A Quaker Sits With the Lord’s Prayer
How strange that I should write an article about the Lord’s Prayer – that recitation that was drilled into us at primary school, full of words like “trespasses”, “hallowed” and “glory” that pull it far away from the concerns of everyday life.
How strange that I should write about prayer at all when I find the concept and practice a tricky one. When prayers seem to be begging and instructing God, particularly when they do it in a routine way, I find it hard not to switch off immediately.
But the fact remains that I have developed a habit of sitting in meeting for worship with the prayer Jesus taught and have, over a number of years, discovered that it makes a very complete description of the spiritual reality I live with. Which I can’t help trusting was exactly what its wise and skillful author intended.
As with any ministry I find challenging, I have tried to listen to it with openness and a readiness to discover how it could be speaking of truths I recognise. This doesn’t mean, I hope, that I have twiddled the words to mean what I want them to mean, but it does mean that my interpretation steers away from what I find unhelpful. I don’t find the power and the glory at all helpful (and I think they were later additions) so I skip that part.
This is what I sit with:
Parent of us all, who is just behind the veil of appearances,
I recognise it is really difficult to pin you down in language.
May the world guided by your goodness become a reality in our everyday lives and in our aspirations.
You give us what we need and forgive us what we owe, and we forgive those who owe us.
You guide us away from evil and following your guidance helps us to avoid our selfish urges.
And this is eternal.
So be it.
Over the course of my years of Quaker worship I have learned that certain attitudes help me into worship – particularly humility and gratitude. Gratitude is easy; I can think of all that I am thankful for, and that’s probably the best way into worship on a difficult, distracted day. By humility I don’t mean grovelling and feeling awful about myself. It means, simply, remembering that I am not in charge, that I do not know what should happen (either in the meeting or beyond it) and so I am listening intently.
Both of these are present in the prayer. And as someone who finds it difficult to imagine God as a person, I find it helpfully expresses relationship – my relationship with God and with the material world and with other people. There’s an intimacy to it - that suggestion that we are all related and sharing the same gifts from nature, all debts forgiven.
As I experience it now, it is a description of how things are rather than a set of requests for what I want God to do. It lets me recognise my difficulty in sustaining my own part in a world guided by God but allows me to open myself to the hope of fully participating in it.
Lucy Faulkner-Gawlinski – King’s Lynn Quaker Meeting