PATTERNS OF PRAYER By Noel Serrano from the Gala Foundation 2020

Jesus starts out telling us that prayer is not a mystical mystery; rather, we can, by ourselves and without a priest, go before our Holy God and make our petitions and our heart known to Him and commune with Him. Jesus is basically showing us how to relate to Him through intimacy, emptying our will so our heart is exposed to Him as we would with any true, intimate encounter. Thus the mortar of prayer built the Early Church until it disintegrated into the chaos that it was in Jesus' day. Prior to the Reformation, prayer had reverted again to mere ritual and meaningless rhetoric. The prayers were all in Latin and contained elaborate theological terms that the people did not understand. No one was given an opportunity to be educated to learn it unless he was a priest or a physician. Luther and Calvin were challenged to seek Christ; in so doing, they relearned what prayer was all about and communicated that to us.