We See As Much As We Know

 Prayer is a time when we acknowledge that we are sinners who cannot love by ourselves and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. In the Catholic Times in a column on the subject: we see as much as we know. Those who know they have wounds are those who receive treatment.

Some years ago, there was a Spanish YouTuber who gave 20 euros (about 25 dollars) to a homeless person along with an Oreo cookie filled with toothpaste. He was fined about 20 thousand dollars and sentenced to 15 months in prison. The homeless man vomited it right away. The YouTuber claimed that he had no intention of insulting the homeless person. He thought he had done a good deed of donating 20 euros. He even said that toothpaste had a positive effect on him, who hadn't brushed his teeth for a long time.
 
The love that human beings want to give to someone is often the same as this young man's actions. There is something like toothpaste in side a delicious cookie called our love. By nature, human beings cannot fully love. This is because, in my love, often the selfish mind loves in the way it is advantageous to oneself.
 
Sin is breaking God's commandment to love one another. "To forsake the true love of God and of neighbor" is a sin. But a more fundamental sin is pride, believing that one can love on one's own strength. To believe in oneself too much and to love oneself becomes a sin of ignoring God's help and contempt for God. To believe that one can love as God without God is trying to become like God with one's own strength.
 
We need the help of others to live as human beings.
Moreover, it is a sin to believe that you can have a reasonable level of love without God's help when you enter the kingdom of God here on this earth.

So what should we do? I must reveal that I am a sinner. The Lord wants us to admit that we are sinners, like the "doctors who need to examine wounds." Then help me. Doctors can only treat people who show their wounds.
 
'David', the main character of Steven Spielberg’s film 'A.I.' (2001), is not a human but an artificial intelligence robot. Like Pinocchio, David believes that he can become a human too, with the help of a blue fairy. But David is abandoned by humans. David finds a statue of a blue fairy in the depths of the sea. He prays and prays to the fairy to make him human.  
 

David knew that he couldn't be human, at least by his own power. That's why he chose "pray." David's prayer was a plea to recognize himself as a machine and to be reborn as a human being. The same goes for our prayers. It is time to acknowledge that we are sinners who cannot love by ourselves and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. Love is poured into us by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).
 
Therefore, only those who acknowledge that they are sinners can pray. Prayer is an effort to believe in the gospel as "the revelation of God’s mercy" and to love in his strength, like patients who shows their wound to the doctor. It is only through this process we are freed from sin and reborn as beings with the power to love.