This is Scott Hahn, and I want to welcome you to The Road to Amas, a podcast from the St. Paul's Center.

What does it mean to have a relationship with God?

In personal prayer, a guide for receiving the Father's love,

Father Thomas Acklin and Father Boniface Hicks

provide a path to a deeply personal relationship with the Lord.

Human history seen through the fatherly eyes of God is a covenant drama, a revelation of prayer.

Even before the fall, when God created the world in six days, but then finished his work on the Sabbath, the seventh day, which is not only the Sabbath,

but the Sabbath is the sign of the covenant.

So God forms a covenant with those creatures who were made in the image and likeness of God,

even before he's given them commandments, he's made them for communion.

So after the fall, he's already programmed that covenant with the mercies that he knows

we're going to need because he is a loving father who foresees the weaknesses and the needs

of his children.

And so the catechism highlights the dialogue between God and man. Where are you? You know, and Adam could have

responded. I'm, I'm over here. I'm hiding. I'm naked. I'm ashamed. I really blew it. Lord, have

mercy. But instead, he says, I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid because I was

naked, so I hid myself. Sort of like Adam's saying, you just came barging in, you scared the heck, you know,

you scare the heck out of me.

And at that point, you know, if God were simply a supreme master, beholding a slave,

I think he would have blotted him out and begun again.

But instead, a conversation ensues that you almost think is beneath

the dignity of the deity, unless what is most supreme about God is not his power or his capacity to

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