Words Given

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he did not give them a method. He gave them words. This book takes those words one phrase at a time.

Each of the forty daily readings takes one phrase of the prayer. It hears the phrase in the languages that carried it to us, from Matthew’s Greek to Luther’s German and the English of the Prayer Book, follows it through the people who have prayed it, and ends with one small practice for the day and one line to carry. A reading takes six to eight minutes.

On the six Sundays the book tells the prayer’s history: where it came from, what the oldest manuscripts say, how the early church handed it to the newly baptized, how it came into German and into English, and how the churches pray it today. The last week follows the prayer into the Passion, and an epilogue ends at Easter.

The book does not try to settle every question the prayer raises. Where the church has held several answers, it lays them side by side and lets the reader pray inside the question. The scholarship is in the notes, where anyone can check a quotation against its source.

It was written with the help of an AI model, under the author’s direction, and the book says so.

Notes on this book