About the ‘Our Father’

‘Our Father Who is in the heavens.’

God is our Father; there is nothing real in us that did not proceed from Him. We are His. God loves us since He loves Himself and we are His. But God is the Father Who is in the heavens. Not elsewhere. If we believe we have a Father here below, it is not God; it is a false God. We cannot take a single step toward God. We cannot walk vertically. We only have the power to direct our gaze toward God. We do not have to search; we must only change the direction of our gaze. It is God who searches for us. We must be happy knowing that God is infinitely beyond our reach. We thus have the certainty that the evil in us, even if it submerges our whole being, does not defile the purity, the bliss and the divine perfection at all.

‘Holy is your name.’

God alone has the power to name Himself. God’s name is not pronounceable for human lips. God’s name is His word. It is the Word [Verbe]. The name of any being is an intermediary between the human spirit and that being, the only way the human spirit can grasp anything of that being when it is absent. God is absent; God is in the heavens. God’s name is the only possibility for people to have access to God. It is the mediator. People have access to that name, although it is also transcendent. It shines in the beauty of the order of the world and in the internal light of the human soul. That name is holiness itself; there is nothing holy outside of it. Therefore, it does not need to be sanctified. In requesting the sanctification, we ask for what is — what really is, infallibly, eternally, in a manner quite independent of our request — this is the perfect request. We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are desire. But that desire which nails us to the imaginary, the temporal, to egoism — if we make it pass totally into this request we can turn it into a lever that snatches us from the imaginary into the real, from the temporal into eternity, and outside the prison of the self.

‘Your kingdom come.’

It is now something that must come. It is not here. The kingdom of God is the Holy Spirit completely filling the entire soul of intelligent creatures. The Spirit blows where it wants; we can only invite the Spirit. We must not even think of a particular way of inviting the Spirit in this or that person, or even on everyone, but to invite purely and simply. To think of the Spirit is an appeal and a cry. When we are at the limit of our thirst — when we are sick with thirst — we can no longer think the act of drinking in relation to ourselves, nor even as the general act of drinking. We only think of water, taking water in itself, but this image of water is like a cry from our whole being.

‘Accomplish your will.’

We are only absolutely, infallibly certain of the will of God for the past. All the events that have happened, whatever they might be, are conformed to the will of the all-powerful Father. This is implied by the notion of omnipotence. The future also, whatever it must be, once accomplished, will be accomplished in conformity to the will of God. We have no power whatsoever to add or subtract from that conformity. Thus, in this phrase, after the incentive of desire toward the possible, we ask for what is — but no longer as an eternal reality as is the holiness of the Word. Here the object of our request is what happens in time. But we request the infallible and eternal conformity of what happens in time to the divine will. After having, through the first request, snatched our desire from time to be applied to the eternal, and having it thus transformed, we resume with this desire, which itself becomes eternal in a certain way, to apply it again to time. Thus our desire pierces time to find eternity behind it. This is what happens when we know how to make every accomplished event, whatever it might be, an object of our desire. This is different than resignation. The word ‘acceptance’ is even too feeble. We must desire for everything that happens to happen, and not something else. Not because what happened is good in our eyes, but because God permitted it, and because obedience of the course of events to God is in itself an absolute good.

‘As in the heavens, likewise on earth.’

The association of our desire with the all-powerful will of God must extend to spiritual things. Our spiritual ascents and failures and those of beings we love are related to the other world, but are also events that happen here below in time. On that account, they are details in the immense sea of events, tossed with the whole sea in a manner that conforms to the will of God. Since our past failures have happened, we must desire that they should have happened. We must extend that desire to the future for the day when they should become the past. This is a necessary correction to the request that the kingdom of God should arrive. We must abandon every other desire in favor of eternal life, but we must desire eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not attach ourselves even to detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than other attachments. We must think of eternal life as one thinks of water when dying of thirst. And at the same time we must desire for ourselves and for our loved ones the eternal deprivation of that water rather than being filled in spite of the will of God, if such a thing were conceivable.

