THE PRAYER TO BEGIN ALL PRAYERS

The Prayer to Begin All Prayer


There's a lot I mean a lotgoing on in the Lord's Prayer. It's like an army of ideas ready to overwhelm us, so we're wise to divide and conquer.

The Lord's Prayer can be divided into two parts. The opening ("Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name") helps us understand the setting of prayer. The seven phrases after that are requests, sometimes called "the seven petitions." In this chapter, we'll look at the opening and the first three petitions.

Our Father

It doesn't take long to find something meaningful in the Lord's Prayer. Take the first word: Our.By using this little pronoun, Jesus is trying to clear up three matters right off the bat.

1 You Never Pray Alone

I've made a point of saying that prayer is about personal communication with God; it's an intimate relationship, one on one. But it's also about much, much more. For one thing, prayer is about being connected with other pray-ers.


Let's take an example. I like to fly fish, and when I do, I have to spend a lot of time alone. Even when I go on a trip with my son, we usually split up and take different parts of the river we're fishing. We come back in a few hours and swap stories. Even when I'm casting by myself, though, alone in front of a gentle riffle, enjoying some solitude with nature, I never feel alone. I know my son is fishing with me, even though he's not fishing with me.

That's how it is with the Lord's Prayer. Even though we might say it alone, it reminds us that we're not alone. That's the point of the words our and us that run all the way through it. Even when you pray it alone, you are reminded that you're part of a communityin particular, a group that honors Christ, that prays to him regularly, and also, from time to time, that says the prayer he taught.

2 Prayer Is Learned Together

If I want to improve my golf game, let's say, I need to spend time on the practice tee, alone, flailing away at the ball. But if I'm serious about getting better, I find a group to play with regularly, and I take lessons from a pro. In other words, I get together with other golfers.

With this little word ourand the use of us throughout this prayerJesus is simply reminding us that if we really want to learn about prayer, we need to get together regularly with other pray-ers.

Jesus assumes prayer is first something done in the community of believers and by the community of believers.

This goes against conventional wisdom, of course (as does much of what Jesus has to say, by the way). For the longest time, when I heard the word prayer, I conjured up an image of a solitary individual, with bowed head and/or kneeling in a bedroomalone. Of course, this is prayer; prayer is something people do by themselves a lot. And, certainly, prayer expresses an individual's personal relationship with God. But if that were the only thing true about prayer, Jesus would have said to pray, "My father."

But he didn't. And one reason is that he wanted to suggest that if we want to learn how to pray well, we need to get together with others to learn. (More on this in Part 3, "Just Doing It."

3 God Is Bigger Than My Ideas about God

This is really good news. A lot of times I think I've got God figured out, and I couldn't be bothered with what other people think. But then I find that I pretty quickly get bored with the God I've figured out.


Fortunately, God is much bigger than my mind or my heart can capture, and for that reason God is a continual surprise. When I pray in the context of a larger prayer community, I can be sure that there will be times when the community teaches me how to expand my understanding of God. For example, my three children each know something about me that the others don't know. As they talk about me with one another, they sometimes discover things: how to get their way with me, what line not to cross, and so on.

God is not just "my" God, but he's also "our" Fatherthe God of the entire community of prayer. So, as I become a part of that community, I'm going to have my understanding of God expanded.

Our Father

This word Fatheris the most radical word in this prayerand maybe in the history of religions. Even the most skeptical New Testament scholarssome of whom believe that hardly anything in the New Testament is originaladmit that calling God "Father," as Jesus did, is a fresh idea in the history of religions. Until then it was common to call God all sorts of things: Lord, Master, Creator, King, Holy One, Majestic One, Lawgiver. But not "papa."


I'm not being disrespectful here. We know that Jesus, in introducing this radical word, used the Aramaic word abba,which is equivalent to our "dad" or even "daddy." This has profound implications for the life of prayer.


