[00:00] My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we are given, from the Gospel of Matthew, our Lord's instruction on how to pray and taking from the Gospel verbatim the formula for the Lord's Prayer, which we know as the Our Father.

[00:32] And this is a perfect and concise instruction on how to pray, as well as a formula. It can be taken as a template for prayer. The Mass that I selected as a votive Mass is the Mother of Reconciliation, and one of the reasons I picked that is that I've recently become somewhat more aware of a lesser known

[01:07] apparition which does have the Church's approval, the apparition of Our Lady to Maria Esperanza in Venezuela in the 70s and 80s. And Our Lady then made herself known to Maria Esperanza as Our Lady of Reconciliation. And the message given to Maria Esperanza has to do with the grave need that humanity has

[01:38] for reconciliation, first and foremost with God, which is lost through sin. The union with God is lost through sin and so must be restored. We must be reconciled to God, and of course that's Christ's mission. That's why He took flesh, to reconcile us to God. And having worked the redemption, then we are to live a life of union with God, which

[02:12] is made possible first through the redemptive action of Christ, which is mediated to us through the Church, through the sacraments. But also then we maintain it through our own effort to elevate our hearts and minds to God, which is what prayer is. We can't simply be lazy receptors.

[02:44] We have to actually communicate, and that communion is what our Lord tells us to pray for. "Give us this day our daily bread." That's a reference not only to our physical need for material sustenance, but more importantly to our need for the life of grace, which He transmits to us through the sacrament of the

[03:16] Eucharist. "Unless you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you do not have life in you." And so He made Himself available, His flesh and blood, to us in the Eucharist. But to approach the table of the Lord and to receive His body and blood without bringing a condemnation upon ourselves, we have to be united already in grace. Sadly, we all know the experience of sin, choosing our own will instead of that of God.

[03:55] We pray, our Lord tells us, "Thy will be done," pray this, that Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come. It's all about our interior disposition to receive Him, to be united with Him, to do His will. "If you love Me, you will obey My commands." So that union that we seek with God is a union of will, which love, our highest goal, the

[04:29] act to which we have to order our lives to love God and neighbor, is primarily seated in the will. So our Lord teaches us how to pray, and within the words that He gives us are all of the principles that we have to follow. But as I said, sadly, we all know, because we have all fallen into sin, choosing our

[05:06] own will, which is love of self, versus doing God's will, which is love of God, which then opens all of the channels that we can truly love. And so when we lose that union, we need to be restored, and our Lord has made that possible as well through the sacrament of confession, or as it's also known, the sacrament of reconciliation.

[05:39] And so we have to go to the Lord, and as our Lord came to us through His mother, we also recognize the great grace and power of inviting Our Lady into our lives. She is the Mother of Reconciliation. She's the one, as we prayed at the beginning of the Mass, who was at the foot of the cross when our Lord shed His blood to win for us redemption.

[06:12] So when we pray, let us keep this in mind, our need to be reconciled and the role that Jesus has chosen for Mary, our mother, Mother of Mercy, to help us to be reconciled to Him. And as Our Lady at Betania, which is the place in Venezuela where she appeared in the 80s, we must pray for reconciliation, first and foremost of sinners with God, but then of

[06:47] brothers among brothers. The wars that plague us today that are ongoing can't be resolved without reconciliation. War is the consequence of sin, and if we're to survive and not collapse into a total cataclysm of hatred and violence, we need to be reconciled. So we pray, we turn our prayers and thoughts also to the Mediatrix of Grace, Our Lady,

[07:20] Mother of Reconciliation, to have that disposition to seek God's forgiveness with the mindfulness of what our Lord says at the end of the Gospel today. "If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions." So we must also seek to be forgiving to those who have injured us. Mary, Mother of Reconciliation, pray for us.

[07:56] Queen of Peace, pray for us.