The Our Father, Word by Word – a roundup of posts!
When I wrote the first post for this series back in March, I thought I’d have it wrapped up by the end of Lent. I would have never guessed that the final post wouldn’t be up until almost December! Keeping up with the project required more work than I expected, but it was so much fun. In particular, I loved hearing everyone else’s thoughts. The guest posters were constantly coming up with fresh insights I would have never thought of, leading me to see this prayer in a whole new light.
And so, nine months, 40 posts and 26 contributors later, here is a roundup on our meditation on the Our Father. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
BY WORD
OUR | FATHER | WHO | ART | IN | HEAVEN (1) | HALLOWED BE | THY | NAME | KINGDOM | COME | WILL | BE DONE | ON | EARTH | AS IT IS | HEAVEN (2) | GIVE | US (1) | THIS | DAY| OUR | DAILY | BREAD | FORGIVE | US (2) | TRESPASSES | AS | WE FORGIVE | THOSE | WHO HAVE TRESPASSED | AGAINST | LEAD | NOT | INTO | TEMPTATION | BUT | DELIVER | FROM | EVIL
BY AUTHOR
Jason Anderson – HEAVEN
Erin Arlinghaus – EARTH
Marc Barnes – THIS
Margaret Berns – US
Melanie Bettinelli – HALLOWED BE
Betty Duffy – EVIL
Karen Edmisten – NAME
Steve G. – HEAVEN
Heather King – WE FORGIVE
Martina Kreitzer – NOT
Marcel LeJeune – FATHER
Dan Lord – DELIVER
Darwin – IN
Mrs. Darwin – WHO
Elizabeth Scalia – WHO HAVE TRESPASSED
Anna Macdonald – AS
Jeff Miller – FORGIVE
Anna Mitchell – GIVE
Eric Sammons – US
Dorian Speed – WILL
Matt Swaim – KINGDOM
Sally Thomas – LEAD
Stacy Trasancos – TEMPTATION
Brandon Vogt – ART, AS IT IS
Wellness Mama – BREAD
Kate Wicker – DAILY
Me – OUR, THY, COME, DONE, ON, DAY, OUR, TRESPASSES, THOSE, AGAINST, INTO, BUT, FROM
I hope your Advent is off to a great start!
EVIL (The Our Father, Word by Word)
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. Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Have Trespassed Against Us. Lead Us Not Into Temptation But Deliver Us From Evil.
.
by Betty Duffy
Evil’s the last word. And it would be nice if we never had to think about it.
It will always be a concern, because evil is…interesting. When people talk about “the banality of evil” they don’t mean that evil itself is boring. They mean that evil makes itself appealing to so many people that an entire culture can accept horrendous acts as though they are normal. The casual societal attitude towards pornography is an example of the banality of evil. So’s the holocaust.
Of course there’s nothing casual about what sin does to people. We become attached, physically, emotionally, habitually entrenched in it. Sin can define lives. And it can define lives even if the sin is venial rather than some malicious mortal sin like murder or adultry. It can be soft sin, light sin, fun, interesting, harmless sin. Or so we tell ourselves.
Life in Eden before the Fall was perfect, but perhaps secretly, we wonder how much fun Adam and Eve could really have had without the stimulus of fiery tempers, flirtations with a more glamourous world, and the occasional over-indulgence in chocolate? Weren’t they pretty much just tending garden and looking after animals? Sounds like work to me.
Evil, as anyone who has ever lived will tell you, can be terribly, terribly attractive. Eve had everything she could possibly have wanted, but she wanted more.
The particular horror of Eve’s sin is that we don’t really blame her. In her place, I would have done the exact same thing. God prohibited my eating from this tree–but obviously, God was talking to the lowest common denominator, rather than a good person like me. It’s just knowledge after all.
It’s just a little gluttony. Just a little anger. You might just say I’m “spirited,” when I throw that darn lego piece across the living room, or that I’m on the pursuit of excellence when I berate my husband for not living up to my standards. My addiction to (fill in the blank) is just a part of my personality. Garfield would not be Garfield, after all, without his inordinate attachment to lasagna.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote in a Homily, December 8, 2005:
“We think that evil is basically good. We think we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being.”
–Pope Benedict XVI, “Benedictus” p. 288
In allowing that little bit of evil to persist in our souls to salvage what we wrongly think is our winning personality, we inevitably block out the action of grace in our lives. We know what the devil wants, our souls, and we’re not giving in. But we avoid asking God what he wants. We have a sneaking suspicion that he too wants our souls. But what if he puts rules on my life? What if he makes me suffer? He’s going to white out my personality, my quirks, and turn me into an automaton. We make God our rival.
And so we do not belong to the devil in any obvious way–too smart for that–but we do not belong to God. We belong to ourselves, which is, ironically, exactly where the devil wants us–in a bind, refusing to grow.
It’s only in hindsight that we realize what heavens we have lost through our sin.
As soon as the sinner recognizes his need for grace, it is there. We have a Redeemer who releases all binds. He, and only He, delivers us from the tendency towards evil that is our birthright. He delivers us from our attraction to sin, and fosters a new dependency on his grace and mercy, a dependency that unexpectedly makes us more free than our supposed independence.
