In this book Paul Murray, a contemporary spiritual master, expounds the teaching of an earlier Dominican spiritual master, whose writings can be a bit daunting for the majority of Christians, let alone for the merely curious spiritual seeker. It is a vital part of the resurgence of interest in St Thomas that he should be appreciated as a preacher, and as a spiritual master, for these are hallmarks of a Dominican saint. St Thomas was canonized because he contemplated Wisdom and handed on the fruit of his contemplation of sacra doctrina. It is this holy teaching that Murray shares with us again in this little volume. Just as St Thomas drew on other commentators, notably Augustine and Origen to explain the Lord's Prayer, Murray also draws on other Dominicans to illuminate his text. In this way, it is the work of a community, a ‘holy preaching’, in the best Dominican tradition.
The author has done an excellent job of pulling together St Thomas’ writings on the Lord's Prayer for they are found not in a single treatise but in seven different texts. He helpfully explains the history and context of these texts in the ‘Appendix’. In the main text, Murray follows St Thomas’ own practice and we are led to consider the Lord's Prayer one brief phrase at a time. Readers who are not accustomed to the scholastic method of analysis may be astonished by how much St Thomas derives from the first two words alone, but the result is not academic nit-picking or dry distinctions but the illuminating insights of a saint who has prayed over every precious word taught by the incarnate Word. So, we are led into a Thomistic lectio divina of the Lord's Prayer in which spirituality and theology cannot be separated.
St Thomas's well-known Summa theologiæ is famously structured as a series of questions, objections, and responses, and any reader of it knows how very relevant are the questions he poses, and how apt the answers he gives. So too in this consideration of the Lord's Prayer, many of the objections to petitionary prayer, and erroneous ideas about prayer and the spiritual life, are answered, and so we are taught to pray. Moreover, we are taught to live well, for St Thomas brilliantly shows how the Lord's Prayer begins with the goal of life, namely God, and then shows how we can attain that goal with hope and confidence by loving ourselves in God (see p. 37). Therefore, we are more fully human and more free the more we love and desire God above all else.
However, in all this, and particularly in St Thomas's treatment of the phrase, ‘forgive us our trespasses’ (chapter 7), his humanity stands out in the depth of his understanding of human weakness and of our need of God's grace and compassion. Similarly, Murray highlights some of the difficulties of living the Christian life such as forgiving our enemies, coping with suffering, and distraction in prayer, and he shares St Thomas's eminently practical and compassionate responses to such struggles.
St Thomas says that prayer should “last long enough to arouse fervour of interior desire”. This book is just long enough to be read with ease, and to stir up our desire to pray with confidence and hope, but it also contains such richness that it will amply reward many meditative revisits.