1 We Can Have Intimacy with God

This gets back to what I was saying in Chapter 2, "What Prayer Promises": Prayer is a key means to experiencing God. And it also gets back to what I said in the Introduction: This word Father is not about God's maleness.

Admittedly, the Bible mostly uses masculine images for God. But it doesn't hesitate to use feminine ones as well to show the intimacy we can experience with God. One of my favorites is found in Psalm 131, where prayer is compared to a child nursing at a mother's breast:

Lord, my heart is not proud;my eyes are not haughty.I don't concern myself with matters too greator awesome for me.But I have stilled and quieted myself,just as a small child is quiet with its mother.Yes, like a small child is my soul within me.

So Father is not about fathers or mothers, or males or females. It's about the meaning of prayer: intimacy with God.

2 We Become God's Children

Of course, If God is our Father, then we are his children. The apostle John put it this way: "See how very much the heavenly Father loves us, for he allows us to be called his children, and we really are!" (1 John 3:1). This takes some getting used to, but once you do get used to it, it's pretty incredible.

When I first got married, I thought it the strangest thing when my wife introduced me to others as her husband. I had never been a "husband," and it just sounded strange. But the more we've grown together and immersed ourselves in the mystery of being husband and wife, the more I've gotten used to the word. I've also grown to relish it, for it carries with it not only responsibility, but also a sense that I have a deep connection with my wife as no other man has.

It also has taken me a while to get used to being called a "child" or "son" of God. In fact, I never addressed God as ''Father" for the longest time in my spiritual journey. And then one day I did. It's difficult to describe, but at that moment I felt immediately that I had become more intimate with God.

The apostle Paul wrote, "You should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God's very own children, adopted into his familycalling him "Father, dear Father." For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God's children" (Romans 8:1516). Indeed.


3 We Can Come to God with Confidence

I've quoted it once in another context, but this is such an important saying of Jesus that it bears repeating:

"You parents if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not! If you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him." (Matthew 7:911)

This doesn't mean we can assume that everything we request of God will be granted. God loves us a little more than that. It does mean that every prayer is heard and that God will give us what we most need (which doesn't always correspond to what we think we need).

The great theologian Augustine put it this way: "Our Father: At this name love is aroused in us . . . and the confidence of obtaining what we are about to ask. . . . What would he not give to his children who ask, since he has already granted them the gift of being his children?

Who Art in Heaven

If you haven't figured it out already, prayer is pretty hard to figure out. First it's one thing and then it's another. Here's another case in point:

If the words our Father teach that God is intimate, this phrasewho art in heavensuggests that God is distant. This doesn't sound very good until you understand what Jesus is driving at.

He doesn't mean to say that God is physically distant; "heaven" is not a place. It is a way of beingexisting in perfect loveand that way of being is so perfect that it is unlike life as we know it (which, to put it as nicely as possible, is not perfect in love).

Heaven in the Bible is usually contrasted with earth, as in the phrase we're about to look at: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This suggests that the one sphere, earth, has a long way to go to become like the other sphere, heaven.

The Bible usually uses the word holy to talk about this. Holy doesn't mean "perfectly good in a religious sort of way," but "set apart." In this sense, I could say my best suit is holy because it's set apart in many ways: It's the most expensive, finest tailored piece of clothing I own. And I've set it apart to wear only on the most special occasions.


In calling God holy, we're saying that he is set apart, distinct, utterly different than human beings. God is nothing like us: He is infinite, and we're finite; he is all-knowing and present everywhere, and we are not; he is pure goodness and love, and we are not. And here's the kicker for philosophical types: We participate in being, and he transcends being (let's not get into that here).

The practical point is this: The Lord's Prayer reminds us that we can never put God in a box, mold him into our image, or make him more acceptable to our sensibilities.


