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From the Lord's Prayer:

And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

When we ask God to "lead us not into temptation," we are recognizing our own weakness. There's an apocalyptic character to the petition that does not come through in the language of the prayer that does come through in the New American Bible's translation:

and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.

The New American Bible explains that "final test":

Jewish apocalyptic writings speak of a period of severe trial before the end of the age, sometimes called the "messianic woes." This petition asks that the disciples be spared that final test.

Temptation happens. Without the grace of God we would not be able to handle even the slightest temptation, much less a final test. In a way, we are again asking God for mercy and grace.

I am not aware of God ever having led someone into temptation to sin. What I am aware of is people leading themselves and others into temptation. And of course, temptation is often the work of "the evil one," of whom the New American translation speaks.

The translation can go either way, "the evil one," as in the Scriptures, or simply "evil," as in the prayer.

A few important conceptual points about evil. One, evil has no Supreme Origin. It is wrong to think of the Devil as equal in any way to God Himself. The Devil is a creation of God.

Yet nothing that God created is essentially evil. The Devil chooses to do evil, and so makes himself into a living lie. God created him to be good (he is an angel after all), just as he created us to be good. But the Devil, for reasons we ultimately won't know in this life, hates truth. And beauty. And love. He hates them so much that he is constantly lying to himself about who he himself is. He is stuck forever in constant state of denial. He know he is fundamentally good and he hates that.

So he wants you and me to subscribe to his lie about who we are. He wants us to believe that we are rotten, filthy degenerates no more meant to love than a dung beetle. He wants us to believe this about ourselves, and each other, forever.

Evil is fundamentally not. St. Thomas Aquinas said, "Mal est nihil." Evil is nothing. It is nothingness -- the privation of some good. Now some evils are more terrible than others, because some goods are more fundamental than others. The more fundamental the good, the worse it is to be deprived of it. Mild physical hunger due to fasting is a kind of evil, because it points to the absence of nourishment. But it is arguably not so terrible as personal loneliness that comes from a lack of loving relationships. And neither of those is so terrible as the ultimate privation, which is the loss of the ultimate good, which is God Himself.

And it is that from which we pray to God to be delivered. Just as He delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. When we ask God to deliver us from evil, we simply ask Him to hold us close to Himself. Without God we are slaves to evil and the evil one in the same way the Hebrews were slaves to Egypt. We will inescapably lose sight of the truth about ourselves and about our neighbors and the world around us.

God is not an abusive, scrooge-like tyrant who imposes on his children pointless rules designed to make them unhappy. He is deliverer. He provides us with the complete shelter of His kingdom, the ultimate bread of His Son, the ultimate release of forgiveness, and the strength to forgive. In short, He frees and fulfills us. The Our Father is a prayer for freedom, freedom from evil, and freedom to be good as God wills, and thus for the complete happiness that comes from God.

The Holy Father and other Church leaders last weekend concluded their Lenten retreat. Pope Benedict spoke of the prayer of Solomon, for "a heart that listens."

Solomon's prayer is from the First Book of Kings, Chapter 3 verse 9:

Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong. For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?

Said Pope Benedict:

It really seems to me that this sums up the whole of the Christian vision of the human being. In himself man is not perfect; he is a relational being. It is not his cogito [I think] that can cogitare [think] of the whole of reality. He needs listening, he needs to listen to the other and especially to the Other with a capital "O", to God. Only in this way does he know himself, only in this way does he become himself.
From my place here I could always see the Mother of the Redeemer, the Sedes Sapientiae, the living throne of wisdom with Wisdom incarnate on her lap. And, as we have seen, St Luke presents Mary precisely as a woman with a heart that listens, who is steeped in the word of God, who listens to the Word, meditates on it (synballein), composes it and preserves it, who cherishes it in her heart.
The Fathers of the Church say that at the moment of the conception of the eternal Word in the Virgin's womb, the Holy Spirit entered Mary through her ear. In listening she conceived the eternal Word, she gave flesh to this Word. And thus she tells us what it means to have a listening heart.
Here Mary is surrounded by the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, by the Communion of Saints. And thus, in these very days we have seen and understood precisely that it is not in the isolated "I" that we can truly listen to the Word but only in the "we" of the Communion of Saints.

I may try to unpack some of this as the week goes on.

Meantime, as we continue through Lent, let's pray for a heart that listens for God, and when it hears Him, listens to Him.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

The beatitudes are a serious of principles that Jesus taught to his followers, and this is the first, in my opinion because it is the most fundamental. The less "poor in spirit" we are, the less able we will be to be blessed in any other way.

In addition to being the most fundamental beatitude, it is also perhaps the most ironic. We have to be poor in order to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. When I think Kingdom, I think major bling. I think significant wealth. But it is only by being "poor in spirit" that I can inherit the significant wealth of Heaven. If I fill up my heart with the insignificant wealth of this world, there will be no room for what God wants me to have.

