He will get up because of his persistence

Mal 3,13-20a; Ps 1; Lk 11,5-13
10 OCTOBER

The prayer of request – and the entire Our Father is a prayer of request – must be the fruit of a man’s ontological deficiency, a deprivation of the personal being necessary for his own being in order to be in accordance with truth. Let’s go for a moment into the garden of Eden. God sees the ontologically deficient man. He wants to create what he misses. He creates every species of living being. But man does not find what is lacking in his being so that he becomes being in the fullness of his true essence. The Lord creates him the woman and finally he feels he can be fully himself.

The Lord God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.” So the Lord God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each of them would be its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of the air, and all the wild animals; but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man. So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man. When he brought her to the man, the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body (Gen 2,18-24).

The insistence is true if man feels that he is really ontologically missing something – the absence of holiness, of obedience, of bread and of forgiveness are ontological shortcomings of the being of man. Even the fall into temptation is depriving oneself of the truth of his own being, made in the image and likeness of his Creator and Lord – and he does not stop asking what he lacks until his being returns to its fullness. Prayer is not the request of vain things, but it is a request to God to do to us what we are by eternal vocation. We are by his will, according to his eternal wisdom. We ask that He brings us into his will according to his eternal wisdom. We must ask for this grace every day, because every day we are not fully what we should be and every day He has to make us. The insistence does not last an hour, a day, a week, a month and a year. It must last for a lifetime. Being man in a continuous becoming of approaching the truth of his source, only when he enters into eternity, the approach will be immersion in the source. Until that moment he will have to insist.

And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend to whom he goes at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey and I have nothing to offer him,’ and he says in reply from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked and my children and I are already in bed. I cannot get up to give you anything.’ I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence. “And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the holy Spirit to those who ask him?”

Why do we have to ask for the Holy Spirit? Because it is He who must manifest our shortcomings and ontological gaps that must be filled, eliminated and brought to completion. The Holy Spirit must see for us in the same way that God has seen for Adam. He saw and filled the ontological gap. If we are without the Spirit of the Lord, we do not see our true gaps, we see shortcomings of vanity, foolishness, insipidity and futility and we pray for these useless things. Instead, if we ask the Holy Spirit, He comes, sees our spiritual and physical shortcomings, sees our shortcomings of holiness and virtue, of beatitudes and Gospel and asks the Father to intervene with the power of his light and holiness and create in us what is still missing. A perennial intrusiveness.

Mother of God, Angels and Saints  ensure that the Spirit of God always sees and prays for us.