Given words
The disciples didn’t ask Jesus how prayer works. Luke says they’d been watching him pray, and when he finished, one of them said: ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples’ (Luke 11:1). Jesus didn’t answer with a method, a theory, or a list of conditions. He answered with words: ‘When you pray, say’ (Luke 11:2).
Matthew tells the story differently, and the answer is the same. Jesus first warns against praying with ‘vain repetitions’, like people who ‘think that they will be heard for their much speaking’. Then he gives the reason: ‘your Father knows what things you need before you ask him’. And then: ‘Pray like this’ (Matt 6:7–9). What follows is short enough for a child to learn.
That’s where the title of my book comes from. The Lord’s Prayer is words given, and I’ve come to think that’s its strength.
Many of us carry a quiet suspicion against set prayers. A prayer read from a page, said the same way every Sunday, sounds second-hand. Real prayer, we think, comes from the heart and in our own words, or it doesn’t count.
Part of that suspicion is right. Words said without attention are empty, however holy they are. Jesus says so himself, in the verses just before the prayer.
But the suspicion assumes that the best words are the ones we make up ourselves, and I don’t believe that. We learn to speak by repeating what others said to us first. Nobody calls a child’s first sentences second-hand. They’re how the child learns to speak at all.
In the middle of the third century Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, wrote a book on the Lord’s Prayer for his people. Near the beginning he turns the suspicion around:
‘It is a loving and friendly prayer to beseech God with His own word, to come up to His ears in the prayer of Christ. Let the Father acknowledge the words of His Son when we make our prayer’ (Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer 3).
For Cyprian the value of these words is exactly that they aren’t ours. When we pray them, the Father hears the voice of his Son in our voice. Second-hand prayer would be words borrowed from someone who didn’t mean them. These come from the one person who knew best how to speak to the Father.
Augustine, about a century and a half later, preached on the prayer to people who were about to be baptized and were learning it by heart. He told them: ‘The words therefore which our Lord Jesus Christ has taught us in His prayer, are the rule and standard of our desires. You may not ask for anything but what is written there’ (Augustine, Sermon 56.4). His Latin is shorter—the words are forma desideriorum, the form of our desires.
That sounds strict, as if every other prayer were forbidden. He explained what he meant in a letter to Proba, a widow who’d written to ask him how she ought to pray. First he tells her what the words are for. God doesn’t need them. We do: ‘To us, therefore, words are necessary, that by them we may be assisted in considering and observing what we ask, not as means by which we expect that God is to be either informed or moved to compliance’ (Letter 130.11.21).
Then he gives her the freedom: ‘in praying, we are free to use different words to any extent, but we must ask the same things’. And he gives her the measure: ‘if we pray rightly, and as becomes our wants, we say nothing but what is already contained in the Lord’s Prayer’ (Letter 130.12.22).
I like that balance. My own words are welcome, as many as I like. The given words don’t replace them; they check them. Left to our own words, most of us begin with whatever is on our mind that day. The prayer begins with God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will, and only then asks for bread for today, for forgiveness, and for protection. It puts our desires in order without forbidding any of them.
I learned the prayer as a child, in German. In my atheist years I never prayed it. When I came back to faith, I came back to it too, and today I pray it every day, slowly, phrase by phrase.
The words didn’t change in all those years. They waited. I think of praying them as an apprenticeship: you’re handed something made by a better hand than yours, and you use it long before you understand it. Over time the words begin to fit. Some days we mean every one of them. Other days we say them because they were given, and that’s enough to keep the door open.
Nobody prays this prayer first. Jesus gave it to people who didn’t know how to pray. They handed it on to the next generation, and the church carried it into language after language. Each of us received words we didn’t write, and the meaning came later.
It doesn’t trouble me that the words aren’t mine. It’s the reason I trust them, and it’s the reason for the title, Words Given.
Sources
Augustine. Letter 130, to Proba. Translated by J. G. Cunningham. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 1. 1887. Written around 411 or 412. In 12.22 the Latin says, literally, that we’re free to say the same things ‘with other and other words’.
Augustine. Sermon 56. Translated by R. G. MacMullen. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 6. 1888. Numbered there as Sermon 6 on the New Testament.
Cyprian of Carthage. On the Lord’s Prayer. Translated by Ernest Wallis. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885. Dated by the editor to 252.
Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible, British Edition, which is in the public domain.