How is it that the path to freedom and goodness inevitably leads us through journeys of brokenness and humility? I've been looking for a few words to string together that might express the landscape my soul has been inhabiting for a few weeks now and then stumbled upon these thoughts from Eugene Peterson regarding the passage found in Luke 11:1-13 and realized that he's already said it. Read on:

"A realization and embrace of our basic neediness, our poverty, is a necessary precondition for the employment of the imperatives in the [Lord's] prayer and parable [of the friend at midnight]. If the imperative is issued from wealth, it is nothing, but wanting more, stark religious or spiritual consumerism. We command God to give us what we want, not what we need, using prayer to raise our standard of living.

St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ, the revelation of God become human, 'set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death-- and the worst kind of death at that: crucifixion' (phil 2:5-8, msg). In other words, when God became man, revealing to us our sheer humanity, he didn't come in the form of a superhuman, but 'experienced the poverty of human existence more deeply and more excruciatingly than any other man could.' He became absolutely poor and of no account: 'a root out of dry ground... no form or comliness... despised and rejected... we esteemed him not" (Is 53).

When God became human in Jesus, he showed us how to become complete human beings before him. We do it the way Jesus did it, by becoming absolutely needy and dependent on the Father. Only when we stand emptied, stand impoverished before God can we receive what only empty hands can receive. This is the poverty of spirit in which Jesus blesses us (Matt 5:3). When we listen to and follow Jesus, who lived in continual dependence on his Father, we become convinced of our poverty as men and women. we realize our absolute neediness. We are all beggars. Father, give us bread. Friend, lend us three loaves. being human means that we are the poorest and most incomplete of all creatures. Our needs are always beyond our capacities. Johannes Baptist Metz writes of the 'radical indulgence of our humanity" and the "transcendental neediness" at the core of our humanity.

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent-- which is to say, more human. When we pray we dive ever more deeply into the very human condition from which sin alienates us and Christ saves us.

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Jesus concludes his teaching on prayer with this: 'If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!' (Luke 11:13).

Holy Spirit? We thought we were asking for bread for ourselves and for our friend. We thought we were asking for a fish and eggs. And we were. We are. But by introducing the term "Holy Spirit" into the conversation, Jesus anchors our understanding of the words and ways of God in the details of each and every hour of each and every day. Holy Spirit is God's way of being personally with us in all our listening and speaking and acting. God in all the particulars of our lives and our friends' and neighbors; lives. God comprehensively and personally present."

-- Eugene Peterson, "Tell it Slant" p 54-55