Jesus' Prayer within the Womb of Mary

Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) said something – actually, tens of thousands of things – that it would do us a tremendous amount of good to meditate upon. In his book Behold the Pierced One, he wrote “[P]rayer was the central act of the person of Jesus…this person is constituted by the act of prayer, of unbroken communication with the one he calls ‘Father.’”[1] This was true at every point of our Lord’s human life, including the nine months he spent in the womb of our Blessed Mother. And because our Lord “enables us to live in him all that he himself lived” (CCC 521), Jesus’ embryonic prayer life is able to massively enrich our own – especially when we are at a loss for the words to pray!

Our Lord’s prayer throughout his first 40 weeks on earth was completely wordless. From the nanosecond his soul and body came into existence, our Lord’s entire humanity was oriented toward the Father. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews heard the prayer of Jesus’ heart in Psalm 40:

When Christ came into the world, he said,“Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired,but a body hast thou prepared for me;in burnt offerings and sin offerings thou hast taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God,’as it is written of me in the roll of the book.”(Heb 10:5-7; Ps 40:6-8)

Simply by being, by existing as a child, Jesus was at prayer. It was the prayer of surrender, entrustment. Words were not needed. In the heights of his soul, Jesus gazed upon the Father with all the clarity of the saints in heaven. He was “not engaged in the adult business of thinking at all.” Rather, “in the earthly paradise of his Mother’s body, he is resting and seeing and loving and praising the Father.”[2] And his prayer is available to us in our moments of need. No, we do not have his direct vision of the God the Father, but we can gaze upon the God-Man in the Eucharist.

At some point each of us finds ourselves at a loss for what to say to God. It is usually at a time of intense trial. The pain of disease, agony of loss, or sting of betrayal leave us overwhelmed. Our sadness and anger are so acute that we feel abandoned, as if God were a universe away. How do we pray in those moments? We look to Jesus, who desires to draw us into his own prayer.

No matter how deep our pain and confusion, nor how distant we may feel from God, when we visit Jesus in the tabernacle we objectively place ourselves in his presence. When the Eucharist, the Lord’s Body, is reserved in a Tabernacle or exposed to our eyes in a monstrance, we are allowed to kneel and gaze upon our brother Jesus … as He gazes upon the Father. There he is – just as he has been from all of eternity – surrendered to the Father in the Holy Spirit, and offering himself completely to us

When you don’t have the words, put yourself in Jesus’ presence and fasten your eyes upon him. Be with him. In baptism he united you to his own conception by the Holy Spirit. Jesus made you a child of the Father. Open your arms to him and let his Spirit, dwelling within you, “intercede with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). Begin there. In a short time your ability to speak will return and you will be able to make Jesus’ prayer in Gethsamene your own (it’s there in the Our Father). You will be able to open your Bible and pray the psalms he did upon the Cross (Ps 22, 31, and 69), psalms that praise the Father for the resurrection to come, even amidst the pain. But begin like Jesus by gazing upon the Lord and resting in his presence… resting beneath the heart of the Blessed Mother. 

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Our Lord's prayer is an infinite source of riches. If you'd like to go a little deeper, I have several articles available here as well as my labor of love, the book Through, With, and In Him.
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[1] Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1986).
[2] Saward, John, Redeemer in the Womb (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

We Still Find Him in the Temple

Mary and Joseph were at their wits end.  After three days of searching, they had finally found Jesus.  There he was, seated in the Temple's second court, asking questions of the rabbis.  Mary blurted out, "Son, why have you done this to us?  You see that your father and I have been searching for you in sorrow."  His answer caught them completely off-guard, "Why were you searching for me?  Did you not know that I had to be in my Father's house?" (Lk 2:48-50). Jesus says exactly the same thing to those of us hungering for his presence today! He waits for us in the temple of our parish church.

The Catechism (593) reminds us how deeply Jesus loved the Temple of his day. It was adamat-qodesh, holy ground. God was present in the Temple's innermost chamber in a way unsurpassed anywhere else in all of creation, except in Jesus himself. It was the only place where sacrifice could lawfully be offered and, like all faithful Jews, Jesus made pilgrimage there at least three times a year. 

In the New Covenant, Jesus takes all of this to a higher level.  The Temple prefigured him, in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Col. 2:9). Through Baptism he makes us members of his Church, "living stones" in the spiritual temple of his Body (1 Pet 2:5). The many sacrifices of the Jerusalem Temple found their fulfillment in his one upon the cross, the same sacrifice renewed in our celebration of the Eucharist; and it is his Eucharistic presence that allows us to speak of our church buildings as temples.