“The person who abandons himself totally in God’s hands does not become God’s puppet, a boring ‘yes man.’ Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great creative immensity of the freedom of good. The person who turns to God does not become smaller, but greater, for through God and with God he becomes great, he becomes divine, he becomes truly himself.” ( Benedictus p. 288)
When we pray, “Lord, deliver us from evil,” we think, not only of the evil “out there,” which most of us have become pretty adept at sidestepping, but deliver us from the evil within. Christ, our Redeemer, knows what we need before we ask. Deliver us from the evil we don’t see, the evil to which we have become attached and blind, the evil that is an obstacle to our surrender, the evil that sees God as a rival, that prevents love towards our fellow man, but that also prevents us from falling truly, deeply in love with Christ.
.
Elizabeth Duffy is a freelance writer and author of the blog, Betty Duffy. Her writing has appeared online at Patheos, Faith and Family, the Korrektiv Press Blog, and numerous other venues. She and her husband live in rural Indiana with their five children.
FROM (Our Father, Word by Word)
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. Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those
Who Have Trespassed Against Us. Lead Us Not Into Temptation But Deliver Us From…
.
When I come to this word, I notice not so much the word itself, but the words that aren’t there. Notice that there is nothing between the words from and evil. It’s not “deliver us from stuff that is evil,” or “deliver us from situations where evilness might occur.” Deliver us from evil. The word that follows from is in the singular, and is unadorned with adjectives or qualifiers.
For me, this evokes thoughts of the personal nature of evil.
The Catechism tells us:
In this petition, evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. The devil (dia-bolos) is the one who “throws himself across” God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ.
One of the biggest ways in which my conversion to Christianity has assisted me in terms of practical, day-to-day living is that I now understand the reality of spiritual warfare. Back when I was an atheist I felt the blows and the injuries, but didn’t know where they came from. I had no idea that I was standing on a battlefield.
Through the wisdom of the Church, I’ve learned how to recognize many of the techniques of the enemy; I’ve come to understand how to protect myself from his attacks; and I’ve been given the armor to keep me safe from his weapons. And if I could distill everything I’ve learned down to the single most important thing to know, it would be this:
Never forget that evil is personal.
Even within mainstream Christianity, there’s a tendency to discount the devil as an intelligent being, to think of evil as an impersonal force, like an earthquake or a lightning strike. But evil is not a disinterested phenomenon. As odd as it sounds to modern ears, the truth is that devil and his demons are smart — smarter than we are — and they tailor their plans of attack to each individual. They have a special plan, just for you; they’ll use different techniques for you than they do to try keep your neighbor or your brother or me away from God. And the stakes are high, since they aim to kill not only our physical bodies, but our eternal souls as well.
When you think about the enemy we’re up against, consider his intelligence, and the endless energy he has to put toward conquering in this winner-takes-all game, it fills you with a renewed understanding of just how dependent we are on God’s grace. It makes you realize with trembling that this is a battle that we simply cannot fight alone. And so we speak these last words of the Our Father with great urgency, as we beg the only One who can save us, Deliver us from evil.
DELIVER (The Our Father, Word by Word)
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. Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those
Who Have Trespassed Against Us. Lead Us Not Into Temptation But Deliver…
.
by Dan Lord
When you say “deliver” I think: the large, meaty organ that filters the blood, right next to degallbladder and depancreas.
I also think of Prince of Egypt, and all of those emaciated Hebrews churning mud and singing “Deliver us to the Promised Land…”
Thirdly, I think of demons.
That’s three random connotations all in a row, and they don’t belong together except in some lost David Lynch script.
Scratch the first two, then, and consider these facts: we become angry with one another, we fantasize about the ways we would reduce people to humiliated cinders and how people ought to recognize our extraordinary wonderfulness, we grab for the things we want to the exclusion of others and we like to see others fail. If you can’t admit to being a part of this stuff on some level, then you’re just not being honest with yourself.
But we are not each other’s enemies. The nasty, rotten ways in which we all treat each other or would like to treat each other are certainly attributable to lousy choices that we make, but behind it all is a vicious troupe of fallen “powers and principalities” (Eph 6:12) leaping and slithering across the stages of our lives trying to ruin our performances. The correct response is to turn all of their hatred back on them by accepting death: the death of our pride, the death of our will to power. When we do this in Christ, who showed us what “dying to self” really means, we do something for which our spiritual antagonizers have absolutely no comeback.
Evil spirits are real. Our Father in heaven knows it—he sent His only Son precisely to deliver us from their power. Jesus was who those emaciated Hebrews in Prince of Egypt were really yearning for, though they didn’t know it—so I guess that connotation is relevant, after all. Not the “deliver/degallbladder” thing, though…that’s just an obnoxious pun.
Dan Lord is a writer, a recovering rock star (my words, not his) and has a great blog called That Strangest of Wars. I asked him to cover this particular word because of his fascinating experience with the concept of deliverance, which you can read about here.