The three preceding requests are related to the three Persons of the Trinity — the Son, the Spirit and the Father — and also to the three types of time: the present, the future and the past. The three requests that follow bear on the three parts of time more directly and in a different order — present, past and future.

‘Give us today our bread, which is supernatural.’

Christ is our bread. We only need to ask for him now. For he is always there, at the door of our soul, which he wants to enter, but he will not force consent. If we consent for Christ to enter, he will. As soon as we do not want him, he is gone. We cannot bind our will for tomorrow to today; we cannot make a pact with him today for tomorrow, that he will be in us even in spite of us. Our consent to his presence is the same thing as his presence. Consent is an act that can only be actual. We have not been given a will that can be applied to the future. All that is not effective in our will is imaginary. The effective part of the will is effective immediately; its effectiveness is not distinct from itself. The effective part of the will is not effort outstretched toward tomorrow. It is consent, the ‘yes’ of marriage, a ‘yes’ pronounced in the present instant and for the present instant, but pronounced as an eternal word, for it is consent to the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul.

Bread is a necessity for us. We are beings who draw our energy from outside, for the measure that we receive is depleted by our efforts. If our energy is not renewed daily, we become devoid of strength and incapable of movement. Outside of the actual food, in the literal sense of the word, every stimulant is a source of energy for us. Money, advancement, consideration, decoration, celebrity, power, loved ones — all that which is placed in us for the capacity to act is like bread. If one of these attachments penetrates deeply enough into us, even to the roots of our carnal existence, its loss can break us and make us die. We call this ‘dying of grief.’ It is like dying of hunger. Every object of attachment constitutes, along with actual food, the bread here below. Whether they are granted to us or refused to us depends entirely on our circumstances. We should never make requests about the circumstances unless they conform to the will of God. We should not ask for the bread here below.

There is a transcendent energy whose source is from heaven that flows into us as soon as we desire it. It is the true energy; it executes actions through the mediation of our souls and our bodies. We should ask for this food. The moment we ask for it and even by the fact that we ask, we know that God wants to give it to us. We should not endure the remainder of a single day without it. For when only earthly energy, subject to necessity here below, feeds our acts, we can only do or think of evil. The necessity that compels us toward evil governs all that is in us, except for the energy from on high in the moment that it enters us. We cannot store it up.

‘And remit our debts, in the same way we also have remitted our debtors.’

In the moment we say these words, we must already have remitted all debts. This includes not only remitting the reparation of offenses we think we have suffered; it is also letting go of the recognition for the good that we think we have done; and in a completely general way, all that we expect from people and things, everything we believe is our due, the absence of which has given us the sense of having been frustrated.

It is remitting every right we believe is ours in the past and in the future. First, the right to a guaranteed permanence. When we have enjoyed something for a long time, we believe it is ours and that fate must let us keep enjoying it. Second, the right to compensation for every effort, whatever the nature of our effort, work, suffering or desire. Every time we expend effort and the equivalent effort is not returned to us in the form of visible fruit, we have a feeling of inequity, of emptiness, that makes us believe we have been robbed. The effort of sustaining an offense makes us expect the chastisement of the offender, or an apology from them. The effort of doing some good makes us expect the recognition of the one obliged to us. But these are only particular cases of a universal law in the soul. Every time anything is released from us, we have an absolute need that at least its equivalent should be returned to us, and because we have that need, we believe we have that right. Our debtors are all beings, all things and the entire universe. We believe we have a claim over everything. In all claims we believe we possess, there is always an imaginary claim of the past on the future. It is this that we must renounce.

Forgiving our debtors is to renounce the past en bloc. To accept that the future is again virgin and intact, tied to the past strictly by links of which we are ignorant, but completely free from what our imagination believes it has imposed on it. To forgive is to accept the possibility that this can happen, and in particular that it can happen to us, and that the future may make our lives in the past a sterile and vain thing.

