Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer II
Dear Friends of Christ Church,
I regret that we are not able to meet at the present time owing to the precautions belonging to the Covid-19 outbreak. I will continue to post the Lenten reflections and sermons. Please keep safe but be not afraid.
In Christ,
Fr. David Curry
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.
And so it begins. “God himself taught us this prayer,” Thomas Aquinas observes, making clear the connection between Christ and God for “He who with the Father hears our prayer, did himself teach us how to pray.” It is, he says, the “most perfect” and the “most preeminent” of prayers. It is quite simply the prayer that underlies all prayer and without which our prayers are less than truly prayers. Aquinas makes the point that “if we are praying appropriately and correctly, then whatever words we may be using we are not saying anything other than what is laid down in the Lord’s Prayer.”[1]
All prayer in some sense or another has its ground in the Lord’s Prayer. Simone Weil, a modern writer in her work “Waiting on God,” notes that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.” At issue is the challenge of paying attention to each word. She is, we might say, ‘the philosopher of attention’ whose voice is especially needed in our age of distraction and inattention. To ponder the Lord’s Prayer is to learn to pay attention to God and to his word. “Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it,” Jesus says to us in our despair and desolation.
Praying the Lord’s prayer attentively is the subject of our Lenten programme. Following in the footsteps of Origen, the great early Patrisic biblical theologian, Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century emphasizes the intimate nature of the Lord’s Prayer. “Many things [in the past[ were said in praise of God, But we do not find that the people of Israel were taught to address God as ‘Our Father’… With regard to Christ’s people, however, the Apostle says, ‘We have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father and that not of our deserving, but of grace.’ This, then, we express in the prayer when we say Father, which name also stirs up love. For what can be dearer than sons and daughters are to a father?” The Lord’s Prayer is grounded in the understanding of God as Trinity.
To begin with “Our Father’ is to begin with praise, Aquinas teaches, but such a beginning also corrects what he calls three errors that are absolutely fatal for the life of prayer. What are these three errors?
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