Words Given

The disciples did not ask Jesus how prayer works. Luke says they had been watching him pray, and when he finished, one of them said: “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.”¹ Jesus did not answer with a method, a theory or a list of conditions. He answered with words: “When you pray, say.”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.”³ What follows is short enough for a child to learn.

That is where the title of my book comes from. The Lord’s Prayer is words given. This note explains why I think that is its strength.

The suspicion of borrowed words

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 does not 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. I do not believe that. We learn to speak by repeating what others said to us first. Nobody calls a child’s first sentences second-hand. They are how the child learns to speak at all.

His own word

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.”⁴

For Cyprian the value of these words is exactly that they are not 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 did not mean them. These come from the one person who knew best how to speak to the Father.

The rule and standard

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.”⁵

That sounds strict, as if every other prayer were forbidden. He explained what he meant in a letter to Proba, a widow who had written to ask him how she ought to pray. First he tells her what the words are for. God does not 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.”⁶

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.”⁷

I like that balance. My own words are welcome, as many as I like. The given words do not 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.

How given words become ours

I learned the prayer as a child, in German, in the church of a Catholic village in western Germany. In my atheist years I never prayed it. When I came back to faith, I came back to it too. Today I pray it every day, slowly, phrase by phrase.

The words did not change in all those years. They waited. I think of praying them as an apprenticeship: you are 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 is enough to keep the door open.

Nobody prays this prayer first. Jesus gave it to people who did not 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 did not write, and the meaning came later.

So it does not trouble me that the words are not mine. It is the reason I trust them, and it is why the book is called Words Given.

This note, like the book, was written with the help of an AI model. The years with the prayer are my own.

Footnotes

1. Luke 11:1. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

2. Luke 11:2. ↩

3. Matthew 6:7–9. The prayer follows in verses 9–13. ↩

4. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord’s Prayer 3, trans. Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885), ccel.org. The editor of that volume dates the treatise to 252. ↩

5. Augustine, Sermon 56.4, trans. R. G. MacMullen, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 6 (1888), where it is numbered Sermon 6 on the New Testament, newadvent.org. Augustine’s Latin is shorter: the words are forma desideriorum, the form of desires. ↩

6. Augustine, Letter 130.11.21, trans. J. G. Cunningham, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 1 (1887), newadvent.org. The letter was written around 411 or 412. ↩

7. Augustine, Letter 130.12.22, in the same translation. Cunningham expands the first sentence a little. The Latin says, literally, that we are free to say the same things in prayer “with other and other words,” but not free to say other things. ↩