HALLOWING

In my continuing meditation on the life, activities and thoughts of Yeshua Bar-Yosef before he began his ministry, I've begun to think about the moment, and the way, he began to imagine what we call the Lord's Prayer or the Pater Noster. For I do not believe that this prayer which, as Bonhoeffer and others have said, sums up all the prayers we could conceivably pray was born fully formed at the moment when the disciples asked him how they should address the Father. 

I imagine him, then, in that slow eighteen-year runup from twelve to Cana, gradually forming and evolving his interactions with the Father -- learning, in fact, to pray. As, indeed, we all must, but in his case it must have been very different. I do not imagine him, for instance, having the problems we face, which were so beautifully expressed by John Donne: "I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door." But I do imagine the composition of the Pater Noster as having taken much time and meditation.

So, to begin: "Hallowed be thy Name." Sanctificetur nomen tuum. We have trouble with this, as we don't hallow much, and we are't used to attached serious weight to a name. We can look it up, and find that to hallow or sanctify is to set apart, to venerate or honour. And what about the Name itself? Most of us know that the Hebrew name for God is something like "Jehovah", and that it is in fact "Yahweh", a name too sacred to be pronounced unless furnished with the vowels of "Adonai" the day-to-day name of the Deity. In Hebrew it is written YHWH, four letters, in Greek a tetragrammaton, shown in Goya's painting above. Richard Rohr has said that this name was not spoken but breathed; as such it was, and is, a Name that lives in wind and water, in the gusts and ripples of creation, in the sweetness and the sorrows of humanity.

I have imagined Yeshua, in his late Twenties, spending a Shabbat away from the family, perhaps on the edge of the rock hard by Nazareth, lost for an entire day in an Act of Adoration of the Name, of the Tetragrammaton. I imagine him having a miniature basket filled with a wax medallion of the Name; seeing it in the shape of tree-branches, hearing it in the autumn wind. And out of such a day grows quite naturally the very first petition, or commandment, of the Great Prayer: "Hallowed be Thy Name." For unlike ourselves, who are known but not defined by our names, God is his Name. Its root is the verb "to be". So to hallow the Name is to worship the Father. 

How do we, then, hallow it? First, by never using it disrespectfully. I was brought up as a very liberal Protestant; but my parents came down heavily on any casual use of the Name. In the Dutch streetcars of my youth, among the advertisements were nailed little enamel signs of the League Against Swearing: "Speak freely about God, but never abuse His name." So we could begin by banishing "OMG" from our and our children's texts. 

Secondly, we could follow the League sign's other suggestion, and hallow the Name by talking about it, and about Him, with others, even those who don't agree with us. This is hard, but it may be one of the ways we can help our world come back to civilised behaviour and conversation across divides of conviction and belief. 

And thirdly, we could perhaps best hallow the Name by imitating Yeshua and praying intimately and often. A Carthusian wrote that we should not think that we can bring to God only the best of ourselves: on the contrary, He can only heal us and love us better if we bring him everything, all the time. Something we would not do even with our best friends; but then, He and his Name are sanctified --- set apart.