The Ultimate Prayer Partner

Spirituality Column #117
February 3, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

The Ultimate Prayer Partner
By Bob Walters

Fourth in a series on The Lord’s Prayer

When my childhood church modernized its liturgical language in the 1960s – goodbye “thy” and “thine;” hello “you” and “your” – I remember saying the updated Lord’s Prayer only once or twice in Sunday services.

“Our Father in Heaven, Holy be your name …”

It simply didn’t have its divine “oomph.” The rest of the new liturgy soldiered on, but the traditional “Which art in heaven” Lord’s Prayer was back in the service almost immediately.

I like the “which art,” “hallowed,” “thy” and “thine” version for its sheer linguistic pleasure and familiar, poetic cadence. In the Sermon on the Mount version from Matthew, the Greek text plainly says “debts.” In Luke 11 it’s “sins.” I like Origen’s “trespasses.”

The Protestant Lord’s Prayer ends with “…forever, Amen.” I have always said, “… forever and ever, Amen.” Catholics stop at “… deliver us from evil.”

Minor points. The prayer, and more importantly the love and trust relationship with God Almighty, are the major points.

We all have our favorite versions and styles, prayers and verses, prayer partners and prayer leaders. I know certain people who, when they pray – inside or outside of a liturgy – seem to supernaturally just reach out, grab the Lord and attach Him to the proceedings in a mystical, very nearly tangible way.

If you know someone like that, say a prayer of thanks for them right now.

What’s special about the Lord’s Prayer is that it is the prayer Jesus – Jesus as a prayer leader – teaches us to pray. He instructed his disciples in Matthew 6 against false prayers and publicly showing off, and reminded them that God – His and our Father – already knows what we need. So this, He said, “is how you should pray.”

Romans 8:26 reminds us that humans know not “how to pray as we ought.” Maybe that helps explain why throughout Luke major events in Jesus’ ministry are depicted primarily as prayer events, to help instruct us in prayer. In Luke 11 on the way to Jerusalem, the disciples fairly beg Jesus to teach them how to pray the way He prays.

Jesus obliges them by sharing what Pope Benedict describes in his recent book Jesus of Nazareth, as “the interior dialogue of the triune love,” The Lord’s Prayer.

A prayer to God shared by Jesus. How’s that for a prayer partner?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), who will eventually get to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, here borrows various phrases and scholarship from Pope Benedict’s wonderful book, Jesus of Nazareth. Mea Culpa.