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| Simone and her brother Andre in 1922 |
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν
τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·
“Our Father which art in Heaven.”
He
is our Father. There is nothing real in us which does not come from him. We
belong to Him. He loves us, since He loves himself and we are His. Nevertheless
He is our Father who is in heaven -- not elsewhere. If we think to have a
Father here below it is not He, it is a false God. We cannot take a single step
toward Him. We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward Him. We
do not have to search for Him, we only have to change the direction in which we
are looking. It is for Him to search for us. We must be happy in the knowledge
that He is infinitely beyond our reach. Thus we can be certain that the evil in
us, even if it overwhelms our whole being, in no way sullies the divine purity,
bliss, and perfection.
ἁγιασθήτω
τὸ ὄνομά
σου·
“Hallowed be thy Name.”
God
alone has the power to name himself, His name is unpronounceable for human
lips. His name is his word. It is the Word of God. The name of any being is an
intermediary between the human spirit and that being; it is the only means by
which the human spirit can conceive something about a being that is absent. God
is absent. He is in heaven. Man’s only possibility of gaining access to him is
through His name. It is the Mediator. Man has access to this name, although it
also is transcendent. It shines in the beauty and order of the world and it
shines in the interior light of the human soul. This name is holiness itself;
there is no holiness outside it; it does not therefore have to be hallowed. In
asking for its hallowing we are asking for something that exists eternally,
with full and complete reality, so that we can neither increase nor diminish
it, even by an infinitesimal fraction. To ask for that which exists, that which
exists really, infallibly, eternally, quite independently of our prayer, that
is the perfect petition. We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made
of desire; but the desire that nails us down to what is imaginary, temporal,
selfish, can, if we make it pass wholly into this petition, become a lever to
tear us from the imaginary into the real and from time into eternity, to lift
us right out of the prison of self.
ἐλθέτω
ἡ βασιλεία σου·
“Thy Kingdom Come.”
This
concerns something to be achieved, something not yet here. The Kingdom of God
means the complete filling of the entire soul of intelligent creatures with the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit bloweth where he listeth? We can only invite him. We
must not even try to invite him in a definite and special way to visit us or
anyone else in particular, or even everybody in general; we must just invite
him purely and simply, so that our thought of him is an invitation, a longing
cry. It is as when one is in extreme thirst, ill with thirst; then one no
longer thinks of the act of drinking in relation to oneself, or even of the act
of drinking in a general way. One merely thinks of water, actual water itself,
but the image of water is like a cry from our whole being.
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου,·
“Thy will be done.”
We
are only absolutely, infallibly certain of the will of God concerning the past.
Everything that has happened, whatever it may be, is in accordance with the
will of the almighty Father. That is implied by the notion of almighty power.
The future also, whatever it may contain, once it has come about, will have
come about in conformity with the will of God. We can neither add to nor take
from this conformity. In this clause, therefore, after an upsurging of our
desire toward the possible, we are once again asking for that which is. Here,
however, we are not concerned with an eternal reality such as the holiness of
the Word, but with what happens in the time order. Nevertheless we are asking
for the infallible and eternal conformity of everything in time with the will
of God. After having, in our first peti.don, torn ow desire away from time in
order to fix it upon eternity, thereby transforming it, we return to this
desire which has itself become in some measure eternal, in order to apply it
once more to time. Whereupon our desire pierces through time to find eternity
behind it. That is what comes about when we know how to make every accomplished
fact, whatever it may be, an object of desire. We have here quite a different
thing from resignation. Even the word acceptance is too weak. We have to desire
that everything that has happened should have happened, and nothing else. We
have to do so, not because what has happened is good in our eyes, but because
God has permitted it, and because the obedience of the course of events to God
is in itself an absolute good.
ὡς
ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ
ἐπὶ
τῆς γῆς·
“On earth as it is in heaven.”
