The Living Room Lord's Prayer
Last Sunday night our community concluded our series of conversations (jams) on The Lord's Prayer by rewriting it (talk about local and contextual theology!) So check out our version of the Lord's Prayer...
We pray like this:
We pray like this:
To the One who has always been, and who has always been there with us, may all that you are be sacred to us.
Help us renew your creation by living into your alternative, surprising consciousness that arrives when we seek justice, love kindness and walk humbly before you.
Meet our daily needs as you know them, and help us to be a part of meeting the daily needs of others. Redistribute the resources of the world as needed. Forgive us when we knowingly and unknowingly fail and help us to forgive those who do the same.
Lead us away from temptation and rescue us from all forms of evil and from ourselves. . .
posted by Dan Ra at
6:35 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for posting this, Dan. I have a love/hate relationship with corporate prayer. You can churn through the Lord's Prayer (or any number of prayers and creeds) in unison with a room full of people and feel like it's the emptiest gesture on earth.
My choir sings a pretty popular arrangement of the Lord's Prayer that I really don't like that much. But every time we perform it, certain people in the audience react so strongly to it- their faces light up or they start crying or they grab the person sitting next to them. I am always amazed that a piece I have such a hard time getting into can be so moving to others. Our conductor has pointed out that you just don't know who had that piece played at their wedding or at the funeral of a loved one or during some other crystalizing life experience. As much as the arrangement kind of cheeses me out, I also sort of envy those people (eek- a Deadly Sin!) for their connection with the prayer.
I can remember one of my HS youth directors giving a talk about how to use the Lord's Prayer as a a model for our own prayers, and that was the first time I really "got" the point of what Jesus was saying, I think. But I have always had to be very intentional about praying the ACTUAL Lord's Prayer with sincerety- it's just so easy to sprint through the cadences you know so well without even knowing what you're saying. Sort of like driving home from work and not even realizing how you got home once you park.
Anyway- I appreciate this meditation on and re-imagining of the Lord's Prayer as much for the restored throughtfulness it engenders as its obvious personal significance to the Living Room folks. Which, I guess, was sort of the idea. I said it before, but I especially love that we included the words from Micah 6:8- what does the Lord require (my choir actually sings an arrangement of that, too!)?
Hmmm . . . maybe you should set this to music, Dan. A minor undertaking, to be sure! :)
Word! So true KQ - it is amazing how the words of this most simple of prayers evokes in many the deepest of heart-felt reactions. It may not occur every time, less we envy others, but it can and does happen. That's what makes ritual, or the things we repeat over time, interesting to me. Such "things" move and reside deeply with our soul.
I'm so thankful for our communities willingness to re-write a prayer that invites such creative engagement. "Pray like this"... even if our prayer isn't easily put to music (though I also would LOVE to see what Dan could do with it)!
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