“There’s always the Our Father.”

by Jennie Hurd.

My first Spiritual Director was a wonderful, older, Poor Clare nun called Mother Paula. Heaven knows what she made of the young Methodist probationer presbyter who came to visit her, but she listened patiently and offered words of wisdom that I treasure to this day. During one conversation on prayer and the challenge of praying, she floored me with the profundity and simplicity of her advice: “There’s always the Our Father.”

Until then, I had considered the Lord’s Prayer to be predominantly for corporate worship and not for personal devotion. The clue was in its grammar, surely – “Our,” “us” – and I had been taught from childhood that God wanted to hear from me personally, in my own words. Mother Paula’s wisdom transformed my attitude to the Lord’s Prayer. It became an essential part of my daily devotions, but it is especially precious now as a mindful meditation when I find myself on ‘Planet 3 a.m.’ and, over the years, in those pastoral situations and difficult meetings where other words simply fail. As Mother Paula said, “There’s always the Our Father.” As followers of Jesus, it unites us. As an expression of our relationship with God, it brings us into relationship with all who have prayed similarly in very varied circumstances over the centuries.

I am not a Greek scholar, and so my understanding of the Lord’s Prayer has been expanded by the nuances of other different translations and versions that are available to us. Always, however, the pattern remains the same: it begins with God – “Our Father…”; it moves to we who pray – “Give us today…”; it returns to God – “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours…” For me, it gives a pattern for living, with God as our beginning and end, our context, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being”.[1] In spite of these three apparent movements through the pattern of the prayer, I perceive a pivot point which comes when we move from “Your kingdom come, Your will be done” to “Give us today…” – a kind of shift, if you like, as the prayer becomes a more of a conversation, a dialogue, and so the blueprint for all our prayers.

Two words from the traditional version of the Lord’s Prayer have recently repaid further reflection: “trespasses” and “temptation.” According to Nick Hayes, “’Trespass’ is one of the most charged words in the English language.”[2]  Even in its legal context, it still carries a “moral stigma.”[3] He points out the irony that it was the freethinking Bible translator William Tyndale who incorporated it into the Lord’s Prayer and therefore deeply into the English language. Contemporary versions use the word “sins” or “debts,” drawing on the gospels of Luke and Matthew respectively, and William Barclay commends the former for its simplicity[4]. I sense Mother Paula would approve.

Having worked in Wales for much of my ministry, I have learnt that the Welsh word used for “temptation” in the Lord’s Prayer is “profedigaeth.” It carries the sense of an experience of testing (“profi” means to test, to prove), but it is also the word commonly used for bereavement. A woman once told me after a bilingual service that she had never prayed the Lord’s Prayer in English before and that doing this had a given her a new understanding. She realized that she was not actually asking for God to keep her from bereavement, an experience which, as she rightly said, is impossible, but rather asking for a different kind of help: “Save us from the time of trial,” as one version puts it. For me, the Welsh expresses this better than the English, leading to my interpretation that our prayer is for resistance to temptation and strength not to yield in the trying times. There are occasions when I cling to this like a lifebelt.

I offer a question in conclusion: What would be your ‘Desert Island’ word or phrase from the Lord’s Prayer? To put it another way, what word or words distil the essence of the Lord’s Prayer for you? For me, it is “Your will be done,” but the Prayer is so rich, it will be different for all of us. Thank God for that.

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[1] Acts 17: 28

[2] Hayes, N: The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (Bloomsbury: 2020), p17

[3] Ibid, p18

[4] Barclay, W: The Lord’s Prayer (Arthur James: 1998), p87