Dear Father Angelo,

In the final prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours, on the Thursday of the first week, we ask God to lead us in following Jesus.
This seems to me deeply wrong. We should be asking Jesus to lead us to the Father, and not the opposite.
We can pray directly to God, not as a guide but as the recipient of all prayer.
Thank you
Pasquale

Priest’s answer

Dear Pasquale, 

  1. that prayer is precisely correct.
    In fact, Jesus said: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (Jn 6:44).
    No one, using their natural resources, can arrive at supernatural truths because of the infinite disparity between natural order and the supernatural order of grace.
    We can now adopt Jesus Christ as our beloved, as our God and creator, only because the Father moves our heart and our intellect to adopt His person and His teachings.
    Using only the faculties of our reason, we can marvel at the figure of Jesus Christ and say that, in Him, was made manifest a divine power that has no comparison even in the greatest saints.
    However, coming to the conclusion that He is our God and our creator, is only possible because the Father gives us strength and light in order to accept this supernatural reality. 
  2. Jesus also says: “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” (Jn 6:45).
    Therefore, in order to accept Christ, it is necessary for the Father to take the initiative, to talk and to make us listen.
    This is why Saint Paul says: “May the eyes of [your] hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones” (Eph 1:18). 
  3. Once we are grafted onto Christ, then from Christ we are led to the Father, because only Christ is “the way, the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6).
    Indeed, Jesus has declared: “Nobody comes to the Father except through me” (Ibid.)
    Nobody can know the Father if Christ does not reveal Him: “no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal Him.” (Matt 11:27). 
  4. We come, then, to Saint Thomas’ commentary: “Just as no one can know the things of God except by the Spirit of God (1Cor 2:11), so no one can attain knowledge of the Father except through His Word, His Verbum, who is the Son. And just as a man who wishes to reveal himself through his word clothes that word in some way with writing or with voice, so God, desiring to manifest Himself to men, clothed with flesh in time His Word, who had been conceived in eternity. Therefore, no one can attain knowledge of the Father except through the Son. Hence the words of Jesus: “I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved” (Jn 10:9).
  5. We have to remember that, according to Saint John’s wording, knowing the Father does not simply mean to know something about Him; it means, most of all, loving Him and being united with Him and possessing Him. 
  6. Therefore, it is obvious that the movement is circular: the Father, with His movements, leads us to Christ.
    Christ, then, takes us to the Father, or rather “at the Father’s side” (Jn 1:18), in His heart.
    In this, your reflection is correct.

Wishing for you to always be inserted in this circular divine movement, I bless you, wish you well and remember you in my prayers.
Father Angelo

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