

We who are baptized into Jesus Christ now live our lives in His Mystical Body, the Church, of which we are members. (1 Cor. 12:27) The call to live in Christ invites our continual response to God’s invitations of grace. The intimate communion the disciples witnessed when they came upon Jesus in prayer can become our lived experience if we persevere in prayer. The instruction that they received as they walked with Him can be realized in our own lives if we learn how to walk with Him daily. That happens if we persevere in prayer.

The same Jesus Who instructed the disciples is alive with us today. He has been raised from the dead. We need the eyes of living faith to see Him – and the courage derived from such living faith to accompany Him as He continues His redemptive mission through His Mystical Body, the Church.

By living our lives within the communion of the Church, we place ourselves in the home where we can receive this grace, this divine life, and be converted. It is mediated to us through the Sacraments, which are encounters with the Risen Christ.

Through grace we are made capable of living an entirely new way of life. In the words of the Apostle St. Peter, we become “…partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1). All of this can be realized, in an ever-deeper way, if we continue to persevere in prayer.

God created us in His Image. Our freedom is patterned after God’s freedom. The Catholic Catechism reminds us that in man, “true freedom is an outstanding manifestation of the divine image.” (CCC #1712) However, our capacity to always choose what is true and good was fractured by sin. The Catechism explains the consequences of the fall: “Man, having been wounded in his nature by original sin, is subject to error and inclined to evil in exercising his freedom and the remedy, He who believes in Christ has new life in the Holy Spirit. The moral life, increased and brought to maturity in grace, is to reach its fulfillment in the glory of heaven.” (CCC #1714, 1715)

Our relationship with God was broken. We were wounded by original sin and human freedom became corrupted by pride. The self-sufficiency that leads to idolatry replaced the loving assent to the plan of God. Our ability to grow in freedom by always directing our capacity for free choice always toward the good was fractured by the fall from grace. The Catechism is clear and insightful on this:

“Man, enticed by the Evil One, abused his freedom at the very beginning of history. He succumbed to temptation and did what was evil. He still desires the good, but his nature bears the wound of original sin. He is now inclined to evil and subject to error: Man is divided in himself. As a result, the whole life of men, both individual and social, shows itself to be a struggle, and a dramatic one, between good and evil, between light and darkness. By his Passion, Christ delivered us from Satan and from sin. He merited for us the new life in the Holy Spirit. His grace restores what sin had damaged in us.” (CCC #1707, 1708)

Now, through grace, the way has been opened for us to live in an even fuller communion with God than our first parents had in that garden called Eden. In Jesus, we are not only saved from sin and the death that it earned (Romans 6:23) but we are being re-created, re-fashioned, and made entirely new. (2 Cor. 5:17)

Jesus stands at the door of our hearts and knocks. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Revelations 3:20) He comes to live in us, and we come to live in Him. Prayer opens the door to the house wherein we learn what all of this means. Persevering in prayer helps us to live in the Church and draw others in.

Through persevering prayer, life also becomes a classroom where we learn the truth about who we are – and who we are becoming – in Jesus. Through persevering in prayer, we receive new glasses through which we begin to see the real landscape of this life, in the light of the life to come.

Through persevering in prayer, darkness can be dispelled and the path of progress illuminated by the light that comes from the Holy Spirit. Yes, we still struggle with disordered appetites. Yes, we still stumble and fall back into living in a way that is at odds with God’s plan. However, through persevering in prayer, we find the Way back home. We also learn how to do battle with the three-fold enemy of the Christian life: the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Even those things that once dragged us down can become an invitation to turn toward the One who liberates us, Jesus Christ, when we persevere in prayer. We are offered a new beginning whenever we confess our sin and return to our first love. Persevering in prayer opens us to Revelation, expands our capacity to comprehend its mysteries, and equips us to be converted, made new by grace, in a continual path of conversion.

