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But as we go deeper into it, we see more fully that it's a prayer about our human condition.

So I'd be very reluctant to see it simply as a prayer only about Christians, although it is a prayer for Christians because it begins with the words "Our Father". Save all of us from the destructive power of evil. Keep all of us from being plunged into crisis we can't handle. When I pray those those bits of the Lord's Prayer, I think not just of myself or of fellow Christians, I feel I'm praying it for all human beings: Give all of us what we need for life, the dignity and the hope. It's about what it's like to be a human being: "And lead us not into temptation deliver us from evil. I'd say in a sense it's about all human beings. It's an interesting question whether the Lord's Prayer is about us. It requires that we become different sorts of people, but it acknowledges that that will only happen when we learn how to depend freely and lovingly on the God whose made himself Our Father. It's not a prayer that pretends and it's also a prayer that requires our lives change. So the Lord's Prayer is a prayer that is utterly serious about the danger, the tragedy of the world. Here is the anchorage that keeps us steady in this turbulent, difficult, nightmare world. Just as in the old hymn, here is an anchor that keeps the soul. And to begin that prayer "Our Father" is really to say what Saint Paul is saying. We know that there is a relationship that nothing can break.Īnd again, you could turn to Saint Paul on that to the end of chapter eight of his Letter to the Romans: "I know that nothing, nothing can separate me from the love of God and Jesus Christ". With that confidence, that kind of unchildish dependence, we're actually free.

We need to know that whatever happens to us God is God, God's name and presence and power and word are holy and wonderful and that that glorious God has made us members of his family in a very intimate and direct way.

To stand with dignity and freedom in a world like that, we need to know that God is Our Father. Where crisis faces us, where uncertainty is all around about tomorrow and where evil is powerfully at work. We stand in the middle of a human world where God's will is not the most automatic thing that people do. The prayer as a whole tells us we stand in a very vulnerable place. Rowan Williams.ĭr Rowan Williams © A prayer to set us free A conversation with The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Rev.