Our Father

I once knew a woman who, to my horror, used to pray ‘My Father’. Her argument was that she could not account for anyone else but that she knew that God was her Father. Apart from the pride of such disobedience to the words given by Christ, she was doing herself dreadful harm by isolating herself from the Communion of the one Church, cutting herself off from the Saints, and leaving herself to flounder alone in the wide, wide sea of temptation. With that one word, *our*, we enter into the freedom of the whole Christian world, on earth and in heaven. We are not abandoned to icy isolation but enter into the joy o the Saints, past, present, future; we enter into a world no longer finite, bound by time and space. We are permitted by Christ himself to join in – no exclusion: our. And Father? No, not the graybeard of childish nightmares but the first Person of the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three Persons, one Godhead. We pray ourselves immediately into the Mystery, and out of the greybeard, somewhere in the clouds, who punishes us for every little fault, who demands our obedience, who avenges every misdeed. Our Father: He is the first Person of the Trinity, who in his tender love for mankind shows Himself to us in the Second Person, Christ God. We cannot see the Father, but we can see the Son, God incarnate. ‘I and my Father are one’ (John 10:30).

Our Father: with these words we are into the very innermost heart of the Mystery of the Trinity.

(Tavener, John, and Mother Thekla, Icons: Mediations in Words and Music, Fount Paperbacks, London, 1994, p. 44.)