Pope Francis during his continuing catechesis on the Lord’s Prayer at the Wednesday General Audience tells pilgrims, that “when we feel that hunger to love God, we are responding to the invitation to know God as ‘Father’.”
Continuing his catechesis on the “Our Father”, on Wednesday, the Pope told the pilgrims gathered in the Paul VI hall that the first step of Christian prayer is to enter into the mystery of God’s paternity.
Pope Francis explained that in order to understand how God is “Father”, we think of our own parents. But, he noted, that no parent is perfect and we all have our defects.
God’s love comes from a heavenly Father
The Pontiff went on to say that when we talk about God as “Father”, we need to go beyond the earthly image, because God’s love comes from a heavenly Father. Yet, we only experience this total divine love – in this life – in an imperfect way, for our human love is wounded.
He said, “we always live our relationships of love under the sign of our limitations and also of our own selfishness, so they are often polluted by the desire to possess or manipulate the other”.
