A prayer calls upon a specific God, one who is named. “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” The teaching of the Bible about prayer is full of names. Jesus tells us to pray in His name and to hallow the name of the Father. The Holy Spirit is said to pray with us. The point is, for Christians, prayer is Trinitarian. We do not pray to a generic deity, much less to the presiding god of a pantheon. We are praying to someone specific, the Triune God revealed in the Bible, and to Him alone.
I recently headed the translation committee for our church body’s new hymnal and worship book. Our previous hymnal included the choice of a modernized version of the Lord’s Prayer. We found, though, that no one used it. Even the churches that had given themselves over to contemporary worship — claiming that old-fashioned language and time-honored practices were incomprehensible to “modern” or “postmodern” people today — when they deigned to pray the Lord’s Prayer used the old-fashioned, time-honored version, complete with “thy’s,” “art’s,” and “trespasses.”
The Lord’s Prayer is the ultimate prayer, comprehending everything that we can pray for, and as such it sinks deep into the consciousness and into the culture.
Prayer still has cultural currency. A TV reporter might be a militantly biased left-wing secularist, but after an interview with the survivors of a hurricane or the family of a murder victim, he often tells them, “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” Legislatures, including those that acknowledge no laws higher than the ones they make up, still begin with prayer. When a national catastrophe takes place — for example, the 9/11 attacks — presidents declare a day of prayer and mass prayer services are convened in sports stadiums or the National Cathedral.
At these exercises of national piety, the Lord’s Prayer is no longer used. Whereas some of us can remember beginning each school day with the Flag Salute and the Lord’s Prayer, it is generally recognized that use of a specifically Christian prayer is not appropriate in a religiously pluralistic context. In our new civil religion, not just Christians but Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Native American animists, and whatever other religions might be represented in the community, must be dragged out and acknowledged. Sometimes this means each priest, imam, or witchdoctor offer his own distinct prayers, as the assembly bows their heads. Sometimes the assembled but diverse worshipers offer generic prayers that refer to no specific deity.
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