Collect taken from Nineteenth Week of Ordinary Time.
Collect: Almighty ever-living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son…
“Almighty ever-living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father,”
– Although we tend to think it’s no big deal, calling God “Father” is a rather bold thing to do. God is infinitely beyond us and, for most of human history, the world of the divine was always something dangerous and strange to humanity. Notice that, at mass, the priest always starts the Our Father by saying “we dare to say.”
“bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised.”
-The reason we call God “Father” is because we have been adopted by Him in Jesus Christ through baptism. Just as getting baptized does not mean we stop growing in our faith, so being adopted by God does not mean the spirit of adoption is perfect in us. We want to be perfectly sons and daughters of God because then and only then will we be able to receive the full inheritance God’s children have.
Questions & Advice: When you call God “Father,” do you just assume that it’s an easy thing to say and mean? Do you presume that being baptized guarantees your inheritance in heaven? Can other people tell that you take your adopted sonship seriously?
Read about adoption and grace in the Catechism (2006-11). Spend some of your prayer time reflecting on what being a child of God means in terms of inheritance and in terms of your responsibility. Give thanks to God for the gift of calling him Father.
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| We are sons in the Son. |