In her book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris talks about this dimension of faith:

One so often hears people say, 'I just can't handle it,' when they reject a biblical image of God as Father, as Mother, as Lord or Judge; God as lover, as angry or jealous, God on a cross. I find this choice of words revealing, however real the pain they reflect: If we seek a God we can 'handle,' that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we've cut down to size.

As intimate as God becomes, he always remains himself, utterly distinct from us, someone we hold in awe, someone who continues to shape usas well it should be if we don't want to narrowly confine the wideness of his mercy.

On to the first petition.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

To keep a name hallowed means to respect the name and what stands behind it. It's like having a great family name with a profound heritage and a long-standing reputation for honesty in business. Then along comes a son who dishonors the family name by lying to clients and embezzling funds. It's a disgrace to the family name, we say, and the family's name is tarnished.


Hallowed here, then, literally means to "keep holy," or to "honor and esteem."


Name here is not a reference to a convenient label, like those we put on people when they are born so we don't get them confused. In the Bible especially, a name often means something, usually describing unique characteristics of the person: Jesus means "savior," Barnabas means "encourager," and so on. That's even more true when it comes to names for God: Holy, Redeemer, Creator, and the like. It's especially true for the most revealing name of God: Father. (If you skimmed the section "Our Father," you'd better go back and read it now.)

It wouldn't seem that we would have to ask God to make sure his name is never disgraced; you'd think he'd be interested in maintaining his honor as well. He is, but we're notat least, not always. This petition is just a roundabout way of saying, "Lord, help me never to do or say anything to dishonor your name and what you stand for."

This is a tall order because it doesn't take much to do something stupid to dishonor that name. I do it everyday: being impatient with a coworker; ignoring the street person asking for a handout; not helping my wife at home; and so on. This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't wear the family name, Christian, and if I hadn't prayed the Lord's Prayer last Sunday to keep the Father's name hallowed.

Because this is hard to do, I need God's help. And so I continue to pray, "Hallowed by thy name."

Thy Kingdom Come

This is a prayer for everything to turn out right in the end. It is, of course, another "useless" prayer, like so many others in this prayer: God is going to bring history to a glorious end. What he promised long ago he will fulfill.

There will come a day, according to the book of Revelation, when: "[God] will live with them [meaning us], and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. For the old world and its evils are gone forever" (Revelation 21:34).

The promise is sure, and it reminds us that this life isn't as good as it gets. One member of one congregation I served had lost a son in childhood. She was in her 70s by the time I knew her, and she had a great sense of humor and was not hesitant to share a smile with the rest of us. But she also carried with her a touch of sadness from this early loss, as well as from the loss of her husband a few years earlier. As much as she enjoyed her life, and as much as she contributed to the lives of others, she told me, "I'm looking forward to seeing my son and husband someday."


She understood this part of the Lord's Prayer. As good as this life can be, it's not good enough. There is something better we await and upon which we can pin our hopes and our lives.


Thy Will Be Done on Earth As It Is in Heaven

This is a deceptive little petition that seems so harmless and well-intentioned at first. Henry Ward Beecher, a nineteenth-century Protestant preacher said, "You read, 'Thy will be done,' and you say to yourself, 'O, I can pray that'; and all the time your mind goes round and round in immense circuits and far-off distances; but God is continually bringing the circuits nearer to you, till he says, 'How is it about your temper and your pride? How is it about your business and daily life?'"

To pray to do God's will, then, is no small prayer. It encompasses about everything we do. This is not a prayer to do God's will on Sundays or when we feel religious. Nor is it a prayer to do God's will as best as we can or according to our interpretation. No, the prayer is to do God's will "as it is done in heaven."

For a serious writer, heaven is The New Yorker magazine. If an aspiring writer were to write in such a way that someone would say, "That sounds like something from The New Yorker,"well, that's about as good as it gets.

For the person of prayer, we want to live life as it's lived in heaven. Again, heaven is not a place so much as a way of being, a way of existing, and that way is described as love. To say our friends who have died are "in heaven" is to say that they exist in a state of love, loving each other and God in ways that are unimaginable to us now.

