Pilgr-image 25 - The Lord's Prayer

This may seem like an odd photo to connect to the Lord’s Prayer but bear with me.  It isn’t necessarily about the prayer itself but instead my (maybe our) experience of the prayer.  First a story that I shared last week with the congregation I serve.  A few years ago, I was leading the congregation in our prayer time and invited the congregation to pray the Lord’s Prayer in a different way.  I would read a line and give some time of silence and then they would repeat what I had just spoken.  It started off well... Our Father...silence... Our Father...Who art in heaven...silence... and so forth.  We got about 5 or 6 lines in when I suddenly went blank and forgot what the next line of the prayer was.  I don’t know if the people picked up on it, but I had to mentally go through the whole prayer to that point to remember what the next line was.  I think the issue was that I was so used to a certain cadence and flow to praying it that when I broke that up for myself, my brain locked up.

As we have moved into a slow walk through the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, I keep returning to that story and how easy it is for me to just allow this form of prayer to become routine.  When we read in Jesus’ teaching “Pray then in this way,” it is not entirely clear whether Jesus is just giving them/us a prayer to pray or simply a form of how to pray.  I feel like in my prayer life, I too easily make it that it is just words to pray rather than letting myself experience the heart of the prayer as Jesus may have intended it.

So that’s where this photo comes in.  For some reason the last few weeks, I have been drawn to stop signs as I’ve been out, specifically to the connection between a stop sign and what is around and behind it such as in this photo.  They have been speaking to me about stopping and taking in what is around me and not just using the sign simply as a functionary thing.  Kind of like this prayer.  I feel like I have been hearing a sense of stopping and slowly taking in this prayer and allowing it to speak deeper to me rather than just relying on the form and cadence I have grown so used to.  So the last week or so, I’ve been trying to just slowly pray this prayer at various times in the day.  I’ve been trying to pray it in different cadences or praying just parts of it.  Stopping and letting God speak in and to me in a new way.

Give it a try.  How can you pray this prayer in a new way?  Speak it differently?  Write it as you pray?  Pray only a line or two?  Speak a line and then sit with that line in silence for a while and see what stirs? Or maybe pray an entirely different form of this same prayer? Below is the text of the prayer as it is shared in the new First Nations Translation.

O Great Spirit, our Father from above, we honor your name as sacred and holy.
Bring your good road to us, where the beauty of your ways in the spirit-world above is reflected in the earth below.
Provide for us day by day—the elk, the buffalo, and the salmon. The corn, the squash, and the wild rice. All the things we need for each day.
Release us from the things we have done wrong, in the same way we release others for the things done wrong to us.
Guide us away from the things that tempt us to stray from your good road, and set us free from the evil one and his worthless ways. Aho! May it be so!¹

1. M. Wildman, Terry. First Nations Version (pp. 9-10). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.