The
association of our desire with the almighty will of God should be extended to
spiritual things. Our own spiritual ascents and falls, and those of the beings
we love, have to do with the other world, but they are also events that take
place here below, in time. On that account they are details in the immense sea
of events and arc tossed about with, the ocean in a way conforming to the will
of God. Since our failures of the past have come about, we have to desire that
they should have come about. We have to extend this desire into the future, for
the day when it will have become the past. It is a necessary correction of the
petition that the kingdom of God should come, We have to cast aside all other
desires for the sake of our desire for eternal life, but we should desire
eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not even become attached to
detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others. We
have to think of eternal life as one thinks of water when dying of thirst, and
yet at the same time we have to desire that we and our loved ones should be
eternally deprived of this water rather than receive it in abundance in spite
of God’s will, if such a thing were conceivable,
The
three foregoing petitions are related to the three Persons of the Trinity, the
Son, the Spirit, and the Father, and also to the three divisions of time, the
present, the future, and the past. The three petitions that follow have a more
direct bearing on the three divisions of time, and take them in a different
order—present, past, and future.
τὸν
ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν
ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
“Give us
this day our daily bread” -- the bread which is supernatural
Christ
is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at
the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our
consent. If we agree to his entry, he enters; directly we cease to want him, he
is gone. We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow; we cannot make a pact with
him that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves. Our consent
to his presence is the same as his presence. Consent is an act; it can only be
actual, that is to say in the present. We have not been given a will that can
be applied to the future. Everything not effective in our will is imaginary.
The effective part of the will has its effect at once; its effectiveness cannot
be separated from itself. The effective part of the will is not effort, which
is directed toward the future. It is consent; it is the “yes” of marriage. A
“yes” pronounced within the present moment and for the present moment, but
spoken as an eternal word, for it is consent to the union of Christ with the
eternal part of our soul.
Bread
is a necessity for us. We are beings who continually draw our energy from
outside, for as we receive it we use it up in effort. If our energy is not
daily renewed, we become feeble and incapable of movement. Besides actual food,
in the literal sense of the word, all incentives are sources of energy for us.
Money, ambition, consideration, decorations, celebrity, power, our loved ones,
everything that puts into us the capacity for action is like bread. If anyone
of these attachments penetrates deeply enough into us to reach the vital roots
of our carnal existence, its loss may break us and even cause our death. That is
called dying of love. It is like dying of hunger. All these objects of
attachment go together with food, in the ordinary sense of the word, to make up
the daily bread of this world. It depends entirely on circumstances whether we
have it or not. We should ask nothing with regard to circumstances unless it be
that they may conform to the will of God. We should not ask for earthly bread.
There
is a transcendent energy whose source is in heaven, and this flows into us as
soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the
agency of our souls and of our bodies.
We
should ask for this food. At the moment of asking, and by the very fact that we
ask for it, we know that God will give it to us. We ought not to be able to
bear to go without it for a single day, for when our actions only depend on
earthly energies, subject to the necessity of this world, we are incapable of
thinking and doing anything but evil. God saw “that the misdeeds of man were
multiplied on the earth and that all the thoughts of his heart were continually
bent upon evil.” [Genesis 6:5] The necessity that drives us toward evil governs
everything in us except the energy from on high at the moment when it comes
into us. We cannot store it.
καὶ
ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ
ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν,
ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς
ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
“And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive
our debtors.”
At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted
everything that is owing to us. This not only includes reparation for any
wrongs we think we have suffered, but also gratitude for the good we think we
have done, and it applies in a quite general way to all we expect from people
and things, to all we consider as our due and without which we should feel
ourselves to have been frustrated. All these are the rights that we think the
past has given us over the future.
First
there is the right to a certain permanence. When we have enjoyed something for
a long time, we think that it is ours and that we are entitled to expect fate
to let us go on enjoying it. Then there is the right to a compensation for
every effort whatever its nature, be it work, suffering, or desire. Every time
that we put forth some effort and the equivalent of this effort does not come
back to us in the form of some visible fruit, we have a sense of false balance
and emptiness which makes us think that we have been cheated. The effort of
suffering from some offense causes us. to expect the punishment or apologies of
the offender, the effort of doing good makes us expect the gratitude of the
person we have helped, but these are only particular cases of a universal law
of the soul.