That qualification, "as it is in heaven," is what saves this prayer from becoming an oppressive burden. The temptation is to begin to catalogue all the ways we fall short of doing God's willimpatience, ungratefulness, selfishness, gluttonyand vow to do better in the future. That we should do better goes without saying. But God's will is not a list of do's and don'ts as much as it is living in love. Someone once asked Jesus what the greatest commandments were, which essentially asked what God's will ultimately is. Jesus replied that we should love God with everything in us, and we should love other people as we love ourselves.

According to the first three petitions, then, to pray is to turn our lives completely over to God so that we may be shaped and guided by his loving hands. In some respects, this is a frightening idea; there's no getting around that. But it's also true that to give yourself to God is the most exciting (and exacting!) adventure a person can go on.


By this time, it should be more clear than ever that prayer is not a religious activity that we add to our lives to make them a little nicer; prayer is something that will transform our lives, inside and out.

What to Do If You Hate the Term "Father"

For people who have been verbally or physically abused by their fathers, this word causes all sorts of discomfort. Others reject the name father in prayer because they deeply resent the patriarchal assumptions that have oppressed women through the centuries. These powerful emotional reactions are understandable, and I agree with spiritual advisors who suggest that such people place a moratorium on using the wordif that's the thing that's keeping them from praying.

Because intimacy is such an important feature of Christian prayer, though, attempts to substitute another name for God have repeatedly failed. Some have suggested, for example, that we pray, "Our Creator." God is certainly our creator, and powerful, and the origin of all things in heaven and earthas the title "Creator" impliesso it is good to address God as such from time to time.


But to do so on a regular basis undermines the most interesting thing about Christian prayer: its ability to bring us closer to God. You just can't get as close to a creator as you can a father.

We have to remember that people were abused by fathers in Jesus' day, and that in his time, there were goddesses galore in the larger Roman and Greek cultures, to whom a lot of people preferred to pray. Jesus knew using the word father would create all sorts of problems for some people. But he still used it because he knew, in the long run, that it would do more spiritual good than psychological harm.

It's also wise to remember that when we object to the word father because it reminds us of our male parents, we are getting things backward. Jesus introduces the term not because he wants us to shape our understanding of God into the image of our earthly fathers. In fact, just the opposite is true: He wants us, among other things, to shape our understanding of fatherhoodand parentingin light of who our Heavenly Father is.

So even if we are uncomfortable using this word in prayer (as I was for a time), we should come back to it now and then, until we come to the point when we can use the name freely. Then we can begin to shape our own parenting, not by our past, but in light of our Heavenly Father who loves us in unimaginable ways.

God Is Not a Lonely Father

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, "When we pray to the Father, we adore and glorify him together with the Son and the Holy Spirit." In other words, in the Christian tradition, the Lord's Prayer assumes that God exists as a Trinity: as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This is not the place to discuss why this is central to Christianity, nor will we go into detail explaining how God can exist as a Trinity. Suffice it to say that the centuries-long Christian understanding is that God exists as one "essence" in three "persons," equal in power and glory. It's not a committee of three or one being with three "faces," but three in one and one in three. You can see that we've reached the limits of human language here.


This is not a merely theoretical matter for Christians, either. It arises out of our experience of God: We experience God as the creator of the world; we experience God as he walked among us as Jesus Christ, the Son; we experience God inwardly as the Holy Spirit.

The Trinity also demonstrates for us at a deep level why love is so central to Christian faith. Not only is it commanded by God, but God himself lives in an eternal relationship of love, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because we are created in God's image, it is vital for us to be in relationships of love.

The Trinity also helps us recognize what is going on in prayer. Author and scholar C. S. Lewis put it this way in his classic Mere Christianity:

An ordinary Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the man who was Godthat Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is prayingthe goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him onthe motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.