Praying the Our Father. (CNS photo)
VIEW FROM THE PEW
OMG! (Nothing irreverent intended: you know that’s just text-speak for gasp.) He’s done it again.
It was Jan. 16 in his weekly public audience at the Vatican that Pope Francis again suggested that we could reword the Lord’s Prayer a bit.
The last time the pope opined publicly about the wording of that most treasured Christian prayer was about a year ago. It was all about rewording “lead us not into temptation” because of course we know it’s not God who does that, it’s Satan. That set off a storm of media spin and attacks from his critics inside and outside our church. The very idea of changing biblical language! Will the church spin off its axis? Will Christianity survive? Outrageous and outspoken open-mindedness is not orthodoxy and someone should do something: they huffed and they sputtered.
This time, when Pope Francis suggested that we get even more personal in talking to God, it didn’t kick up the storm and furor. Yet.
He pointed out that, when Jesus taught this prayer, it was a big step for the first Christians to address the Creator as their father. Jesus used the Aramaic word “Abba” to address his father in heaven. And, said the pope, we should feel free to do the same. Pope Francis told the crowd that the word “is something much more intimate and moving than simply calling God ‘father.’ It is an endearing term, somewhat like ‘dad,’ ‘daddy’ or ‘papa.’ We are invited to say ‘Papa,’ to have a rapport with God like a child with his or her papa. To pray well, one must have the heart of a child.”
“It is rare Aramaic expressions do not get translated into Greek in the New Testament,” Pope Francis told the crowd of thousands. That underscores how important and nuanced “Abba” is, he said.
He suggested that we say this prayer with the parable of the prodigal son in mind. Imagine the son being embraced by his father, who waited so long, who forgave him and wants to say how much he missed his child, according to the Catholic News Service report of the talk.
It was one of those news stories that made me wish I had been there. I love to hear the pope being a pastor and teacher. That’s what he is doing with the series of talks on the Lord’s Prayer that he launched in December. He’s leading us to look at something that we recite by rote, having us open it up and think it through anew.
Now, I don’t foresee us doing that daddy talk in our formal setting at Mass when we recite the prayer together, holding hands or not, often emphasizing whichever part resonates that day. I have felt the Our Father is a quick examination of conscience: yes, that was a misstep toward evil last week; oh woe, how unforgiving I’ve been; how many times have I used your name and not in a hallowed way at all.
But in the secluded prayer space inside my head, I might have courage to try it. I already have a stream-of-conscious refrain running, a distraction that occurs when I use memorized prayers. Oh Lord, are you getting impatient with my whimpering or demanding. You must have a sense of humor to watch my train of thought going off the rails so often. I know you know my thoughts before I speak them, but I have this list, you see, and I need to go through it.
I have a friend who occasionally asks “did they change the words yet?” She’s referring to the previous tempest about the Our Father. It’s an oft-repeated conversation about the Catholic Church and how it’s changed since she was in parochial school decades ago. She was somewhat on board with last year’s papal proposal that “lead us not into temptation” just doesn’t fit. I made the mistake of pointing out how other stuff was lost or deliberately changed in translations from Aramaic to Greek to English. It was a too-much-information conversation. So we just agreed to appreciate the Lord’s Prayer as a moving poetic and musical performance by a great tenor.
The Protestant version
It doesn’t bother me that “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” is still language we would encounter when we listen to the sung prayer, or say it in a Protestant setting. You don’t have to be a biblical scholar or language expert to get that it’s not about financial debt. Theologians were comfortable with tweaking the translation to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Another anomaly in the prayer causes Catholics to go mute too soon for the Protestant prayer experience. Most non-Catholic Christians conclude the best loved prayer with the soaring finale that took you to great heights of fervor when it poured from Pavarotti’s lips: “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”
That language was not in early translations of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, who used Greek to report the event when Jesus taught his first followers to pray in Aramaic, writing about a century later. I found that particular tinkering with the prayer treated mostly as a footnote, no big gasps of heresy, as I cruised the internet for theological viewpoints. Martin Luther and others in early days of the Protestant Reformation used a Greek translation from Orthodox Christian tradition to revamp the Lord’s Prayer, among other efforts to purge language used by the Catholic Church.
Isn’t it interesting that the Catholic Church adopted the “Protestant” language, more than 400 years after the Protestant revolt, at a time when we moved into modern language liturgies after the Second Vatican Council. Only during Mass and only after we pause for a few more words from the priest, do we add “for the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours now and forever.”
Speaking of Vatican II, remember how we got all casual and folksy with our new music and freedom to worship in English. Nowadays, you don’t even blink when references to “us men” gets turned politically correct with “and women.” It still echoes in some Catholic situations, attempts to avoid the male pronoun when talking about Him.
And as for a female pronoun being used in connection with God, I’ve witnessed it and I like it only because it gives fundamentalists apoplexy. Those purists must not have been listening last week because the pope slipped this perspective into his homily: “God is not just a father, he is like a mother who never stops loving” her child. He said the father of the prodigal son displays maternal qualities of forgiveness and empathy. It is mothers who keep loving their children “even if they would no longer deserve anything.”
OMG, indeed!
We’ll be listening should Pope Francis get around to talking about the added-on doxology as he continues the series of talks on the prayer in his papal audiences.
But, back to the last time our irrepressible pope commented on changing the language of the most famous Christian prayer. The criticism continues to sputter in the dark web world of critics outside and inside the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis said the final petition for help — “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” — is misleading and could be made more clear to our limited, literal 21st century minds. He said that leading us into temptation is not what God does, “it’s Satan’s job.”
Maybe the reason it aroused such a kerfuffle in December 2017 is that he spoke in a television interview in Rome, and we know how the media watch each other for inspiration. It made headlines from the BBC to American networks to The Hindu daily paper in Mumbai.
The French version
At the time, Francis was praising what Catholic Church leaders in France had just done with the French language liturgy. “Let us not enter into temptation” is what the French came up, and they are using it now.
The pope proposed that Italian church leaders do a similar change, and indeed that idea was already in the works for years. The Italians approved their third edition of the Roman missal in November with language that translates “do not abandon us to temptation but deliver us from evil.”
After the dust settled, it was pointed out that the Spanish language version of the Our Father says “do not let us fall” into temptation, thus not pointing the finger of blame at God, so to speak. Spanish is the language most familiar to our Argentinian Pope. The Portuguese missal is similar. German bishops recently decided to stick with “lead us not.”
“The New American Bible,” revised edition, is the basis for the lectionary used at English language masses in the United States. The petition from the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke is translated as “do not subject us to the final test.” The Catholic News Service pointed that out at the time, a fact widely ignored in favor of furor. That’s the way we hear it when that Gospel text cycles around to be read at Mass.
You’d think that would apply to what we say aloud in the prayer, too, but nope.
No need to watch the front page for breaking news on the subject. There’s no imminent plan to revamp the 2011 edition of the English language missal. It took years to get that into print. We’re still stumbling along with its awkward translations in the creed and elsewhere, but we are firm and loud with the familiar “lead us not into temptation.”
