The Lord's Prayer: Another Reflection

A quite different context, that of the nineteenth century and the ministry of Fredrick Denison Maurice, offers a complementary view to that of St. Cyprian. While Cyprian’s emphasis is focused on our status as sons and daughters of God who are privileged to say “Our Father,” thus drawing special attention to the intimate and mystical dimension of the prayer, Maurice gives special consideration to the moral implications of the opening address. One ought to recall that sharp class division is the social context in which he writes. So the prayer seems to suggest a reassessment of how we regard our neighbor, whoever he or she may be. To say “Our Father” is to suggest that there is one Father of one human family. Maurice writes:

How can we look round upon the people whom we habitually feel to be separated from us by almost impassible barriers; who are above us so that we cannot reach them, or so far beneath us that the slightest recognition of them is an act of gracious condescension; upon the people of an opposite faction to our own, whom we denounce as utterly evil; upon men whom we have reason to despise; upon the actual wrong-doers of society, those who have made themselves vile, and are helping to make it vile—and then teach ourselves to think that, in the very highest exercise of lives, these are associated with us. That when we pray, we are praying with them and for them. . . . Think how many causes are at work every hour of our lives to make this opening word of the prayer a nullity and a falsehood. –Sermons on the Prayer Book and the Lord’s Prayer, London 1902, 283-293

The divisions at present in American society and reflected, in some measure, in the Church are now so deep and so vehemently felt, civil discourse is becoming painfully difficult, many people simply opting for a political correctness and coded politeness as a way of avoiding each other. It may be of some help to recall that those who dare to say “Our Father” thereby commit themselves to the conviction that we are inexorably bound together by the providence and love of one God. Radical as it may seem, we need our adversary, our opponent, our enemy. We are praying with them and for them. Some solid meditation on this point may start to carve out room for a God who is infinitely beyond our grasp and whose love cannot, by our standards, be constrained. Is this easy? No. The easy response, always posing as the reasonable response, is to fight, argue, win, and, if necessary (and how often are we told this is necessary), kill. But God’s ways are not ours, for which we might give thanks. There is, I should add, some real civic benefit to this universal vision of the human family. St. Augustine once remarked that we do not love our enemies to the end that they should remain our enemies, in which case nothing has really changed. Rather, he asserted, we love them to the end that they should become our friends. Therefore, a real transformation is under way in saying “Our Father.” .