DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?

 

 

Houtōs oun proseuchesthe humeis: pater hèmōn ho en tois ouranois, hagiasthètō to onoma sou; elthetō hè basileia sou; genèthètō to thelèma sou, hōs en ouranōi kai epi tès gès; to arton hèmōn ton epiousion dos hèmin sèmeron; kai aphes hèmin ta opheilèmata hèmōn, hōs kai hèmeis aphèkamen tois opheilètais hèmōn; kai mè eisenegkèis hèmas eis peirasmon, alla hrusai hèmas apo tou ponèrou. Ean gar aphète tois anthrōpois ta paraptōmata autōn, apèsei kai humin ho patèr humōn o ouranios. Ean de mè aphète tois anthropōn ta paraptōmata autōn, oude ho patèr humōn aphèsei ta paraptōmata humōn.

 

⁹ thus therefore pray ye: `Our Father who [art] in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name.

¹⁰ `Thy reign come: Thy will come to pass, as in heaven also on the earth.

¹¹ `Our bread for the day give us to-day.

¹² `And forgive us our debts, as also we forgive our debtors.

¹³ `And do Thou not force us into a testing, but deliver us from the evil, because Thine is the reign, and the power, and the glory -- to the ages. Amen.

¹⁴ `For, if ye forgive men their false steps He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;

¹⁵ but if ye do not forgive men their false steps, neither will your Father forgive your false steps.

 

What is there to say about this prayer that has not been said a million times or more? That it is useful to remember that basileia reflects a condition (“reign”) more than a place (“kingdom”); that Greek readers would have read “may [what is] thy will come to pass” rather than “be done”; that they would have read epiousion as a very rare word for “for the coming day”; that opheilèmata are debts while paraptomata are false steps or payment errors; that peirasmos is more a test, an assay, than a seductive temptation; that, once again, ponèron is “bad” or “wicked” rather than “evil”, and that the genitive case after apo, “from” may refer to a person or to a thing: “from the wicked one” or “from what is wicked”.

            On the other hand, it is interesting to put it in the context of the Sermon on the Mount so far. In the immediate context, it is the outcome of the discussion on prayer, and may thus be thought of as a blueprint for what we should murmur to the Father behind the closed door of our inmost room. And yet notice that throughout it is placed in the first person plural: even alone, we are part of the Father’s family, and even our singular prayer reflects our siblinghood therein.

            In the context of the Sermon as the new Torah, the completed Torah, the most salient aspects of the prayer are perhaps its inwardness and its polyvalence. Inwardness, because it gladly recognises our weakness and our dependence, for forgiveness and even for simple nourishment (the daily bread reminds us also of the manna that Israel received in the wilderness); polyvalence, because unlike many prayers in the Old Testament, this prayer is not a request for one specific thing but covers every aspect of our relation to our Father: adoration (hallowing), hope (the reign), obedience (His will), dependence (bread), penitence (forgiveness), weakness (do not test us as Thou didst the great ones like Job), protection (the wicked one, wickedness).

            No wonder that it has remained the prayer for Christians. It was very surprising to a number of us to see Pope Francis’s boldness in changing the wording of the penultimate petition to “let us not enter into temptation”, and doing so in a way that neither restored the original nor made the translation any clearer. In the Greek, the act we ask to be spared is an action by God, not merely a permission by God for an act of our own. It is God who might eisenengkein us to a testing, and roots of that verb are those of “forcing” and “into”. It would have been better for His Holiness to have concentrated on the peirasmos rather than on the verb.

            And for those who thrill to the idea of reading, and hearing, the original words Yeshua pronounced, above is the reconstructed written version in Jewish Aramaic of the 1^st century; below is the transliterated Aramaic text; and a reading can be heard here. 

Abbun d'bishmayya

yitqadesh shmakh

titey malkhutakh

tihey re`utakh

heykhma debishmayya

keyn af be’ar`a

lachman deme’ar`a

hab lan yoma deyn umachra

ushbaq lan chobayn

heykhma de’af shebaqnan lechayyabayn

we’al ta`eylan lenisayuna

ela atseylan min bisha

 

POOR AND FREE?

The following is a passage from the admirable The Wound of Love: a Carthusian Miscellany. The author, anonymous like all Carthusian writers, has been discussing spiritual poverty, in the context of poverty, chastity and obedience. I found these paragraphs very striking, even for those who are not monks or nuns They merit being read with real attention. 

We have no right to claim as our own the good which we do. We do not even have the absolute certainty of believing in God, of loving him or our brothers. Each morning we must receive everything anew in faith. God creates us truly at every moment. The past, we entrust to his mercy; we must empty our memory of its supposed riches so as to change it into a pure movement toward God himself beyond his gifts. This movement is lived uniquely in the reality of the present moment, in our conforming to the will of the Lord for us, here and now, in our communion of love and our close attention to him. Here poverty and simplicity become one. For the future, we entrust ourselves to God. We do not, as it were, have an account in some celestial bank, all we have is our faith in the love of the Lord, our hope and our desire to love. 

