Five "Our Fathers"

Some notable recitations of the Lord's Prayer.

1 - The Sermon on the Mount

In the Gospels, Jesus almost never prays in public. For example, in Gethsemane, while he prays not to be crucified, he instructs his disciples to stay behind and keep watch. (They all fall asleep.) When he gives thanks to God in public, it’s always a little apologetically—he adds a disclaimer that this is more for the benefit of those watching than anything else. Arguably, he prays in public while on the cross, but it’s not like he has much of a choice at that point.

In the Sermon on the Mount, he makes it explicit that this is the correct way to pray. It’s part of a long section on the various ways his laws are going to be stricter than the Torah’s—he’s keeping all 613 commandments, plus adding some more. The Torah says not to commit adultery, and now Jesus says not to even think about committing adultery, and so on. The Torah says to pray, but it’s not actually enough to pray performatively, like the Pharisees. Instead, Jesus says, “when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” ¹

Here is how you should pray, he continues, sort of breaking his own rule but never mind that:

Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

2 - The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory

If you’re creating a power structure here on earth, “your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” is a problematic verse. How are you going to rule over your flock if you can’t see whether they’re being faithful or not? For Jesus, this was presumably a feature, not a bug, but according to scripture his successors immediately began to undermine it. In Acts 21, Paul returns from his missionary work to find a council of elders, led by Jesus’s brother James, in charge in Jerusalem. They order him to pay them some money and perform a public act of contrition “so that everybody will know that you are living in obedience to the law.”

I don’t know if The Church really happened that quickly, but Acts dates back to at latest the second century, so it was definitely in place by then. It’s not enough to pray in private, most versions of The Church explain. You have to pray both in public and in private.

This means, of course, ignoring or interpreting away the lead-in to the prayer. “When you pray, go into a private room, close the door, and keep it short and non-repetitive” becomes “When you pray, make sure you mean it. To help with that, here’s a long repetitive liturgy everybody has to recite in public once a week.”

One of the oldest liturgies still in use is the Liturgy of Saint James, attributed to that original bishop. Like most of them, it includes the Lord’s Prayer, adding a little bit at the end that goes something like “for thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, amen.” That, plus about an hour and a half’s worth of other prayers, of course. How else will everybody know that everybody is living in obedience to the law?

3 - Tariff Penance

Because of Ireland’s isolation from continental Europe, the Celtic Church developed some unique teachings and attitudes, some of which ended up being adopted more widely. One of these was the idea of “tariff penance”—part of the confessor’s job, during the Sacrament of Penance, is to assign the correct act of contrition that perfectly cancels out the sin. There are a fair number of surviving handbooks listing rates, starting in 7th-century Ireland and spreading throughout Europe by the end of the Middle Ages. They give a valuable, and often alarming, glimpse into life back then—the Old Irish Table of Commutations notes that “there is hardly a single layman or laywoman who has not some part in manslaughter” so the penance can’t be too heavy: just have them sleep on a bed of thorns or with a dead body in a grave.

One of the lightest penances you could assess was a “paternoster,” a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (pater noster means “our father” in Latin). In the Middle Ages, I don’t think this was ever enough by itself. That table says that for “small minor sins,” the proper penance involves fasting, thirty paternosters, then being whipped thirty times. I’m told it tends to be even lighter these days.

So it goes. Jesus says “Don’t pray repetitively, just say this one short prayer in private.” A thousand years later, there’s a handbook giving the number of times you’re supposed to repeat that prayer to atone for brigandage, druidism, or writing irreverent poetry.

4 - On a Ladder by a Tree

Around the same time, the belief arose that witches physically couldn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer. It makes sense. If simply reciting the Lord’s Prayer helps pay down your debt of sin, but witches are irrevocably damned…it’s just math. They must not be able to do it.

This phenomenon was used as a test in witch trials, but according to this article, nobody ever passed. It was only tried on people who were nearly-guaranteed to fail: people who weren’t fluent in the local language, people with speech impediments, and people not used to public speaking and now being forced to do it in the most high-stakes possible circumstance. And if they somehow seemed to manage it, the witch-finder could always just decide they said “hollowed” instead of “hallowed” or something like that.

