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4.2 The Our Father
This session includes a line by line reading of the Our Father.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Our Father
Please share the version of the Our Father that you use. What is your favorite verse from the Our Father? What does that verse mean to you?
Food for thought
- In the parable of the importunate widow, James says that God is not like the judge but rather the widow, who represents a persistent, smelly desire. How is God like a persistent smelly desire?
- In what ways does your pattern of desire shift if you pray for those who persecute or abuse you?
- How does our pattern of desire begin to shift when we can imagine ourselves held in the regard of God for whom death is not?
- Or for whom scarcity is not a reality?
- Or for whom everything is open-ended and pointing to more than itself?
Wrap-up question
How does praying the Our Father prepare you to hear an unheard voice speaking to you?
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I’m finding that the insights offered in the Forgiving Victim course take some time to percolate into my life. James teaches that the social other recreates itself anew in each person. I get the concept, but integrating this understanding into practice does not come immediately or easily. The idea’s ‘behavioral rightness’ emerges only gradually within the ebb and flow of my existence. Both intellectual grasp and emotional acceptance are necessary to acknowledge that a social other recreates itself from within the arbitrary confines of my ‘personal’ identity.
The other day I remembered something that English philosopher Alan Watts wrote comparing individuals to whirlpools in a stream, which echoes the idea of the social other recreating itself within personal identity:
“Just, for example, like a whirlpool in water, you could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape you have a definite form. All right? Here is a flow of water, and suddenly it does a whirlpool, and it goes on. The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it. The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and exactly the same way, the whole universe is doing each one of us …”
Jesus’s admonishes us in the Sermon on the Mount in Luke 6:28 to: “Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” His advice makes limited sense in a thought-world that sees only self-contained individuals competing against each other for scarce resources.
However, it makes eminent sense to me this morning by opening my little social other whirlpool existence to the reality of a caring ‘Other other.’ God not only created the river of life but also cares equally for each of the eddies and undercurrents flowing along with mine down the channels of our shared existence.
The social other binds human life within whirls that compete to become the richest, the most famous, the biggest of all the whirls. But individual awareness is part of something much larger than inward directed whirls that compete for short periods of time before disappearing.
The Other other in the person of Jesus tells us that we are free to share in the full stream of God’s unbounded love. Jesus tells us that we are free to uncoil into the endless, full flow of our collective humanity.
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Yes, Rich, you express it beautifully. I think we all undergo a long process of this sort when James begins to revolutionise our way of seeing Christianity. If this helps at all, I think Richard Rohr has a way of expressing our dilemma that can also help: “The binary, dualistic mind cannot deal with contradictions, paradox, or mystery, all of which are at the heart of religion. Sadly, a large percentage of religious people become and remain quite rigid thinkers because their religion taught them that to be faithful, obedient, and stalwart in the ways of God, they had to seek some ideal “order” instead of growing in their capacity for love. These are not bad people; they simply never learned much about living inside of paradox and mystery as the very nature of faith”.
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“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” On page 426 of our text, James refers to the “… name of the Holy One” as “… a constantly flickering hologram of revelation.”
“Hallowed be your name” or “hologram of revelation,” anything more, James writes, would present the Holy One as an idol we can grasp rather than as a real response to our longing for communion. We want to see “… visible signs in our midst of the personal, named, directed, ownership of everything that is.” Our scientific, social other provides plenty of pseudo possibilities by reducing the idea of the Divine to no loving response, but merely to measurable, material reality.
Ken Wilber, writing in ‘The Marriage of Sense and Soul,’ writes that the materialistic, social other, denying transcendent mystery, measures and controls a flatland, material world with the “eye of flesh” and with the “eye of mind.” Science provides innumerable and profound benefits. It is we, however, who, failing to seek God’s presence with the “eye of spirit,” grasp onto science’s material benefits as if they could remove our anguish as if they could provide real communion.
God’s loving presence forever envelopes our existence. We sense the nearness of God, and thankfully as well, we find that the absence of God calls us into deeper communion as profoundly as does God’s presence. And so, we begin the Lord’s Prayer saying – “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” We cannot hold onto God’s presence. And, we don’t want to.
