IN looking up the translation of Matthew 6:7 where the variations on "vain repetitions" comes from, it would seem that that particular word choice might have started with the King James version.
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Other translation traditions talk about heaping up lots of babble or vain words as if you stood a better chance of getting pagan gods' attention by doing that.
That's not what I advocated, to start with, what I advocated was thinking about the meanings of the word as a meditation on their meaning and in context. Using beads to measure the duration of focus on the different parts of the prayer is just to keep those ideas in mind for a time instead of just reciting the words. St. Teresa of Avila talked about the futility of merely saying the words by rote, not thinking about the meaning of it - the way some of the more insipid mindfulness meditations focus on meaningless sounds or feelings or images to deaden the mind instead of engaging it. If you want to do that it's less of an abuse of the Scripture to get yourself a white noise recording or try one of those weird binaural things they post on YouTube. Though Pauline Oliveros' "deep listening" recordings are more congenial and more interesting as to sound. I still wouldn't find it had much to do with what I'm talking about. If it's relaxation you want, watch some ASMR vidoes of people getting a massage or their heads whacked around by an Indian barber.
I'm not really interested in that kind of meditation as mind numbing. To tell you the truth, when I tried "centering prayer" as in The Cloud of Unknowing I didn't go for it much. Nor do I find the kind of Orthodox centering prayer where you constantly declare yourself a sinner (as if God didn't know that) and beg God for forgiveness over and over again, for hours and days and years and lifetimes to be particularly healthy or founded in the instructions of Jesus when he was asked how to pray. I think it's got more to do with an obsessive fear of sex than it does anything useful. It's certainly not anything I've found in scripture. By their fruits you will know them, Jesus said, I would trust someone who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, took care of the sick, visited those in prison more than I would someone who spent their life bewailing their sinfulness when they never risked much in life to do good things for our fellow creatures.
The idea of praying isn't for us to try to change something about God, it's to change us, how we think and how we act. We can ask for things, "Give us this day our daily bread," "Forgive us out debts (or trespasses) "don't let us fall into temptation but deliver us from evil." I'd even say the beginning of the prayer which is more properly considered worship, "Our Creator who is in heaven, hallowed be your name" is for our information not God's. "Your Kingdom come, your will be done," is a request as much as "give us this day our daily bread." Who wouldn't rather be ruled by the justice of God than the best human devised system of government that, even in the best of times, relies on human frailty and propensity to evil or just mere ignorance.
I, actually, don't prefer any of the traditional or inclusive language suggestions for getting around the gendering of God, "Creator" which is close to what I like sounds too remote from the idea of God as a loving parent, "Maker" is closer in terms of familiarity, it seems to me. "Father" works if you keep in mind that God isn't a human male and that that choice of words said to the people Jesus first gave the prayer to meant to evoke the kind of relationship they would expect to have of their father, tied up in obligations of conduct and aspirations to goodness, on the part of humans and the hope of if not obligation to be provided for. "Mother" might be closer for some modern people,especially those of my age group whose depression-WWII experiencing fathers may have been too remote and the number of homes in which the mother was the sole parent. But Jesus didn't give our age cohort in our time the prayer, he gave it to 1st century people whose mothers were not anything like enabled, empowered or endowed with authority and the ability to provide for a family. And the whole thing is filled with metaphors, "Kingdom" is a human invention as certainly as bread is. Debts are a human invention, too. Those certainly stand in for a more general category, the reason I don't have any problem with using the traditional Catholic translation of "forgive us our trespasses," which I grew up with and is a more general category of things for which obligations are taken on, obligations we may not be capable of fulfilling and for which we might need forgiveness as well as forgiving.
As to the hate mail, No, I'm not going to feel embarrassed or be inhibited from talking about this, I'm done feeling embarrassed by the enforced inhibition that keeps liberals or lefties or college credentialed people from talking about these things explicitly. This is the kind of thought crime I'm announced as intending to commit.
Update: Geesh, when I think "Matthew" and type "James" I think it's time to take another antihistamine and go back to bed. I've had a really hard time shaking whatever it was I had last month, it lingers, ebbs and, unfortunately, doesn't much flow. Blocked ears (the thing I hate the most) cough, sore throat, fatigue. I'm hoping to get done with it by New Years II (2021) when Biden becomes president. This coda to 2020 has been as bad as any of the actual year.
Update 2: You know, ALL of the scripture is talking about things beyond human experience, talking about, hinting at things that are outside of human experience and you can only make that communication in terms human beings can deal with. The discrepancy between the necessarily limited and inadequate terms used and what is being talked about isn't any great shock. The exact relationship between things talked about by the physical sciences and the mathematics which is the language through which those things are comprehended is no more understood and the things that the real sciences deal with are a lot simpler than the things the Scripture talks about. To think that the words have some absolute status is to willfully misunderstand that state of affairs. I think of Isaiah 55: 8-11:
“My thoughts,” says the Lord, “are not like yours,
and my ways are different from yours.
As high as the heavens are above the earth,
so high are my ways and thoughts above yours.
“My word is like the snow and the rain
that come down from the sky to water the earth.
They make the crops grow
and provide seed for planting and food to eat.
So also will be the word that I speak—
it will not fail to do what I plan for it;
it will do everything I send it to do.
The Bible is written by people in language people can understand, it has no choice but to be metaphorical when it addresses things past human experience. And metaphors can be used to bunch ideas together based on general characteristics. Debts are like other trespasses, fathers are like other caregivers, God is our maker just as our parents are our begetters and, for better or worse, caregivers and influences. No, who's afraid of metaphors are just not thinking hard about what human language inevitably is. It's all metaphors, right down to the bottom.
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