But what does "poor in spirit" mean? It means recognizing that we are nothing without God. It also means recognizing that no possessions that we may acquire, no lesser goods like notoriety or money, can give our lives the sense of meaning or joy that comes from being with God. Being poor in spirit means nothing else besides God preoccupies us.

Being poor in spirit means that we recognize that nothing else can make us happy -- that is, nothing can satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts -- other than Jesus. It doesn't mean that we must never enjoy any of the gifts that he wants us to have. Lent takes up only a little over ten percent of the calendar year. But none of those gifts can make us happy. Not even doing what God wants us to do can make us happy.

What does it take to be poor in spirit? In short, it takes letting go. It takes emptying ourselves, as Jesus did, of all the things that we rely on to give us joy and to keep us going -- whether it's our job (should we be blessed to have one) or our social life or whatever. Again, it doesn't mean we can't derive joy from these things, or be thankful to God for them. In fact, we should.

But there is only One who can occupy the very center of our hearts. That's Jesus, who himself gave us a model of spiritual poverty when He was being tempted by the devil in the desert, as Pope Benedict observed in his Angelus message on Sunday:

Of the three temptations of Jesus, the first "had its origin in hunger, in material want", said the Pope. "But Jesus responded with the words: 'One does not live by bread alone'". The second temptation came when the devil showed Christ all the kingdoms of the earth; this, the Holy Father explained, "is the lure of power which Jesus unmasked and rejected". To the third temptation, the proposal to perform a miracle that everyone might believe in Him, Jesus responded: "Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

"Making constant reference to Holy Scripture", the Pope added, Jesus "made human criteria subject to the only true criterion: obedience to the will of God. This is a fundamental lesson for us too: if we carry the Word of God in our minds and hearts, if it enters our lives, then we too can reject all the tricks of the Tempter".

The devil (who did not know who Jesus truly was at that point) was tempting Jesus to put something other than his closeness to God first in His life. Jesus refuses.

Jesus says, "I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me." Jesus constantly relied upon His Father, surrendering to Him. So we must constantly recognize that we are poor, that we have nothing spiritually to sustain us, to give us joy, to make us capable of loving. We have to constantly rely on Jesus.

He says "Without me you can do nothing." Jesus can love without me. He can love an eternity without me, and He has. He can love all of creation and the whole human race, without me. But I can't love in any real sense without Him. Recognizing that, every single day, is the key to inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Here's a clip from John Paul II addressing World Youth Day on August 19, 2000.

It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

There's a lot of confusion these days about what is meant by "happiness." Is it a feeling? Is it a state of mind? Or is it an objective state of being?

I can say confidently that happiness in the sense that John Paul II spoke about it is what happens to us when the deepest desires of our hearts are satisfied. One is happy not necessarily when one feels warm and fuzzy. In fact, happiness that comes with the satisfaction of our deepest, most powerful appetites can coincide with suffering that comes with the dissatisfaction of our lesser ones.

This kind of happiness, which overcomes any suffering we may face, is what Jesus calls being "blessed." The classical term for it is "beatitude."

That's what I'll be looking at for the next few days.

Pope Benedict's Lent 2010 Message.

I want to consider the meaning of the term "justice," which in common usage implies "to render to every man his due," according to the famous expression of Ulpian, a Roman jurist of the third century. In reality, however, this classical definition does not specify what "due" is to be rendered to each person. What man needs most cannot be guaranteed to him by law. In order to live life to the full, something more intimate is necessary that can be granted only as a gift: we could say that man lives by that love which only God can communicate since He created the human person in His image and likeness.

This reminds me of what I wrote a few days ago about the assertion I read that "You deserve love." But if something is inherently a gift, like love, then it is by definition given despite the fact that we have done nothing in particular to warrant receiving it. In the case of God's love, we have done quite the opposite. We have given Him reason to justly withhold His love from us.

And that is, in a most unsettling sense, what we really "deserve." So when it comes to love, it is not a question of what we deserve. It is a question of how we might escape what we deserve. The answer, simply, is we need God to save us. We don't deserve His saving love. We simply need it.

Here's a quick footnote on the divinity of Jesus from my Lent Day One reflection.

Jesus is the human embodiment of the eternal expression of God. When we say a word, it comes and goes. When God says a Word, the Word remains. Isaiah 40:8 says "The grass withers and the flower wilts, but the word of our Lord stands forever."

God is eternal, ever-existing, and before there was anything in the universe to know besides Himself, He knew Himself perfectly. He knew Himself, and He spoke the flawless, complete truth of Himself in the form of the Word.

In this way, the Father begot the Son. The Father did not "make" the Son, for when a man "makes" something he by definition uses materials that are different from himself, like a man making a chair out of wood. When a father begets a son, the son is made of the same stuff as the father. (Kudos to C.S. Lewis for this point.) The Word or Son of God consists of the same eternal, everlasting divine stuff that the Father consists of. So the Word was, in the beginning, with God, and was God.