The Prayer And A Way To Pray It

A while ago I mentioned meditating on the Lord's Prayer, the "Our Father" taking it phrase by phrase, sometimes by individual words, other times sentence by sentence and sentences in groups.   My basic method is to use it with beads, twenty-five on the loop of them I'm using and repeating the words, thinking about their meaning in those groupings one at a time, coordinating with my breaths. I do it while lying down with my knees bent and my feet flat on the floor to save my back.  I don't see any advantage to meditating in an uncomfortable position in which you're going to spend more time thinking about your discomfort than on what you're supposed to be concentrating on.

There have been countless commentaries on the Lord's Prayer, short passages to entire books by eminent scholars, great thinkers and saints, high and brainy and lowly and simple - some of the best I've seen are by the simple saints.  It's  a temptation to go over one after another of those,  such as the one St. Teresa of Avila included in The Way of Perfection or John Dominic Crossan's fairly recent book on the topic or, well, I'd guess there are thousands to choose from.  

For a beginner like me I don't think that's an especially productive way to go because, as you can see from looking at different ones, different people find different, though generally related things about the petitions and praise, some not so related.  I read one of the evangelical critics of Crossan leveling the old accusation against his egalitarian economic interpretation of the prayer,  that it was "agenda" driven, as if a conservative-evangelical one which didn't talk about egalitarian economic-justice would be without the opposite agenda.   I make that distinction of "conservative evangelical" because there are actually liberal evangelicals, not that you'd know that by the use of the word.  Some of whom I suspect share in Crossan's general  view of the prayer.  

It's my experience that for real depth of thought, there's nothing like having to come up with an idea on ones own, knowing that anything you think of, almost certainly someone else has thought before. 

There are certainly the obvious issues such as the gendering of God, the context I mentioned of a first century person who would have been the recipent of Jesus' advice having a far different view of what a "father" was, the idea that I was surprised to see St. T. noticed too, the idea of God being "in heaven".   I thought it was a rather strange thing to think of God being contained in something larger than God - though I quickly thought that a house wasn't greater than the persons living in it, and that the resident might also be the builder of it.  

One particular problem is the translation "and lead us not into temptation" which implies God is a tempter to evil.  Pope Francis a few years back said he thought that was a bad translation, I use the alternative "let us not fall into . . . "which is close to the literal translation of the original in some scholars' opinions.   

I have found that for me the phrase "your will be done" was comfortingly passive, a passive act of submission until I thought that seemed inadequate because if God's will being done comes after "Your Kingdom come (passing over the implications of "Kingdom" what would that be but people agreeing to do God's will, forgiving our debts (or trespasses) and being delivered fromevil.  

I've also started keeping a list of various ideas that come to mind under the heading of the various phrases, clauses, sentences and, at times, individual words of the prayer.   That isn't meant to be an orderly thing, though I've got it on loose leafs that could be arranged into some order.  

I think in the end it's better to come up with your own readings of the prayer, first, then to question your conclusions, looking for your own agenda and challenging your own conclusions, or testing them.   I did note in what I said a few weeks back that there is no singular first person anywhere in the prayer, the petition and attribution is always "Our" and "Us" and "To Us" and that first person plural isn't limited to a particular group, sect, nation, race, or species.   I think if you start with that observation in mind you're less likely to go seriously wrong.  I do think it's quite easy to go wrong on even such a simple thing,most of that will come with considering God to be excluding some others in "his" proper concerns.  Getting past the gender exclusion in concept and maybe in language is helpful too.   One of the things I read pointed out that Jesus wasn't so much teaching those who asked him how to pray a prayer as a method of praying,an attitude of it, avoiding counterproductive aspects of it.