THE O U R FAT H E R 2
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
POPE FRANCIS HAS REMINDED US THAT AS CHRISTIANS, “WE SAY THAT WE HAVE A FATHER, BUT WE LIVE LIKE PEOPLE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE EITHER IN GOD OR IN MAN. WE LIVE WITHOUT FAITH; WE LIVE NOT IN LOVE BUT IN HATRED, IN COMPETITION, 26 IN WAR; WE LIVE IN DOING EVIL.” BY MIKE DALEY
No
more adjectives. Just nouns. If you think this advice was given by a crabby old grammarian, you’d be wrong. It was offered by Pope Francis. Speaking to employees at the Vatican’s Communication Office, Pope Francis stated that one of the things they must not do “is advertising, mere advertising". To this he added two words that he is allergic to: 'authentic' and 'truly'. He gave the example: “’This is a Christian thing’: why say authentically Christian? It is Christian! The mere fact of the noun Christian, ‘I am of Christ’, is strong: it is an adjectival noun, yes, but it is a noun.” Pope Francis observed: “We have fallen into the culture of adjectives and adverbs, and we have forgotten the strength of nouns. The communicator must make people understand the weight of the reality of nouns that reflect the reality of people. And this is a mission of communication: to communicate
REALITY MARCH 2020
with reality, without sweetening with adjectives and adverbs.” As reflected in the Our Father, Jesus is a proponent of nouns without any of the flowery additions we think so necessary when addressing God. Unlike other Jewish and near Eastern prayers of his time, the Our Father is brief. It gets right to the person (God) and the point (petitions). Coming in at just around 50 words (Gospel of Matthew version), it doesn’t mince or waste words. Remarkably, considering the subject–our relationship with God–it contains little to no formality or ceremony. THE POWER OF KNOWING A NAME Though the Our Father begins with a very intimate and familial name for God–Father– it quickly moves to a call to glorify, to sanctify, and to reverence God’s name. You get a sense in this movement of a relationship–God and us–which should be stronger, closer, more
mutual and reciprocal, but isn’t. Interestingly, we often think of 'hallowing' God’s name in terms of violating it. Like when we curse. Ironically enough, mentioning this in the sacrament of reconciliation, some of us are given Our Fathers as a form of penance. In his own book on this prayer, Our Father: Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer, Pope Francis suggests: “’Hallowed be thy name’ means it should be hallowed, it should be revered and honored, in us, in me. Because many times we believers, we Christians, present a testimony that is sad, ugly. We say that we are Christians, we say that we have a father, but we live like–I do not want to say like animals, but we often live like people who do not believe either in God or in man. We live without faith; we live not in love but in hatred, in competition, in war; we live in doing evil.” In the ancient world, unlike today, names were very important. To know someone’s name was to have power over that person. To
