Episode 2-Communion with Christ – Practical Prayer –  We have lost are fear of going astray and being unfaithful within.  We must be aware of the spirits, personal or impersonal, that can get into us.  We can get tangled up in many different  influences in prayer.  That is why it so important to have a director, a guide,  to help us navigate in this journey and to test those spirits.  Jesus is the model of prayer.  “He learns to pray from His mother”. (see below).    The witness of the community.  His prayer springs from a secret source and He wishes to share it with us.  All prayer is foretaste of heaven.

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Deacon James Keating, PhD, the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 2599

The Son of God who became Son of the Virgin learned to pray in his human heart. He learns to pray from his mother, who kept all the great things the Almighty had done and treasured them in her heart.⁴¹Â He learns to pray in the words and rhythms of the prayer of his people, in the synagogue at Nazareth and the Temple at Jerusalem. But his prayer springs from an otherwise secret source, as he intimates at the age of twelve: “I must be in my Father’s house.”⁴²Â Here the newness of prayer in the fullness of time begins to be revealed: his filial prayer, which the Father awaits from his children, is finally going to be lived out by the only Son in his humanity, with and for men.

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