The Idea of Praying Through Time

Pondering prayer, and the notion of praying through time, thanks to our Holy Father:

We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist . . . If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: “It is good that you exist”—must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love. For it is the way of love to will the other’s existence and, at the same time, to bring that existence forth again. The key to the I lies with the you; the way to the you leads through the I.

Reading this broke my heart a little, as I considered people I have known who have gone their whole lives waiting to hear from someone, “it is good that you exist.”

Benedict’s wise words here remind me of the teaching of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, former Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, who wrote:

Now in our own day . . . it is always in the name of good, of freedom, of concern for mankind that people are enslaved and murdered, deceived, lied to, slandered and destroyed. “Every evil screams out only one message: ‘I am good!'” And not only does it scream, but it demands that the people cry out tirelessly in response: “You are good, you are freedom, you are happiness!”

Read on for the praying through time part