We dare to say 'Our Father'
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
WE DARE TO SAY 'OUR FATHER' REFLECTION FOR THE EASTER SEASON LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM While not as obsessively punctual as Immanuel Kant, I do like to take my dog out for his walk every...
...There are more aphorisms in that short section than one normally finds in an entire work by a lesser author...
...Mainly cribbed from earlier models, it served as a stylistic device for the poet: seven petitions to correspond to the seven terraces of the purgatorial mount...
...The matter can be stated even more simply than that...
...it is rapture in the Lord that is the final goal of prayer...
...And the more is, to use Buber's word, address...
...The lesson was not lost on me...
...Those who have read them (they are included in Waiting for God) can attest to their vigor...
...It occurred to me that I had never "dared to say" the prayer in my life...
...The notion of ascent is an ancient one in the history of spirituality...
...all of the daily rosaries during the months of May and October...
...It is this: for all of the changes in the church in general and the liturgy in particular, either to be applauded or lamented according to one's disposition, there is, at the core of the liturgy, a series of readings, recitations, gestures, and prayers which link us in time with the whole tradition of Christian worship...
...Is it any wonder, then, that the great mystics reach for that prayer, as if for oxygen, when they wish to plumb the depths of our relationship to God...
...WE DARE TO SAY 'OUR FATHER' REFLECTION FOR THE EASTER SEASON LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM While not as obsessively punctual as Immanuel Kant, I do like to take my dog out for his walk every afternoon at five o'clock...
...One of my favorite images is of Simone Weil, in the early 1940s, concentrating with that ferocity which she called attention on the Greek text of the prayer...
...a practice, if imitated by academics, that would sharply decrease the amount of scholarly writing in the world...
...When thinking about the Lord's Prayer, I often find myself thinking about her comments on it...
...The words fly up but the thought stays here below...
...Secondly, as people of faith we make gestures of faith among which are the recitation of traditional formulas of prayer such as the Pater...
...The very compressed terseness of the petitions render it impossible to rephrase them without verbosity...
...If we affirm forgiveness in the formula but do not forgive, then we have not only not understood...
...Through her blinding headaches, exacerbated by her clumsily inept attempts at doing farm work on the holdings of Gustave Thibon, Weil gave over her powerful soul to the words of that prayer...
...Jesus taught the prayer to the disciples who asked him to teach them to pray...
...Or, on the prayer itself: "It is to prayer what Jesus is to humanity...
...If Joachim Jeremias is to be believed, not only do we touch the ipsissima verba of Jesus in that prayer but, in his use of the term Abba we come to the heart of Jesus' intimate relationship to God...
...It takes even more daring to listen to them...
...It is a bit startling that one does something with perfect insouciance when grave doctors tell us that it should be done only with fear and awesome preparation...
...When one feels an attack of what Gabriel Daly has called the "old Catholic post-enlightenment blues," that sense of continuity and tradition should help...
...Or, "Our debtors comprise all beings and all things...
...His celebrated The Ladder of Divine Ascent contains thirty rungs...
...And so it is with the Lord's Prayer...
...They write after they have experienced and when they have something to say...
...We recite it, for example, in unison, before serving the evening meal at the St...
...we have gone back to the Lord's Prayer since that day...
...Vincent de Paul kitchen where I occasionally volunteer...
...If we pray for the kingdom to come but, in truth, are quite satisfied with the way things are, then we are like Claudius in the prayer scene of Hamlet...
...Bernard and the Victorines in it) but what we remember is Francis's Canticle because it was his while the Pater is, well, the Lord's...
...There is a point to be pondered in that fact...
...It may take daring to speak the words of the Lord's Prayer as the liturgy insists...
...The very act of saying a prayer — the repeating of a formula — is a break from other routines...
...Thirdly, there comes a time when we reflect back on what we say as persons of faith...
...It may be sentimental of me but it affords me great consolation to remember that when joining with my local congregation in singing the Pater I'm in the company of Augustine, Francis, Teresa, and, yes, Alexander VI who also sang it in similar settings...
...With that question in mind, the game was afoot...
...I learned the formula at the knee of a long-suffering nun and have said it all my life...
...First, one has to recollect the likely occasions when one would have said it: every day in parochial school...
...Saint Thomas, in the Summa, asks if it is the perfect prayer...
...It may well be that we would not turn to the Pater for nourishment as did Father Delp as he awaited execution by the Nazi government...
...It is a very popular prayer...
...Both insisted that only with awe and fear did one utter the phrase "Our Father.'' That made me think of the Latin phrase that once introduced the Lord's Prayer in the old Latin liturgy: audemus dicere — we dare to say...
...Quite frankly, it developed from a reading of some commentaries on the Our Father written by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa...