Every
time we give anything out we have an absolute need that at least the
equivalents should come into us, and because we. need this we think we have a
right to it. Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the
entire universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim we think we
possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the
future. That is the claim we have to renounce.
To
have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump.
It is to accept that the future should still be virgin and intact, strictly
united to the past by bonds of which we are ignorant, but quite free from the
bonds our imagination thought to impose upon it. It means that we accept the
possibility that. this will happen, and that it may happen to us in particular;
it means that we are prepared for the future to render all our past life
sterile and vain.
In
renouncing at one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can
ask of God that our past sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and
error. So long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot stop this horrible
fruiting. We cannot hold on to the past without retaining our crimes, for we
are unaware of what is most essentially bad in us.
The
principal claim we think we have on the universe is that our personality should
continue. This claim implies all the others. The instinct of self-preservation
makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a
necessity is a right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I
must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “I do not see the necessity for
that.”
Our
personality is entirely dependent on external circumstances which have
unlimited power to crush it. But we would rather die than admit this. From our
point of view the equilibrium of the world is a combination of circumstances so
ordered that our personality remains intact and seems to belong to us. All the
circumstances of the past that have wounded our personality appear to us to be
disturbances of balance which should infallibly be made up for one day or
another by phenomena having a contrary effect. We live on the expectation of
these compensations. The near approach of death is horrible chiefly because it
forces the knowledge upon us that these compensations will never come.
To
remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything
that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that• in
the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external
circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means
being happy that things should be so.
The
words “Thy will be done” imply this acceptance, if we say them with all our
soul, That is why we can say a few moments later: “We forgive our debtors.”
The
forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, spiritual nakedness, death. If we
accept death completely, we can ask God to make us live again, purified from
the evil in us. For to ask him to forgive us our debts is to ask him to wipe
out the evil in us. Pardon is purification. God himself has not the power to
forgive the evil in us while it remains there. God will have forgiven our debts
when he has brought us to the state of perfection.
Until
then God forgives our debts partially in the same measure as we forgive our
debtors.
καὶ
μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς
πειρασμόν,
ἀλλὰ
ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ
πονηροῦ.
“And lead
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
The only temptation for man
is to be abandoned to his own
resources in the presence of evil. His nothingness is then proved
experimentally. Although the soul has received supernatural bread at the moment
when it asked for it, its joy is mixed with fear because it could only ask for
it for the present. The future is still to be feared. The soul has not, the
right to ask for bread for the morrow, but it expresses its fear in the form of
a supplication. It finishes with that. The prayer began with the word’ “Father,”
it ends with the word “evil.” We must go from confidence to fear. Confidence
alone can give us strength enough not to fall as a result of fear. After having
contemplated the name, the kingdom, and the will of God, after having received
the supernatural bread and having been purified from evil, the soul is ready
for that true humility which crowns all virtues. Humility consists of knowing
that in this world the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its
totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it,
is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolute
acceptance of the possibility that everything natural in us should be
destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that
the supernatural part of the soul should disappear. It must be accepted as an
event that would come about only in conformity with the will of God. It must be
repudiated as being something utterly horrible. We must be afraid of it, but
our fear must be as it were the completion of confidence.
The
six petitions correspond with each other in pairs. The bread which is
transcendent is the same thing as the divine name. It is what brings about the
contact of man with God. The kingdom of God is the same thing as his protection
stretched over us against temptation; to protect is the function of royalty.
Forgiving our debtors their debts is the same thing as the total acceptance of
the will of God. The difference is that in the first three petitions the
attention is fixed solely on God. In the three last, we turn our attention back
to ourselves in order to compel ourselves to make these petitions a real and
not an imaginary act.
In
the first half of the prayer, we begin with acceptance. Then we allow ourselves
a desire. Then we correct it by coming back to acceptance. In the second half,
the order is changed; we finish by expressing desire. Only desire has now
become negative; it is expressed as a fear; therefore it corresponds. to the
highest degree of humility and that is a fitting way to end.
The
Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer
not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is
impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to
each word, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in
the soul.
