We celebrated our grandchild’s fourth birthday anniversary at a pizzeria, amidst a spread of salads, pasta and risottos. The wall of the room his parents had reserved carried a reproduction of a detail in Michelangeo’s “The Creation of Adam,” the celebrated fresco on the Sistine chapel ceiling, which, last year, when I raised my Iphone camera, a guard stopped me from taking a picture of. But I knew my Isherwood — I am a camera with its shutter open — and so I stood under the ceiling, looking at the fresco long enough for the image of God about to touch man to sear itself into my memory.
In that room in the pizzeria, the image inspired me to high-five my grandson, admittedly a touch less solemn than that portrayed in Michelangelo’s fresco. But the boy was out of reach, on the other side of the table, fiddling with his toy dump truck.
The family being the first school of the Christian life, and a domestic church in which the parents are the first heralds of the faith (Catechism of the Catholic Church), I urged my son — the child’s father — to lead the prayer before meals. As he did, his wife held and guided the boy’s hand in making the Sign of the Cross. This, more than my intended high-five, was for me close to God’s touch of man’s hand, which Michelangelo depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
The sight delighted me, a paterfamilias of a bigger household. As birthday gift, the wife gave the boy a yellow dump truck and a green and white jacket with hoodie. While the gift came from me as well, I had another one — unmentioned, a matter between me and God — a prayer that the boy would learn how “to appear in the presence of the Lord,” as Hannah had planned for her little Samuel in the Old Testament.
In other words, my wish for the boy was that he would learn how to pray, to be aware of the presence of God, to talk to Him as to a friend.
To be taught how to pray was what the disciples asked of Jesus, after observing him in prayer, for him to instruct them, just as John the Baptist instructed his followers.
And so Jesus taught them the “Our Father,” a simple prayer, but one that, St. Augustine said, was complete and all-inclusive.
“And if you go over all the words of holy prayers (scriptures), you will, I believe, find nothing which cannot be comprised and summed up in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.”
In fact, for St. Augustine, the Our Father is a template for every prayer — “Wherefore, in praying, we are free to use different words to any extent, but we must ask the same things; in this we have no choice.” He added that “[i]f we pray rightly, and as becomes our wants, we say nothing but what is already contained in the Lord’s Prayer.”
It might not take long for the boy to learn the Lord’s Prayer because he seems to have a sharp memory, a boon of young minds. But more than the words, I prayed that he would learn the spirit of the prayer, prayer’s real intent, which is being intimate with, not so much asking for as talking to God, with which will go a train of attitudes — a sense of God’s presence, a grateful spirit, an openness to God’s directions, a dependence on His providence, an honest and forgiving heart, as well as a childlike seeking for and abandonment of the self to God’s protection.
Which no doubt the boy would acquire a sense of first of all from his family.
For instance, during the party, the child slipped from his chair. Everyone came to his rescue. His mother picked him up and checked his lower back, which his dad put ice cubes on, and later my wife tenderly rubbed. Watching them, I realized that their hands suggested the hand of the Father, who watches over us and protects us, and provides for and heals us.