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Yes, this is truly the most complete prayer is it not? As James tells us “As we read the Our Father, imagine yourself as highly malleable, being stretched between two force?fields, two patterns of desire. The Our Father is inducting you into a pattern of desire which will enable you to inhabit the “being stretched” which is how the desire of the Other other brings us into being.” I had always had difficulty with the “and lead us not into temptation” as if God would do such a thing, but I suspect that this is the paucity of the English language and needs a better translation, although James words ” Evil is not a thing in itself, it is only known in its being left behind, never to be given oxygen by being dignified with a concentrated gaze” really explains it for me.
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“How is God like a persistent smelly desire?” Were I asked to express smelly desire in sound, then I would find it in the opening notes of Schubert’s 9th Symphony. I hear those simple, very quiet notes flowing through Schubert’s entire opus, some times very quiet and at other times extraordinarily powerful. http://bit.ly/2dd4kfH
Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, God’s persistent presence, like the smelly desire I hear within the opening notes of Schubert’s 9th, is always flowing through our lives. That’s just the way it is.
Our joy comes as we recognize in smelly desire the fragrant odor of Jesus walking alongside. Even as we are caught up in the constantly measured flatland of the every-day, God continues whispering God’s presence, through smell and sound, and as St. Paul tells us, in “… sighs too deep for words.” http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=341541364
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James teaches us Rich that In Luke 18:1?8, the judge is a perfectly non – mimetic person and the widow is the equivalent of a smelly desire, but that God is not like the judge, he is like the irritating desire which gets stronger and stronger. It is only through our wanting something that God is able to give it to us. I think this is exactly what you are expressing.
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In the Discussion Forum of this unit, answer the following question: How does praying the Our Father prepare you to hear an unheard voice speaking to you?
I’m the lector every Sunday morning at St. John’s eight o’clock service, a ministry I enjoy. I always try to be open to the feelings of each character, whether prophet or apostle, in the morning’s text. How are their feelings informing the narrative? What tone of voice would best express the feelings adequately, accurately?
Recently, I read a transcript of a talk James gave in 2007 in Mexico City titled: “Strong Protagonism and Weak Presence: The changes in tone of the voice of God.” James opened his talk by analyzing how best to interpret the use of the word “so” in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world …” One interpretation focuses the verse’s energy on the intensity of God’s love for humankind. Another interpretation looks not at the intensity but at the nature of God’s presence. James uses the second interpretation, a consideration of the nature of God’s presence, to inform the rest of his talk.
I think “strong protagonism and weak presence” might be a good way to think about the relationship between the ‘unheard voice’ and the Our Father because I’m just not completely sure about the connection between the unheard voice and the Our Father. You’d think by this time in our Forgiving Victim course I’d have that all figured out. But I don’t. I have some of the pieces of the puzzle. For example, God’s ever-present love, which is active protagonism. But, God’s love often seems hidden, like the feelings I look for behind the words I read as St. John’s Sunday lector. For example, I read the prophets, not in stentorian tones, but nevertheless forcefully, to carry the quiet voice of God’s longing as it informs the Hebrew scriptures.
As we pray the Our Father each Sunday, I think of it as a kind of poetic-liturgy allowing worshippers to reflect on God’s strong protagonism but weak presence. We remember that God forgives us as we forgive others; that God’s presence is constant, but hallowed; that is, it comes and goes. This prayer-poem brings the Divine voice to earth, but, it’s not we who decide whether we listen to it or not. We can know God’s still voice only as we acknowledge God’s strong protagonism inhabiting us personally in our fiery temptations, in our smelly desires, which, left to our own devices, are mimetic realities drowning out the unheard voice of God’s redemptive power.
God’s Unheard Voice of quickening love inhabits us always, even when we forget God and ignore Neighbor. Through the quiet voice behind its written words, the Our Father teaches how we are inextricably bound together, God and humanity, knowledge which becomes present only with God’s help.
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Yes, Rich there is so much to reflect on here. The quiet voice is not the brass section, but the whisper in the whirlwind. I think we have already discussed how the Our Father is inducting us into a different pattern of desire, but it is also the most complete prayer which touches us in so many aspects of our spiritual life. Personally, I find that I am constantly meditating on its meaning and how we find God in our own weakness, and on being compassionate when confronted with the weakness of others.
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Yes, Rich there is so much to reflect on here. The quiet voice is not the brass section, but the whisper in the whirlwind. I think we have already discussed how the Our Father is inducting us into a different pattern of desire, but it is also the most complete prayer which touches us in so many aspects of our spiritual life. Personally, I find that I am constantly meditating on its meaning and how we find God in our own weakness, and on being compassionate when confronted with the weakness of others.
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