The Lord's Prayer - An Alternative Version

Our Father,

Perfect Love,

We turn again to You.

Guide us;
help us to love,

so that Your Will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Give us this day
that which we need.
Fill us with hope and trust.

Help us to forgive
our brothers and sisters
(and ourselves as well);

and to look on them
as you look on us.

Give us strength to resist temptation.
When we are tempted, let us choose peace.

Deliver us from our fears.

For what You love is safe.

And Your love remains
forever and always.

Amen.

Featured in the book The Kindness of Presence.

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Why, you might ask, would we want an alternative version of the Lord's Prayer?

Well, there are a couple of reasons why I felt moved to write this interpretation.

First, no matter how inspired or inspiring words may be, there's a risk that with over-familiarity they may lose their power to stir and transform us. (Think of how moved you feel when you hear an amazing piece of music for the first time. You listen to it over and over again. As the days, weeks and months go by, the intensity of your response to the music may fade. You still like it, but it no longer inspires or affects you to the extent it did when you first heard it.) Adjusting the words may help us to engage with the prayer more deeply again. (To pick up the music analogy again, maybe you discover a fresh new cover of an old favourite song.)

Second, for me, a prayer should be heart-felt. It should be authentic. How can I pray authentically using a set prayer if some of its words confuse me, or if I disagree with them?

In the Lord's Prayer, there are a couple of things I struggle with:

• We ask God to forgive our debts (or trespasses or sins). We've made mistakes, certainly. We've turned our back on God; cut ourselves off from awareness of His Presence. We have forgotten What we are (a Child of God), and we know not what we do. But when a child acting in ignorance or forgetfulness makes a mistake, do we as parents require them to ask for forgiveness? As Lesson 46 of A Course in Miracles puts it, "God does not forgive, because He has never condemned". Forgiveness is vital (I made it the theme of my novel, Escape to Redemption) - but, it feels to me, it isn't God who needs to forgive. More, it's we who need to forgive one another - including ourselves.
• We pray to God, "Lead us not into temptation". I may be misinterpreting this line, or perhaps its original meaning may have been lost in translation or prior to transcription - but, for me, it's clear that God (Who is Love) would not lead us into temptation. We'll certainly face temptation - temptation to judge others, temptation to diverge from our primary goal of seeking and living the Kingdom of Heaven. But surely the source of that temptation isn't God? 

Photo by Julia Volk from Pexels