Model prayer line up with Lord’s Prayer. Jesus speaks with God, Jesus prays for the church, his church family, and then he prays for the future. The disciples get to hear Jesus praying for them. Paul tells us that Jesus continues to intercede for us. What do they get to overhear. My favorite part is the prayer for helping to keep their souls safe. It reminds me of a parent sending a child off to school, or at this time of year, in that mixture of pride and anxiety as we send a child off to adulthood. This verse even sounds like the Lord’s Prayer.
Psalm 1 leads off the Psalter. It may well introduce the whole fo the 150 psalms as guides to the way of the Lord. The first letter in the prayer is our A and the last word starts with our z. I love the image like a tree planted by a stream of water. This is a tree of life itself. Maybe we would use a mechanical image today. Happy is the person who is like an electric car with an outlet always ready. To find blessedness, is to find happiness, to be rooted in the teaching of God, as a way of life. Put differently, if we keep to the ways of god, we find blessed relief, blessed happiness. When we go off course, we find cheap thrills, illusory uplift, and many pitfalls that lead to a deep unblessed unhappiness. Indeed a lot of our consumption habits are indicators of lives rooted in the promise of possession as opposed to the way of the Lord.
The word delight in Psalm 1 can be linked to the joy of the Priestly Prayer of Jesus. The prayer of Jesus sounds like Jesus to me. I mean that Jesus does not come off as judgemental in his teaching often, and Jesus is not judgemental here either. Instead of all things, Jesus prays for the joy of the disciples. Indeed Jesus prays that his joy, the joy that Jesus knows, be complete in his disciples. Jesus realizes that joy will not come solely from the pleasures of the world, for we are not of the world alone, for we are of God..
I received a grant to go to Oregon at the end of the month for a conference on discernment, using religious tools to help us make decisions. Jesus is closing his long goodbye to his friends with a prayer. In part the prayer is his struggle to discern how to say goodbye. What do you say? How do we discern what is the way of the Lord in our lives in matters large and small? Ignatius emphasized his Jesuits to work on learning how to be indifferent to anything but that which you sense god wants you to do. One of the books I picked up for the conference (E. Liebert. Way of Discernment ) gives some guidelines. Before retiring for bed go over the past day. Pay attention to when you followed or did not follow the voice of god’s direction. Look at what allows you to follow god’s lead or what obstructs or hinders you. Close with something simple such as: Jesus please be in my life tomorrow. When you are facing a decision, or get an itch for change; try this. Get some quiet time. Jot down some of the things you would like to be or do soon, even now. Be specific. Then pick some of the central ones. For each one consider if something deeper, more basic is behind that desire. See those as a gift from goad and allow yourself to be grateful. Thomas Traherne said “Thoughts are the angels we send abroad/to visit all the parts of God’s abode.” Putting our thoughts, our considerations, our decisions into a prayerful posture makes us aware of the angels of God’s abode, but our abode here, on this good earth. In prayer, allow yourself to visit the different rooms of God’s abode in the different rooms of your own life.
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