Jesus waits for us in these buildings, ready to engage our hearts as he did the Temple's rabbis.  The tabernacle in which our Lord dwells under the appearance of bread is the reality foreshadowed in the Temple's Holy of Holies and the table of shewbread kept before it.  When Jesus told the woman of Samaria, "an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem ... [but] authentic worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth," he was not eliminating the idea of holy ground.  Rather, he was expanding it.  Holy ground is now found wherever our Lord's Body is reserved in the tabernacle.

Are you longing for Jesus?  Do you feel like you can't find him no matter how hard you pray?  Make a pilgrimage to the temple - not thousands of miles away, but down the road to your parish.  There you will find him.  There you will objectively enter into his presence, no matter how deep your sadness or confusion.  There you will offer yourself to him, place yourself into his heart, without any need for words.  In the simple act of going to him, sitting in his presence, and gazing at him with longing, you will have prayed beautifully.  "The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (Ps 51:17).

Like Mary and Joseph, you will always find Jesus in the Temple.

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If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy the soon-to-be-released, Through,With, and In Him: The Prayer Life of Jesus and How to Make It Our Own.

"And the Word became flesh ..."

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (Jn 1:1,14)

The scandal of the incarnation.  
It is impossible to become comfortable with it:  the thought that the eternal, all-powerful Deity would became a helpless child in the arms of His Mother.  It was too much for the Docetists, Gnostics, and Arians to take!  But the scandal of God's incarnate love didn't end there.  Not only did God humble himself by taking the form and appearance of a slave (Phil 2:5-8), He abased Himself even further, taking on the appearance of bread and giving himself to us as food! It was no accident that the only “bed” Mary and Joseph found to lay Jesus in that first night was a feed box for animals. It was divine foreshadowing of the night thirty-some years later when he blessed and broke the bread, saying, “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26).

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

I was driving home late this evening, flipping stations, when I happened upon Axl (yes, that's how you spell it) Rose's cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." There's something very soulful about the Axman at times, especially on this tune, so I stuck it out. 

Almost instantaneously, the song had me thinking about Mass. I recently read Matt Swaim's The Eucharist and the Rosary: Mystery, Meditation, Power, Prayer, and  had the good fortune to spend some time talking with Matt as well. What is fresh in my mind from those encounters is Matt's insight that Mass is meant to "yank us out of ourselves" - our littleness, our self-preoccupation - and place us in Heaven. 

As I continued along, singing and thinking, I saw my parish coming up on the right.  I raised my hand and made a knocking motion - my own strange profession of Faith. (I felt alright doing this because at 10:30 p.m., on a relatively empty street, the chance of the knock being mistaken for a gang sign were slim to none.)  As I came into the house I wondered, "Is there enough here to write a blog? Does anyone really want to hear about the hand gestures I make while driving?" The answer to both was an obvious "no."  But here is where things got crazy: When I got to my bedroom I gave my email a final check before going to bed, and there was a message from a blog I follow, titled "Knocking on Heaven's Door." I kid you not.


So here you go. If someone out there needs to be reminded that Jesus is present in that church, in that Tabernacle, this is it. If you've been complaining that your parish priest is a lousy speaker and that the choir director has a voice like Axl (again, yes - that's how he spells it) Rose; drop it. Jesus of Nazareth, the Alpha and the Omega, the Crucified and Risen One, is telling you to get yourself there. If you need to go to Confession, then go; He loves you, what are you waiting for? Knock on Heaven's Door - it's always answered; He's always home...waiting for you and me.


P.S., Check out these words of wisdom from Denise Fath on the subject!

Right in Front of Me

I hadn't prayed my daily rosary yet, so at about 9 p.m. this past Saturday, I ran up to the perpetual adoration chapel on my street. For those who may be unfamiliar with "perpetual adoration," it simply means that the Eucharist is exposed there on the altar, 24 hours a day, and kept company by one or more members of the parish. The Eucharist is displayed in a monstrance (you can see the white Host in the middle), as in this picture.

As I began praying the rosary, I meditated on Jesus' resurrection, picturing Mary Magdalen there at His tomb and hearing Jesus call her name. And the truth bowled me over me once again - the Risen One is right in front of me! What looks like a wafer of bread is Jesus of Nazareth; it's really Him - Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. There I was, meditating on His resurrection right there in His very presence - not just a vague spiritual presence, but one that I could physically locate and gaze upon!

We can see this truth foreshadowed in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and then proclaimed in the four Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the Apocalypse. If I was only allowed to point to one passage though, it would be Jesus' words in John's Gospel, "The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh...he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life...For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink" (John 6:51,54-55).

This is the reason I'm so excited to be just another Catholic - because at every Mass I kneel before, and then receive into me, the Lord of the Universe. I have the opportunity to renew our union again and again. Everytime the Eucharist is celebrated, time and space are folded; and we unite ourselves with Jesus' passage to the Father through His death, resurrection, and ascension!