During the Salem Witch Trials, one of the accused was a Puritan minister, George Burroughs. Mysteriously, during his trial, they decided to skip this particular test. Standing on the ladder to the tree where he was to be hanged, he was asked for his last words. Burroughs tried what today we’d call a Hail Mary: his last words were the Lord’s Prayer “uttered with such composedness and such fervency of spirit, as was very affecting, and drew tears from many, so that it seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution.”

His accusers told the crowd that the Devil had helped him recite it, and hanged him anyway. The crowd grew angrier and it seemed likely they would storm the grounds before the remaining four scheduled executions could take place. But then Cotton Mather, often considered the main villain in Salem, spoke from his horse, quoting 2 Corinthians 11:14: “Even the Devil can disguise himself as an angel of light.” Burroughs hadn’t proven his innocence; he’d disproven the validity of the test.

Quoting that line as “the Devil” was a bit of a cheat from Mather. The original Greek doesn’t use the word “diabolo” there, as it does elsewhere in 2 Corinthians. It uses the word Σατανᾶς, which means Satan. Or, more literally, “the Accuser.”

5 - Baba Yetu

I may have accidentally given the impression that I disapprove of communal uses of the Lord’s Prayer. Actually, I think a certain gospel choir arrangement might be my single favorite song.

In 2005, Christopher Tin was an obscure classical composer, mainly employed writing incidental music for movies and adapting classic movie soundtracks for live orchestras. His old college roommate and friend, Soren Johnson, asked him to compose the theme song for the video game Civilization IV. He gave him a kind of impossible-sounding brief: it should sound like that a cappella group we liked at Stanford, but also like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack. It should evoke the feeling of seeing the Earth from space and have additional layers of meaning about civilization and the human race. It took Tin about a month.

Baba Yetu is Swahili for Our Father, and the lyrics are, indeed, the Paternoster in Swahili. It can be performed a cappella or backed by percussion, strings, or piano. It’s at once recognizably church gospel, recognizably African, and recognizably “epic movie soundtrack” genre. Tin discovered that he loved composing “world music” and began working on an album, Calling All Dawns, released in 2009, where each song was in a different language and drew on different traditions. That album’s version of Baba Yetu won the Grammy for Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals. The album also works as a single song cycle, starting with Baba Yetu performed by the South African Soweto Gospel Choir and ending with a setting of a traditional Maori blessing.

By starting in Africa and ending in New Zealand, Calling All Dawns embraces the full history (so far) of homo sapiens²—we evolved in Africa, and New Zealand was the last major landmass we settled. In starting with the Lord’s Prayer and ending with Kia Hora Te Marino, the lyrics also describe one arc of our civilization.

The Lord’s Prayer feels old, somehow even a bit older than Christianity. It contradicts Church dogma by describing God as a tempter and denying His omnipotence. It’s a plea to our lord and patriarch to be kind, and a promise to help his will be fulfilled. It depicts humanity as a broken collection of broken people, each of us harming each other, each struggling to forgive. It’s certainly still relevant today. Baba Yetu was played at the signing of a historic peace accord in Mozambique six years ago, as the leaders of the two rival factions embraced. It was performed for a session of the United Nations dedicated to the peaceful resolution of conflict. “Our Father” is still part of who we are.

But Kia Hora reminds us that not all peace is about conflict resolution. That’s just the first step. Here’s Tin’s translation of his closing lyrics.

Pull out the centre,
Pull out the centre of the flax plant.
Where will the bellbird sing?
I ask myself
What is the greatest thing in the world?
My answer is,
(All) the people, the people, the people!

The first breath we take,
Bind the entire flesh of our group and bring it into force like the axe.
Gather, gather and go forward!

Christians often refer to public, group prayers as “corporate prayer”—the word “corporate” is about five hundred years older than the modern corporation. The literal meaning of “corporate” is “bound together into one flesh.” Baba Yetu, for me, redeems the corporate use of the Lord’s Prayer by expanding it. We’re invited to sing along with all of our hundred billion people, living and dead. Jesus said we shouldn’t pray “to be seen by others.” You can obey that by going into a room alone and closing the door. Or you can obey it by recognizing that there are no others and we are never alone.

1. Matthew 6:6-6:8, New International Version

2. I’m using homo sapiens here, rather than “humanity,” because humanity may have evolved in parallel in different regions, not just Africa, and then interbred. Homo sapiens, in this model, is the strain that evolved in Africa and contributed by far the most DNA to modern humans.