In renouncing in one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can ask God that our past sins would not bear their miserable fruits of evil and error in our souls. As long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot prevent this horrible fruit-bearing in us. We cannot attach ourselves to the past without attaching ourselves to our crimes, for we are not aware of what is most essentially bad in us.

The principle claim we think we have over the universe is the continuation of our personhood. This claim implies all the others. The instinct for self-preservation makes us feel this continuation as a necessity, and we feel that a necessity is a right. As the beggar said to Talleyrand, ‘Sir, I must live.’ And Talleyrand replied, ‘I do not see the necessity.’ Our personality depends on external circumstances, which have unlimited power to crush it. But we would rather die than recognize this.

The equilibrium of the world seems to us a course of circumstances such that our personality remains intact and seems to belong to us. It seems to us that all the past circumstances which wounded our personality are ruptures of equilibrium that must infallibly, one day or another, be compensated for by phenomena of a contrary sense. We live in expectancy of these compensations. The imminent approach of death is horrible especially because it forces us to realize that this compensation will not occur.

Forgiveness of debts is the renunciation of our own personality. Renouncing everything that I call ‘me.’ Without any exception. It is to know that in what I call ‘me’ there is nothing — no psychological element at all — that external circumstances cannot make disappear. It is to accept this. To be happy that it should be this way.

The words ‘that Your will should be accomplished’ imply this acceptance if we pronounce them with our whole soul. For this reason, we can say a few moments later, ‘We have forgiven our debtors.’

The forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, naked spirituality, death. If we completely accept this death, we can ask God to revive us, to purify us from the evil that is in us. For when we ask Him to remit our debts, it is to ask him to wipe out the evil that is in us. Pardon is purification. God Himself has no power to pardon the evil in us that remains there. Until then, God remits our debts partially, in the measure to which we remit our debtors.

‘And do not cast us into temptation, but protect us from evil.’

The only temptation for mankind is to be abandoned to oneself when in contact with evil. The nothingness of humanity is then experimentally verified. Although the soul has received the supernatural bread in the very moment when we asked for it, our joy is mixed with fear because we can only ask for it for the present. The future remains formidable. We have no right to ask for bread for tomorrow, but we express our fear in the form of supplication. We finish with that. The word ‘Father’ began the prayer; the word ‘evil’ ends it. We must go from confidence to fear. Only confidence gives us enough strength so that the fear should not cause us to fall. After having contemplated the name, the kingdom and the will of God, after having received the supernatural bread and having been purified of evil, the soul is ready for the true humility that crowns all the virtues. Humility consists of knowing that in this world, the whole soul — not only that which I call ‘me’ — in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul where God is present, is subject to time and to the fluctuations of change. We must absolutely accept the possibility that all that is natural in ourselves could be destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and reject the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul could disappear. It is to be accepted as an event that would only happen in conformity to the will of God. It is to be rejected as something horrible. We must be afraid of it; but that fear should be like the achievement of confidence.

These six requests correspond to each other two by two. The transcendent bread is the same thing as the divine name. It is what brings about contact between humanity and God. The kingdom of God is the same thing as God’s protection extending over us against evil. Protection is a royal function. The forgiveness of debts to our debtors is the same thing as total acceptance of the will of God. The difference is that in the first three requests, attention is turned solely toward God. In the second three, our attention is brought back onto ourselves so that we constrain ourselves to make these requests a real act and not an imaginary one.

In the first half of the prayer, we begin with acceptance. Then we allow ourselves a desire. Then we correct ourselves and return to acceptance. In the second half, the order is changed; we finish with an expression of desire. But the desire has become negative; it is expressed as a fear. It therefore corresponds to the highest degree of humility, which is appropriate for an ending.

This prayer contains every possible request; one cannot conceive of a prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer as Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it even once, giving each word the fullness of our attention, without a change — perhaps infinitesimal, but real — happening in our soul.