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The Our Father
The prayer Jesus taught, in full in five languages, with the meaning of every petition and a way to pray it unhurried.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
The Lord's Prayer is the only prayer Jesus taught in his own words. It appears twice in the Gospels: in full in Matthew 6:9-13, inside the Sermon on the Mount, and more briefly in Luke 11:2-4, when a disciple asks him to teach them to pray. Hence its old name, oratio dominica.
There are seven petitions. The first three look toward God: his name, his kingdom, his will. The four that follow look toward the one praying: bread, forgiveness, temptation, evil. Tertullian called it breviarium totius Evangelii, the whole Gospel in brief, and Thomas Aquinas held it the most perfect of prayers, because in it we ask for what we ought to desire, in the order we ought to desire it.
The same prayer has crossed twenty centuries in different tongues. Praying it in each is not a scholarly exercise; it changes what you feel saying it. Aramaic was the mother tongue of Jesus. Latin carried it through the West for fifteen hundred years. English brings it here.
Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu Nombre; venga a nosotros tu reino; hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo. Danos hoy nuestro pan de cada día; perdona nuestras ofensas, como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden; no nos dejes caer en la tentación, y líbranos del mal. Amén.
Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli, sia santificato il tuo nome, venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà, come in cielo così in terra. Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano, e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti come anche noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori, e non abbandonarci alla tentazione, ma liberaci dal male. Amen.
Our Father, who art in heaven. It opens not with a request but with a name. Saying "Father" before asking for anything changes who you are as you stand there. And it says our, not my: no one prays this alone, even praying it in silence.
Hallowed be thy name. We are not adding holiness to God, who has all of it. We are asking that his name be held holy in us and through us.
Thy kingdom come. The boldest line in the prayer: that God's way of governing replace our own, beginning in one's own heart.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is where control is handed over. It is the sentence Jesus will repeat in Gethsemane, and the hardest one to mean.
Give us this day our daily bread. Bread, not wealth. Today, not forever. The prayer asks for one day's necessity and returns the one praying to the real size of a life.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive. The only petition with a condition attached. It is also the only one Jesus explains after teaching it, in the two verses that follow in Matthew.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The Greek has been read two ways for centuries: do not bring us to the test, or do not let us fall when tested. Several modern translations now prefer the second.
Most of us say it from memory in twenty seconds. Said that way, memory works and the soul does not. There is an old way to give it weight again.
First, one line per breath. Say a petition, stop, let it finish sounding, and only then go on. The whole prayer takes two or three minutes and becomes another thing entirely.
Second, stop wherever something resists. If "thy will be done" is hard, that is today's work. It does not need solving; staying there is enough.
Third, listen instead of speaking. Hearing it in another voice, unhurried, while the words light up one at a time, lets you pray it without memory running ahead.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
In two places: Matthew 6:9-13, within the Sermon on the Mount, with all seven petitions; and Luke 11:2-4, in a shorter form, when a disciple asks Jesus to teach them to pray.
Seven. The first three are directed to God: his name, his kingdom and his will. The remaining four ask for the one praying: daily bread, forgiveness, not being led into temptation, and deliverance from evil.
That closing doxology is not in the oldest manuscripts of Matthew, but it is very early: it already appears in the Didache, from the first century. It is kept in Eastern liturgy and in Protestant use, and said separately in the Catholic Mass.
Galilean Aramaic, his mother tongue. The oldest Aramaic text we have is the Syriac Peshitta, which opens Awoon d'bashmaya. The Gospels reached us in Greek, and from there the prayer passed into Latin and every other language.
Paternoster reads it slowly in all five languages, each word lighting up as it is spoken, over sacred art in motion.
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