Ave Maria Meditations
We cannot be our Master’s disciples unless we pray as He did and in the way He showed us. Moreover, God the Father listens more willingly to the prayer that we have learned from His Son rather than those of our own making, which have all our human limitations.
We should say the Our Father with the certitude that the Eternal Father will hear us because it is the prayer of His Son, whom He always hears, and because we are His members. God will surely grant our petitions made through the Lord’s prayer because it is impossible to imagine that such a good Father would refuse a request couched in the language of so worthy a Son, reinforced by His merits and made at His behest.
When we say this wonderful prayer, we touch God’s Heart at the very outset by calling Him by that sweet name of Father. “Our Father”, He is the dearest of fathers: all powerful in His creation, wonderful in the way He maintains the world, completely lovable in His divine providence, all good and infinitely so in the redemption. We have God for our Father, so we are all brothers, and heaven is our homeland and our heritage. This should be more than enough to teach us to love God and our neighbor, and to be detached from the things of this world.
Saint Louis Marie de Montfort
