{"id":2746,"date":"2007-03-04T08:24:16","date_gmt":"2007-03-04T08:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/prayer-life.html"},"modified":"2007-03-04T08:24:16","modified_gmt":"2007-03-04T08:24:16","slug":"prayer-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/prayer-life.html","title":{"rendered":"Prayer Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Angelus talk, today:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Prayer, for the Christian, \u201cis not an optional but a matter of life and death. Only those who pray, that is, those who entrust themselves to God with filial love, can enter into eternal life, which is God himself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Taking his cue from the Transfiguration, Benedict XVI chose to talk about prayer during the first Angelus following his Spiritual Exercises. He was addressing 30,000 people in St Peter\u2019s Square on a day reminiscent of spring. <\/p>\n

From the gospel passage from Luke, the pope noted how on Mount Tabor, \u201cduring the conversation of Jesus with Moses and Elijah, they appeared alongside Him transfigured. They \u2018were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem\u2019 (9:31). Thus, Jesus listens to the Law and the prophets who talk to him about his death and resurrection. In his intimate dialogue with the Father, he does not exit from history; he does not escape the mission for which he came to the world, although he knows that to reach glory he will have to pass through the Cross. Rather, Christ enters more deeply into this mission, adhering with all his heart to the will of the Father and he shows us that true prayer consists precisely of uniting our will with that of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cConsequently, for a Christian, praying is not evading reality and the responsibilities this entails, but taking them on completely, trusting in the faithful and endless love of the Lord. Thus, the verification of the transfiguration is, paradoxically, the agony of Gethsemane (cfr Lk 22:39-46).\u201d From here comes the affirmation that prayer for the Christian \u201cis not an optional but a matter of life and death. Only those who pray, that is, those who entrust themselves to God with filial love, can enter into eternal life, which is God himself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Angelus talk, today: Prayer, for the Christian, \u201cis not an optional but a matter of life and death. Only those who pray, that is, those who entrust themselves to God with filial love, can enter into eternal life, which is God himself.\u201d Taking his cue from the Transfiguration, Benedict XVI chose to talk about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPrayer Life - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/prayer-life.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Prayer Life - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Angelus talk, today: Prayer, for the Christian, \u201cis not an optional but a matter of life and death. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}