Father Mike Cassell, an Episcopalian priest, is a very good friend of mine. We worked together on prison ministry and, over the years, developed a close relationship. Father Mike is now retired from active ministry but has not retired from his calling as a priest.

From time to time, after much spiritual reflection, he would call me to share one of his “aha” moments as he calls them. The following blog is one such beautiful moment of insight, and I am privileged to share it with my readers.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy

My earliest recollections of God go back over eighty years ago. I must not have been much more than three years of age.

Every night just before bedtime, my dad would come into the bedroom and put me on his lap by the window. He would sing to me, read stories to me, and together we would look out the window at the luminosity of the distant elevated trains with their lights and squeaking brakes on Frankford Avenue in Philadelphia.

As I look back on my long life, my first impression of God the Father was indelibly implanted in me by these early experiences of sitting on my father’s lap.

Carl Sagan, noted astronomer once said, “There are as many stars ‘out there’ as are single grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.” As I gazed at the rolling lights of the train passing my window back then and as I peered beyond them at the twinkling stars of the universe, I did not feel overwhelmed or frightened because I was being held in the protective and secure arms of my father.

Jesus taught us that when we pray to God, beyond vocabulary, we are to understand him as “Abba”, “Daddy”, “Pop”.

I am overwhelmed and my mind goes back to when I was but a boy on my “daddy’s” lap. And I am grateful that this God of ours loves me and relates to me like that.

When I pray the Our Father, I am comforted by the fact that I can be as relaxed with Him as I was with my earthly father when I was a little child sitting on his knee. The word Abba is so simple, so basic, that it’s the primal word coming out of a child’s mouth. As a child opens his or her mouth and says “Ah” and then closes with a “b” and then another “ah,” you have the primal word spoken by a child: Abba. And that’s how we are to address God in Heaven. How sublime! This word conveys the closeness and the intimacy of God our Creator with us at the very depths of our being and in the most basic way of expressing ourselves.

The go-to prayer for every Christian is the prayer that Jesus Himself gives us, and it is called the Our Father. When you pray this prayer, think of it as the most basic relationship that you have, a relationship that springs from God who is our home, and is expressed in the beauty of that simple, elemental word, Abba.

—Fr. Mike Cassell