The Greatest Prayer of Thanksgiving

The greatest prayer in the world is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is the offering of the Son of God to the Father! Eucharist means thanksgiving and in the holy Mass is the perfect adoration, prayer, praise and petition to the heavenly Father.

 Here are some thoughts on the Holy Mass from Fr. Raul Plus S.J. from his book "How to Pray Well". I look forward to participating in this great act of thanksgiving at holy Mass tomorrow. For as it says in the 38th chapter of Isaiah: It is not the nether world that gives You thanks, nor death that praises You. Neither do those who go down into the pit await Your kindness; the living, the living give You thanks as I do today. The Lord is our Savior; we shall sing to stringed instuments in the house of the Lord all the days of our life."

Ave Maria!

———-

       As the Word dwelling eternally in the brightness of heaven, the Son of God could not adore. To adore one must be an inferior. But the three persons of the Blessed Trinity are equal, none is superior. None is inferior. The Son equal in all things to the Father may love the Father; He cannot adore Him. Desiring to give to his Father a divinely conceived form of love, the Word decreed to become man. Equal to the Father, He will become inferior to Him, not as God, but as man and thus He will be able to adore Him. In heaven He cannot adore; on earth He can.

      Some theologians ( Bl. John Duns Scotus and many of the Franciscan school) hold the attractive view that even had Adam not sinned the Word would still have become man. Of the two ends of the Incarnation, the glorification of the Father and the salvation of mankind, the former would have been sufficient, and ac­cording to some was sufficient, to induce the Word to become a son of men. Christ is the one object of the divine complaisance, and the motive for which the Word came upon earth was the adoration that He wished to give to His Father. The expiation of sin was but secondary in the divine plan. However this may be, even if we admit with the majority of theologians that both ends were the cause of the Incarnation, it remains true that the desire to procure the glory of His Father by an act of adoration of infinite value loomed large in the plans of the Savior.

      By coming upon earth the Word loses none of His sovereign majesty. He becomes less than the Father, but He remains the Infinite. “Less” than the Father, He can adore him; infinite, He can adore him infinitely. Since the Word became man there is on this little earth of ours one who is capable of giving to the infinite God an infinite adora­tion: the Word of God made flesh.

       All Christians know that God became man for us. Not all, however, realize that He did more than this. Not only did He become one of us, He willed also to make each one of us a part of Himself. In addition to the mystery of the Incarnation there is the mystery of incorporation. We are incorporated into the person of Christ. The result of the Incarnation was that one who is truly God is capable of giving adoration, and precisely because He is God, of giving infinite adoration. Thanks to our incorporation in Christ this mystery becomes more wonderful still. Only one person in the world, we said, can glorify God as He deserves, namely, Christ Jesus. But by the mystery of incorporation, through baptism we become an integral part of Christ, and every increase of sanctifying grace makes us more a part of Christ than before. In this manner the whole of the adoring power of Christ is placed at our disposal!

      The complete Christ is made up of the head and the members together. Hence when, being in the state of grace, we offer up prayer of adoration to the Father through .and in Jesus Christ, our worship will not be merely the worship of a creature, but a worship to which the Son of God adds all that it needs in order to give condign glory to the Father. In fact our Lord asks us to be His complement, to make up, with St Paul, what is wanting to the sufferings of Christ But He, our Savior, the head of the mystical body, the divine head of all deified souls constitutes our divine supplement. He supplies, in the fullest sense of the word, all that is lacking in our offering. This was human; He makes it divine, He makes it a “Christ prayer” and therefore a prayer worthy of God. The model prayer, the most excellent of all prayers-whether it be the prayer of worship, of thanksgiving, of contrition or of petition-is the offering that we make to God of his Son Jesus Christ.

     The culmination of this joint prayer, of this prayer truly worthy of God, is the Mass, in which Christ again offers His supreme sacrifice. Our Lord’s supreme act of worship was His death on the Cross. There did our Savior recognize most completely the sovereign Majesty of God, when He submitted to the will of the Most High, even to the yielding of His life. Having assumed the nothingness of our human nature, He willed to submit to the lot of mankind; He died. Every Mass renews this recognition on the part of Christ of God's sovereign rights and hence every Mass represents the apex of adoration.

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