"Formed by divine teaching, we dare to say..."

In the new translation of the Roman Missal, the Lord's Prayer is introduced with the words, "At the Saviour's command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say..." The prayer itself is so familiar to us that we often forget that it was given to the disciples in the context of a series of instructions about how to pray it. What is this teaching in which we have been "formed"?

In Matthew 6: 5-15 the Prayer is taught in the context of the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5, 6, and 7), which concerns the various dimensions of the living of the Christian life, beginning with the Beatitudes which form the portrait of the perfect Christian. Immediately before the teaching on prayer, he speaks of the love of enemies and of almsgiving in secret. This leads him naturally to go on: "when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." This is the lead-in to the Lord's Prayer itself (6: 9-15), and it is paralleled by a passage at the end where he speaks of fasting: "when

The Lord's Prayer

In my new book (see below) I include a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, and in The Seven Sacraments (on the right) I tried to show how the seven petitions of the Prayer correspond to other patterns of seven in the Christian tradition, and to the needs of the human heart. But there is always more to say about this Prayer, so deceptively simple and yet profound. One of the most fascinating and richest expositions I have ever seen is G. John Champoux’s The Way to Our Heavenly Father, which shows how the whole of Scripture and all the spiritual teachings of the Fathers can be organized and correlated with the various parts of the Prayer, as though before our eyes the entire Christian revelation was flowering and refolding back into the one Prayer. The collection consists not of detailed commentary (although there are

The Name of God

“[W]e have to be clear about what a name actually is,” writes Pope Benedict XVI. “We could put it very simply by saying that the name creates the possibility of address or invocation. It establishes relationship." The most archetypal act of naming is God’s naming of himself. 

In the encounter with Moses at the burning bush, God names himself “I am”. He tells the reluctant prophet, “Say this to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:15). God’s name is himself. It is so sacred that the Jews only allowed the High Priest to pronounce it once a year in the Holy of Holies. When God says "I" it is the act of Being, the primordial act of language, the principial Word. Thus it is not we who name him, but God who names himself, or rather who gives us sacramental tokens to use as names – tokens of his presence. In particular he names himself "Jesus". The many other names by which human beings try to identify an object for worship, such as “the Just” or “the Merciful”, and even “the Creator”, describe aspects of him only, paths of approach, angles of sight; like colours in a rainbow compared to the white light of the sun.

The Name creates the possibility of invocation, and the invocation of God under a variety of names is one of the fundamental methods of prayer. We associate the "Jesus Prayer" - the constant repetition of the phrase Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me a sinner - with the Orthodox East, but repetitive invocation is important in the West too (and use of the Jesus Prayer itself is increasingly common among Catholics). Even the Rosary, though a more elaborate formula, is based around the repetition of the divine Name "Jesus" at the heart of each Hail Mary: "...Blessed art thou, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus...". The other words around these are just a setting, like a monstrance, to lead us to Christ at the centre. Many saints recommend the use of short prayers that can easily be coordinated with breathing in and out.

Prayers may be endlessly repeated not in order to be "mechanical", but to fulfil the teaching of Scripture that we should endeavour to "pray constantly" (Luke 18:1 and 1 Thess. 5:17). The aim is to lead our constantly changing thoughts and feelings into a single conduit. Normally our minds are in a state of distraction, and this often takes the form of an interior monologue, a stream of consciousness like that portrayed in Joyce's novel Ulysses. The repeated prayer, especially if it contains the Holy Name, absorbs and quietens this babbling stream, smoothing the water as it it flows straight to God.
Illustration: Names of God by Athanasius Kircher