On Continuity

Saying the Lord's Prayer

There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer that we say in the Anglican Church of Canada. Most frequently we say the updated version, one that was adopted in 1994 as part of the Revised Common Lectionary. This new version uses contemporary English: the words “thy” and “thine” have been changed, for instance, to “you” and “your.” “Forgive us our sins” has replaced the older word “trespasses,” and we ask, “save us from the time of trial” instead of, “lead us not into temptation.” The prayer ends with doxology, only slightly modified from the original: “the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.”

When we do say the traditional version of the prayer, I attend to the prayer differently, to the words and their meaning, but also to feeling it inspires inside of me. When I say these words aloud with the congregation, it feels as though there is continuity in my life. The person I was decades ago is still the same person I am now. I don’t get this feeling often; at times, who I used to be feels like a stranger to me. But in saying the traditional version of the Lord’s prayer, I am myself. I have a sense of place; I belong to a culture and have a home in it. I feel as though the world is not out of joint, and that I am not alienated from it. For a few moments, I am woven into a story that exists both inside and outside of me.

I am old enough to remember when we said this prayer at the start of every school day in Canadian state schools. Our mornings began with “God Save the Queen,” “Oh Canada,” the Lord’s Prayer, and a daily reading from the Bible. These were not played through a school PA system. We would sing the anthems as a class, unaccompanied, and say the prayer by rote. A few of our classmates would leave the classroom for these morning ceremonies; they were Jehovah Witness kids, and, exempt because of their own religion, they’d wait in the hall. I don’t know if this bothered them in any way. In my own mind, as a first-grader, I thought they rather liked it, the coolness that comes with being special. After the Lord’s Prayer it was time for the Bible reading, and that is when my own praying would begin in earnest. I would silently pray, ironically enough, to be passed over when it came time for my first-grade teacher, Miss Ploose, to choose a student to read the Bible. At age six I was not a natural orator. The words were difficult to read, and I would make frequent errors. We used the King James version, and typically I had little understanding of what was being read aloud. I doubt very much that my classmates did, either, or even our teacher, for that matter. But we did it, dutifully, every morning. That vanishingly few of my childhood friends attended church services aside from Christmas and Easter didn’t seem to trouble anyone. No one was asked to believe what we said. We were simply asked to believe in saying it. Was this Christian prayer and scripture reading part of our school culture because it was part of Canadian culture, or was it part of Canadian culture because it was part of school culture? It is difficult to say. The task of a public education is to create citizens; the line between creating the citizens a culture desires and having a culture because of the kind of citizens it has created is of course a blurry one.

When I recite now the version of the Lord’s Prayer said in my childhood schooldays, it transports me to my early years. I can almost feel the ridges of my brown corduroy pants that I used to wear (hand-me-downs from my older sister that neve quite fit me correctly). I can smell the wood shavings from the classroom’s crank pencil sharpener affixed to the counter by the window. I can remember how we would line up our winter boots by the radiator along the back wall after recess, and what it felt like to sit on the rug during story time. I can hear the sound made by the turning of the heavy, glossy pages of the picture books Miss Ploose would read. The turning of the pages was almost more pleasurable than the story being told. What picture awaited us on the next page? All of these memories are tactile, sensual, even. There is a lot of me still in those old memories and of the schooling that formed me. The Lord’s Prayer was a part of this. Said without much consideration, it nevertheless planted a deep furrow within me, one that now as an adult I can see yielding fruit.

It’s in hindsight that it’s taken on meaning, and that maybe only because as an adult, I’ve returned to Christianity after a period of absence during my 20s and 30s. It is only now that I am beginning to understand the effect that the Lord’s Prayer has had on my mind and soul. I’m under no illusions about the role of nostalgia in my memory of these things; perhaps I mostly enjoy the ritual prayers now because they bring back warm childhood memories. But what is so wrong with childhood memories, especially warm ones? How else do we connect ourselves to our past? That the ritual of saying the Lord’s Prayer was done corporately, and that it still done corporately at church, is in large part what gives meaning to the ritual. I participate out loud together with others. It’s a sort of chant, really. The prayer has a natural rhythm that we all follow. If I think about it, it is strange, ridiculous even: we live in the modern world, yet here we are, a room of fully formed adults, teens and children, chanting an ancient prayer. But it does not feel ridiculous to say it with others. I say it, as many have for centuries, in earnest.

My own daughters, who are both still in school, have of course never said the Lord’s Prayer inside of an educational institution. On November 6 of last year - just two months ago - the Lord’s Prayer was ruled unconstitutional, and thus prohibited, in the province of Manitoba where we live. What schoolkids say instead is our province’s land acknowledgment, a statement to remind them that they occupy Treaty One Territory, land which, however abstractly, belongs to the Indigenous peoples of Canada. I don’t know what effect the land acknowledgement might have on them throughout the long arc of their lives, if any, just as I’m not certain that saying the Lord’s Prayer each morning had any lasting effect on my (many) classmates who do not consider themselves Christian.

Rituals aren’t fading away. They are changing. The rituals are, somehow, both less participatory and more mandatory.