The Lord's Prayer Reprised

My family is still fairly new to the Episcopal church, and having grown up in more evangelicalish churches, there are still a lot of differences that we are still learning to appreciate.  The idea that throughout the service, all of the prayers are written down, predetermined, with only a few blanks to fill in specific to our congregation.  This is a massive change from the church I'm used to, where a member of the congregation or a worship leader would lead a prayer coming from his own words that could last for several minutes, infused with many requests and oftentimes messages to the congregation.  (Please note that I am not attempting to condemn or claim that this improvisational prayer is any less significant or correct, I am just comparing what I grew up with to what my church does now.)  As such, we are having to relearn prayer.

I've also been dealing with a lot of conflicts about the nature of and purpose of prayer.  Since Rachel Held Evans went into the hospital and everyone on Twitter started saying prayers, especially when we started to see things getting worse, my already skeptical views continued to solidify.  If God answered prayers according to our requests, Rachel should have been healed.  If God answered prayers according to the faith of those who prayed, Rachel should have been healed.  If God answered prayers according to our persistence, Rachel should have been healed.  Instead, Rachel died.  If we view prayer as bringing our requests to God, but knowing that God is going to make his own decision anyway (or that he is impotent to do so), then it seems to be completely void of purpose.  There has to be something different to it, and something different to why we pray.

We have a 2-year-old son who joins us during the latter part of service every week.  While he spends most of his time on the pews playing with cars and drawing on paper, we really want him to have something to engage him in the service.  Also, we want him to learn to pray, even if we don't know why or what it should look like, so we were already doing simple prayers at bedtime.  Our church says the Lord's prayer every week, so we thought this would be a good entry point.  We now do the Lord's prayer with him every night, having him repeat after us in bite-sized chunks.  He surprised us a couple of weeks ago by suddenly saying the whole thing without any prompting.  When we get to church and start saying the prayer, he enthusiastically joins in, albeit a bit delayed (which results in him saying "Amen" out loud after the rest of the congregation, which is unbelievably adorable).

The Lord's prayer was part of the lectionary this week, too, so it inspired me to write about it.  I will concede that the passage in the lectionary also includes Jesus basically saying ask God and it will be given to you.  I don't know how to square this with the doubts that Rachel's death cemented in me without doing a lot of mental gymnastics.  Thus, I am going to ignore that point today, not because it is unimportant or wrong, but because I legitimately do not know how to handle it.

Taking all of the above into account, I decided to give my own take on it as an attempt to give the words a little more meaning to me.  In writing this, I decided upon the "May we" format, mainly for the construct of expectation.  If I say to someone "may you find peace today," I tend to mean something along the lines of "my desire is for you to find peace today."  It comes across as a more passive hope or desire rather than directly asking "Please do this."  It's more of a conversation and a statement of mentality than it is a request.  I also like the "we" construct, as it indicates the desire is for all of humanity as well as us individually to embrace these hopes.

So having said all of that, here is my attempt at doing the Lord's prayer in my own voice (which is a little more long-winded, as I'm already long-winded, and I'm doing my best to speak in plain terms).

Dear God,

You are divine and set apart from everything else in our life.

May we declare your presence and power on the earth the same as we do in the life to come.

May we enact your desires on this world to make it reflect the life to come.

May we be satisfied with enough to make it through this day, leaving worries about tomorrow to you.

May we have the wisdom and grace to forgive our oppressors and enemies in the same way we wish to have our own actions of oppression, hatred, and destructiveness forgiven.

May we be freed of the distractions and worries that attempt to take our focus off of your desires.

May we recognize that creation is yours, not ours, and may we treat it accordingly.

May we recognize that your power is great and trust in it when it seems defeat is inevitable.

May we recognize that victory over death is yours and live accordingly.

May all of these desires come to fruition.