Through persevering in prayer, we are drawn by love into a deepening relationship with Jesus whose loving embrace on the hill of Golgotha bridged Heaven with Earth; His relationship with His Father is opened to us; the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead begins to give us new life as we are converted, transfigured, and made new, beginning in this life and leading us to the new life in the world to come.

Through persevering in prayer, heavenly wisdom is planted in the field of our hearts. We grow in our capacity to comprehend what it really means to be “partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4) Our life becomes a true participation in the inner life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Though that participation will only be complete when we are with Him in the fullness of His embrace – in resurrected bodies in a new Heaven and a new Earth – it begins now through prayer.

God holds nothing back from those whom He loves. He gives us the Holy Spirit, His life and energy. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will even quicken our own mortal bodies! (Romans 8:11)

By persevering in prayer, we will grow stronger, able to pull ourselves back up, after the inevitable falls that accompany daily living, by grasping the wood of the Cross, the door to the new world to come. Our fractured freedom is healed by the splint of that Cross, and, as we age, we learn to love its wood. We even begin to understand the mystery revealed in what the Church calls “redemptive suffering,” joining our suffering to the wounds of Christ.

The early Christians reflected upon the Cross with the insights that can only come from an intimate communion with God experienced through persevering in prayer. They saw the Cross as a second tree at which the new creation began again in Jesus Christ, the New Adam. On that Cross, the Living Word, through Whom the Universe was created, re-created it anew.

From His wounded side, His spouse, the Church, was born and betrothed. The blood and water that flowed down is the fountain of grace offered through the sacraments. How did they discern such deep insights? After all, they were men and women just like us. They really, truly, prayed. As result, they probed the depths of the mysteries of faith. So can we.

They wrote of the beauty revealed at the Cross with words drenched in the dew of prayer. St. Theodore the Studite, an eighth century abbot of the first Christian millennium, wrote these words:

“How precious the gift of the cross, how splendid to contemplate! In the cross there is no mingling of good and evil, as in the tree of paradise: it is wholly beautiful to behold and good to taste. The fruit of this tree is not death but life, not darkness but light. This tree does not cast us out of paradise but opens the way for our return.

“This was the tree on which Christ, like a King on a chariot, destroyed the devil, the Lord of death, and freed the human race from his tyranny. This was the tree upon which the Lord, like a brave warrior wounded in hands, feet and side, healed the wounds of sin that the evil serpent had inflicted on our nature. A tree once caused our death but now a tree brings life. Once deceived by a tree, we have now repelled the cunning serpent by a tree. What an astonishing transformation! That death should become life, that decay should become immortality – that shame should become glory!”

A fourth century deacon named St. Ephrem wrote hymns that gained him a title still mentioned in the Syriac Liturgy to this day – the Harp of the Holy Spirit. In a sermon he proclaimed these words about the Cross:

“He who was also the carpenter’s glorious son set up his cross above deaths’ all-consuming jaws and led the human race into the dwelling place of life. Since a tree had brought about the downfall of mankind, it was upon a tree that mankind crossed over to the realm of life.

“Bitter was the branch that had once been grafted upon that ancient tree, but sweet the young shoot that has now been grafted in, the shoot in which we are meant to recognize the Lord Whom no creature can resist. We give glory to You, Lord, Who raised up Your cross to span the jaws of death, like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living.

“We give glory to You who put on the body of a single mortal man and made it the source of life for every other mortal man. You are incontestably alive. Your murderers sowed Your living body in the earth as farmers sow grain, but it sprang up and yielded an abundant harvest of men raised from the dead. Come then, my brothers and sisters, let us offer our Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love and our lives.”

Now that’s diaconal preaching! That is diaconal living. The beauty of their words, the profundity of their insights, proceeded from the depth of their prayer lives.

The same Lord to Whom they clung – and in Whom they found such wisdom – still walks with us, and we walk with Him. Jesus invites us today to persevere in prayer and grow in our relationship with him. And, in Him, with one another. And, with one another, for the sake of the world.

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