Perhaps nothing has done more to make me a prayerful person than being a parent has. The conditions and cruelties of this world surely fuel the anxiety with which I wave goodbye to my children each day, for if we are honest with ourselves, safety is an illusion. So I pray fervently for their protection, their growth, their joy, and their grace. My sanity and nerves usually also make that list. As I grow older—this happens every day, it seems!—I am beginning to understand more fully why so many of us had praying grandmothers.
Even in this, I know that many of those prayers are wealthy beyond measure. We have not ever been left begging for bread, left without a home or water to drink—a claim that many people in the world today cannot make. I believe many things about prayer, including that even in its most mundane of forms, it has miraculous power if it can keep us going yet another day.
So why don’t we pray with Jesus more? For as much as we have memorized the Lord’s Prayer—a political theology unto itself if we mean it when we say the words, beyond rote memorization—we seem to spend far less time surrounded in the other prayers Christ prayed for us. And it seems no coincidence that here, celebrating the seventh Sunday of Easter, we find the tender prayers of our Lord, commissioning us with great care: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