...However, we can console ourselves with the other common teaching of the great masters and mistresses of the life of prayer: the ability to be re-collected in prayer comes, not automatically, but with constant effort, a certain tenacious mortification, and the grace of God...
...Still and all, I continue to say the Lord's Prayer and continue to be unrecollected...
...we have falsified...
...and so on...
...words without thoughts ne'er to heaven go...
...It is when we do that that gesture becomes something more...
...A case can be made, it seems to me, for the saying of a fixed formula even if recollection is absent, intentions are muddled, or mere reflex takes over...
...Dante put a paraphrase of the Pater in the mouth of the penitent proud in the eleventh canto of the Purgatorio without much success...
...That fracture of language occurs, more often than not, because language is used too much, not too little, and, further, the overuse happens in too familiar settings, the great task of the theologian (as well as the reflective believer) is to recover the urgency and the thickness of words with which we have studded our lives so easily and so often...
...People like John Climacus keep us firmly on the first rung of the ladder...
...If we say " Father'' and can mean only father, then we have not begun to pray with daring...
...We have her notes, thick in their compression, as the sole remaining residue of that spiritual exercise...
...Our clients have a keen sense of tradition...
...Weil wrote a meditation, not a paraphrase of the Pater...
...There is more than traditional solidarity and liturgical tradition to the Lord's Prayer...
...We ramble through the neighborhood working out the cramps and frustrations of the day while watching for birds and other such curiosities that present themselves...
...I still do not have even an approximate bottom line to share but, let me state apodictically, it amounts to a lot of Paters susurrated towards the heavens in one lifetime...
...I would like to simplify and invoke a triad...
...they are the entire universe...
...A century earlier, Francis of Assisi also compiled a prayer based on the Lord's Prayer which was also indebted to earlier models (there are echoes of St...
...He answers that it is, and provides three reasons for saying so and three responses to those who deny it...
...For the past few days I have also been thinking about, or, more precisely, computing the number of times I have said the Lord's Prayer in my lifetime...
...For two millennia Christians have said the same prayers, responded to the same scriptures, and shared the same Eucharist...
...There is much that humiliates when one reads the truly serious masters and mistresses of the spiritual life...
...It is not a simple task...
...The only temptation for man is to be abandoned to his own resources in the presence of evil...
...In a celebrated passage in the Quartets, T.S...
...So, I still have enough boldness to say the Lord's Prayer, even if it is only after the fact that I remind myself that I should be thinking of what I am saying...
...292: Commonweal...
...the communal recitations at Mass since, say, the age of six...
...As early as the second century (in the Didache) its LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is professor of religion at the Florida State University, Tallahassee...
...How many times was that...
...There have been many attempts to do the latter...
...Attentive prayer, that old tough guy John Climacus once wrote, is so difficult that infant souls (as he calls them) need quantity before they can expect quality...
...Earlier in this meditation I invoked the name of John Climacus...
...Like every great prayer, we read it but it also reads us...
...Eliot tells us that words "strain./Crack, and sometimes break...
...The gesture may be a feeble one but it is a.gesture and it does signal, however flabbily, a resistance to the autonomy of the self...
...the approximate number of times that one received it as a penance, allowing for the increased numbers of adolescence...
...When I tried to introduce a substitute prayer a few weeks ago, one of the guests demanded that we say it and, then, as if in defiance, added the Protestant coda to the prayer as a sort of judgment on my temerity...
...The proof of that is in the fact that two of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages both tried their hand at it without conspicuous success...
...Indeed, medieval literature is full of such paraphrases but they almost never show much distinction...
...There is a lesson to be drawn from all this, and it is a simple but profound one...
...The Lord's Prayer is deeply .nd essentially a liturgical prayer...
...Each of the occasions had to be multiplied by my lengthening years with reasonable allowances being made for the times the prayer was omitted either through neglect or forgetfulness...
...Most of us, gratefully, do not have the chance to test the degree of faith that stands behind our recitation of prayer...
...But for those of us who use the well-worn words with such facility, there is another, less dramatic, challenge: to stand back and ask ourselves what it is we are saying...
...How did I come on this eccentric game...
...Furthermore, he insists, concentration itself is but an intermediate step...
...First, if we are people of faith (no matter the quality of that faith) we are already people of prayer since "being in faith" is essentially being "in relationship...
...It is one thing to pray for daily bread in the suburbs and quite another to utter those words in afavela or amid the swirling dust of an Ethiopian refugee center...
...It is when that conjunction occurs that we begin to see that the formulas say much more than we can ever begin to comprehend...
...The paraphrase itself, as John Sinclair testily observes in his edition of the Commedia, is scholastic and pedestrian...
...8 May 1987: 291 recitation as part of the public prayer of the church is stipulated...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