            We must not be anxious before the demands of true spiritual poverty. We are never so well off as when we have nothing. We are free and available for anything. Our ego, weak as it is, would like to cover its nakedness with furs made of material things, and intellectual and spiritual goods. The obscure light of faith is a light indeed, and whoever becomes accustomed to it will not abandon it for all the sweetness and consolations of days gone by. May God preserve us from our virtues! Our faith allows us to discard this deceitful covering in order to walk in truth along the path which is no path, which leads us to the Father in Love, that is, in the Spirit of Christ. The man who is poor finds the gates of death open, and he passes freely into the Kingdom of God. For if we despoil ourselves, it is in order to rediscover the innocent nakedness of God’s image in our hearts and thus to clothe ourselves in Christ (Galatians 4:27). Our poverty is the poverty of the children of God, who ‘having nothing, yet possess all’ ( 2 Corinthians 6:10), in hope and in faith. We have received ‘a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry “Abba! Father!”’ (Romans 8:15-17). 

THE PRAYER OF THE HEART

I have been moved by, and reflecting on, a passage from the Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love on the subject of the Prayer of the Heart. The author (anonymous as are all Carthusian authors) writes that in order to attain the Prayer of the Heart, we must confront all our own weaknesses: not to attempt to conquer them but to acknowledge and live them completely in our relation to God. Then God can enter into them and transform them. Is this last, he wonders, a kind of second thought on God’s part, or is it a fundamental dimension of the divine order?

“Even in the natural order, all true love is a victory of weakness. Love does not consist in dominating, possessing, or imposing one’s will on someone. Rather love is to welcome without defences the other as he or she comes to meet me. In return, one is sure of being welcomed unreservedly by the other without being judged or condemned, and without invidious comparisons. There are no contests of strength between two people who love each other. There is a kind of mutual understanding from within which a reciprocal trust emerges.

            Such an experience, even if inevitably imperfect, is already a very compelling one. Yet it is but a reflection of a divine reality. Once we really begin to believe in the infinite tenderness of the Father, we are, as it were, obliged to descend ever more fully and joyfully into a realm in which we neither possess nor understand nor control anything.

xxx

Thus, almost without being aware of it, we enter into communion with the divine life. The relation between Father and Son in the Spirit is at a level completely beyond our comprehension, a perfect embodiment of weakness transformed into communion.

            In a way closer to ourselves, this intimate tenderness of the thrice-holy God is revealed in the relationship between the incarnate Son and his Father. We cannothelp but be struck by the serenity and sense of infinite security with which Jesus quietly proclaims that he has nothing of his own, and that he can do nothing but what he sees the Father doing. What man would accept such powerlessness? Nevertheless, this is the path we must follow if we wish to live in the depths of our heart as God has made it, and as he transfigures it through the death and Resurrection of his Son.” (86-7)

I find this remarkable, both in its depth and in its conceptual simplicity. It goes well beyond the monastic life: indeed it may be more accessible in some ways to those living in the world and, perhaps, in relationships of human love.

            A perennial difficulty for us in these latter times is that we do not seem to have the direct access to the Father that Jesus had. And yet – if we think we do not, is that not because of us? Do we not, perhaps, try too hard to do everything ourselves, try to be better persons, try to do this better and to refrain from that more consistently? I think there is perhaps a two-stage development we need to learn to follow. The first stage is “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” That takes care of our compulsive need to fight our own battles and confront our inner and outer Amalekites all on our own. The second stage goes further and says “First let the Kingdom of God seek you, and find you, and all these things will turn up” – at least in so far as they are (as the Prayer Book says) “requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul”.

            A final subject is that last sentence of the quotation: God’s transfiguration of our heart through the death and Resurrection of his Son. That needs a lot more thought: I’ll try to get back to it at a later stage.  

The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 1994,2006). Readily available through Amazon.

I DON'T DO VOICES

The other night, I awoke around 3 a.m. as one tends to do at my age, for a natural function, and couldn’t get to sleep again. I was turning over in my mind a situation that was deeply bothering and full of complications, and that the hour of night was (as so often happens) making worse. I tried every meditative technique I know to chase it and go back to sleep, but with no success. Then, after about an hour of this, I turned to God and said, “Lord, help me to stop thinking about this”; and on the instant I heard a smiling voice – really: it was a soundless voice, but a voice – in my head that said “What took you so long?” Five minutes later I was asleep, and awoke refreshed at 7:15.

OK, I said to myself, being a fidgety intellectual: what does this mean? Autosuggestion? I know several people who from time to time hear voices, but I never had, and I figure I just don’t do voices. But if it was autosuggestion, why didn’t all the other techniques work that I’d tried? Yoga, breathing, even some Biblical meditations taken from St Francis de Sales -- so it wasn’t a turning to religion that changed things. If one is prepared to accept the existence and the possible presence of the Deity, then the key in this case was perhaps the simplicity.

I think that sometimes we over-complicate the deeps of our life. We twist and turn, mentally; we confuse conscience and consciousness (very easy in French, as they are the same word); we worry about theology, and morality, and the resistible rise of R*ch*rd D*wk*ns; we stress out about never being quite good enough, not being able to explain the ills we see in the world around us, not spending enough time and/or money on the less fortunate, not going to church, so forth. What we forget is the five-year-old who, crossing the road beside her mother, automatically and without looking sticks her hand up, knowing it will be grasped by a large parental one.

This, I think, is what is meant when we are told to be like children. And when, on occasion, we do react with that simplicity in dependence, when we stick our hand up or say “Lord, help me do this, or not do that”, it sometimes happens that we hear a voice saying “What took you so long?”