HALLOW?

Hallowed Be Thy Name . . .

        We tend to pass through the first clause of the Lord’s Prayer rather quickly, and not always with much thought. Yet it is in some ways the most remote and the most archaic. What does ‘hallowing’ mean, and what is it to hallow a name? Many people nowadays know ‘Hallow’ only from ‘Halloween’. This ancient word comes from Old English ‘halig’ which in another development evolved into ‘holy’. So in Middle English the ‘hallows’ were the Saints (hence Hallowe’en, i.e. Hallows-Even, the night before All Saints’ Day, when evil was said to be abroad and needed to be kept away by grinning lanterns), and ‘to hallow’ is to make, or consider as, holy. (In Dutch, the adjective can still be transformed straight into the verb: ‘heilig’ becomes ‘heiligen’.) In the Latin languages its equivalents come from ‘sancti-ficare’, from ‘sanctus’=holy. (English, being a hybrid language, also has ‘sacred’.)

       Fine. But what do ‘sanctus’ and ‘holy’ mean? Fundamentally, something set aside from the rest, special. Hence, something set aside because intended for, or in some way connected with, the divine. So to hallow something means to set it aside, to treat it with great respect, because in some way it is touched by, filled with, the numen, the magic, the uncanniness, of a, of the, Deity. In Hindu India, cows are considered holy.

      Now what is (to be) hallowed here is the Name of God. From the Old Testament, we know that Name. It is ‘I AM’; it is Yahweh. How does one hallow a name?

In the Netherlands of my childhood, there existed a League Against Swearing. It paid for neat enamel notices in trams and buses that said, ‘Speak freely about God, but never abuse His name.’ That was one basic way of hallowing the Name: its opposite is the now-ubiquitous ‘OMG’. Judaism has another way, which is never to write or say it. A lesser name of God is Elohim; and the common form of the Name is to use its consonants with Elohim’s vowels, which creates ‘Adonai’. And devout Jews, when writing the Deity’s name in English, spell it ‘G-d’.

If we pray that God’s name may be ‘hallowed’, we pray that, at the least, God (for the Name and the Being are one) may be respected as the loving Deity of a large proportion of the planet’s inhabitants. In a de-christianized but consciousness-raised Western world, most of us have learnt to respect the divinities of Moslems and Jews, and possibly Hindus, but the Christian God and His followers are still all too often fair game. More seriously, Christians are still actively persecuted in a number of countries. 

Respect of God’s Name is a minimal thing to pray for. Hallowing goes well beyond that. It is what the angels do. It is worship, thanks and praise. It is the choirs of Heaven. To hope for that on Earth, to pray for it, is a difficult but intense happiness.