Blessed be God for ever!

Here we find that the relationship between God and man has been radically altered through the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. It is through Him, St. Paul tells us, that we have received “adoption as sons” of the Father. We no longer need to address the Father as if we were mere subjects of the Divine King. With Jesus, we can now address this King intimately as “Abba.”

It is always through Christ, the Word made flesh, that we approach the Father; in Christ we find the human face of God, a face we can see and love. In Christ, we meet God not as ineffable spirit or limitless creative power, but as a man, a tangible reality to whom we can pray, who can speak to us and call us over and over again back to the right road. We meet Christ in the words of the Gospel. We meet Him as a person who lived a human life and who gave Himself for us in a horrifying death. In the face of Christ, we find the true image of God, the God whose love for us is so great that, in the words of St. Paul, He “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7).

In Christ, we encounter not only the God who reigns in the high heavens in endless, unperturbed serenity, but the God who loves us, yearns for us, and even suffers for us. It is Christ who enables Christian prayer to be different from all other prayer and enables us to enter into a profoundly intimate relationship with God. As we contemplate Christ in Scripture, and especially in the Eucharist, prayer will become ever more personal for us, more natural to us, more real to us. It will become more and more like what Christian prayer must be: a loving relationship with another person.