†Christology of The Quadrants of the Cross†1
Essay #14: With Jesus at the Center: The Lord’s Prayer
Core Centering Practice: The Lord’s Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer would probably be considered by most Christians to be the single most important utterance of Jesus Christ. It has to be the most often repeated. This prayer has been a source of consolation and inspiration for millennia, and for good reason. Outwardly it is a source of great reassurance that we can call on the Father and that he will hear our prayer. It is an encouragement to rely on him, and shows how to do so. Inwardly and esoterically, it is a jewel which sets forth all of the key facets of a spiritual practice which can us help us dwell in God’s presence.
When Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray to the Father, he is indeed giving instructions for a spiritual practice–instructions laden with terms from Kabbalah. What he offers is much more than a prayer to be recited again and again. It is a set of precise guidelines for how to dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven right then and there while living on earth, or we could say right here and now. The formula is eternal and unchanging–a method for all ages and all seasons–because it emerges from a discernment of the very structure of the created universe.
The Lord’s Prayer echoes that structure, and it awakens in us a discernment of the same to the extent that we authentically participate in the prayer as we recite it. Participation, of course, amounts to the arising of the kind of mind state necessary for the perception of the ontology being invoked, and the Lord’s Prayer nurtures such a mind state in parallel with echoing the underlying ontology. One could say, in somewhat different terms, that it affirms God’s light even as it nurtures and strengthens our ability to perceive the light. Thus the prayer is an invaluable tool to reinforce and expand the foundation of our dwelling in the Father.
At this level of deeper insight into its ontological underpinnings, the Lord’s Prayer is the core centering practice of the Christology, the single most mighty instrument Jesus gave us to keep us with him at the center of the cross. Let us examine it, then, line by line and explore its hidden power.
Dear Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Jesus addresses the Father immediately acknowledging that the Father is in a different place. He is in Heaven, in some sense not right here among us, or at least not obviously so. Yet Jesus implores that his name may be held holy. Once again, as we saw in exploring the beginning of John’s Gospel, the Greek term, onoma, carries a sense not merely of one’s spoken or written name, but of the reputation and glory associated with that name. By imploring us to hold God’s name holy, Jesus is, in essence, asking us to discern God’s glory. For it is not really within our power to make God’s name, or any name holy, unless is by discerning the holiness that is already there in the Being whose name it is. For us to hallow a name is to become more keenly aware of who or what that name refers to. Jesus is really imploring us to transform ourselves so that we are able to discern the holiness that is forever present in God. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what appears at first to be the tenor of his statement, that it is somehow up to us to impart holiness or reverence to God’s name. Once we discern the holiness of God, then reverence for God is inevitable. Our discernment, however, is not inevitable. Rather that is precisely what is in the balance here. In answering his disciples’ question how to pray to God, Jesus is teaching how to come into God’s presence, for this is the ultimate purpose of prayer. In his answer, Jesus at once sets it straight that God is in another place but implies that we can find him there by discerning the holiness and glory behind his name. What follows is Jesus’s elucidation of just how that may happen.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
God is in Heaven, yes, but we may intend that his Kingdom come to us. We may intend that his will be done right here among us on earth, just as it is where God dwells. This is such an extraordinary statement that it’s true meaning has gone almost unnoticed in modern mainstream Christianity until recently, and for a very long time the statement has been made to mean something about an undefined future. However, Jesus is not using the future tense. He is addressing his disciples’ present need with an answer firmly rooted in the present. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and we are able to enter it in just the way he is describing. First, we must open to its coming; second, we must dispose ourselves to God’s will. Next the more exact details of the spiritual method unfold.
Give us this day our daily bread.
This is more of a prescription for a mental outlook than it is a request for daily sustenance. If all we look for from God each day is what we need to sustain us for that day, then this is a profound antidote to the anxiety, greed, uncertainty, and fear that breed inside in anticipation of the future. If we ask only for what we need to live today, then really we are liberated from an enormous weight of concern which wreaks havoc on our minds and emotions. That weight stands in ironic contrast to the lightness of bread for one day, a lightness which is nonetheless able to sustain us perfectly. With graceful economy, Jesus thus shows us how to purge our minds. Focus only on that which you need for today, he is saying. It is enough. All the rest merely clouds your attention and prevents you from aligning with the will of God.
And forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us.
Although seemingly unrelated to the previous supplication, this one is actually tightly knit to it as a corollary. For when we ask for just that which we need for a day, we inevitably must also ask for that which we do not need to be taken away. If we read Jesus’s words as a prescription for a mental attitude, then less is definitely more, and more is not better. In fact, we are constantly getting tripped up by more, and need to come back to God to ask that our mistakes be forgiven. Each day we trespass across the line that says “enough” into the territory of “more than enough” and find ourselves ensnared in complications from which we must beg extraction. We also find that we must forgive one another for the myriad of ways in which we ensnare ourselves in our webs of surfeit. For some reasons, we are unable to stay satisfied with what is enough, and we drift out of attunement to it into one or another temptation. Therefore, Jesus continues:
Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Here we stand at the doorway which leads to the center of the practice. We ask God to help us avoid temptation. Temptation is anything which will take us off the path of the Kingdom–away from the center of the cross–and evil is living outside of the Kingdom entirely. If we might stray into temptation, then we pray not to be led there but rather along the center of the path. If we have left the Kingdom, then we must be delivered from evil, so that we may live. If we are brought back from evil, then evil is reversed, and we live again, just as the English words, “evil” and “live,” are reversals of one another. However, we needn’t have left the Kingdom in order to pray to God to deliver us from evil. Even while we are centered with him, we may pray that he deliver us even from the possibility that we might exchange evil for life, and that is equally the sense of the prayer here.
What is the nature of the temptations Jesus is referring to? What are we asking for help in avoiding and recovering from? To know this is to be able to begin to put the spiritual method into practice, and Jesus gives us the keys, although in a highly esoteric format.
For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
These words, “kingdom, and power, and glory,” may have come to sound almost indistinguishable to us as often as we have repeated them in the Lord’s Prayer. However, in the mystical teachings of Kabbalah these are distinct and specific terms. They name qualities of God known as the sefirot and taught in the branching arrangement known as the Etz Chayim, or “Tree of Life,” which we briefly encountered in Essay #13. Malchut represents God’s Kingdom as manifested in this world. It is essentially Heaven reflected into earth, and as such represents God’s logos, the plan or bedrock of creation. Both netzach (power) and hod (glory) arise from malchut on the Tree of Life, and are associated with the thighs when this tree is mapped onto the human body.2
It is not difficult to discern in malchut, netzach, and hod an echo of the Kabbalistic Trigram, which we have already found at the heart of the Christology. Malchut corresponds to kavannah, representing divine intention for the earth, “God’s kingdom come.” Netzach corresponds to ratzon, effort, and hod to masirah, that is, surrender. We saw in Essay #9 that true power aligns human effort with the divine will rather than with the ego, and so netzach is linked to ratzon like the earth’s magnetism is linked to a compass needle. It is God’s power placed behind our own human effort. Similarly, when we surrender the plots and seductions of the ego and come to the Father with our old wounds asking to be filled and spared from our darkness, we are asking for God’s glory to manifest through us. Surrender thus makes a place for glory like the setting moon gives way to the rising sun.
One could say, then, that to the extent that these divine qualities are proportionally embodied in a man, he is able to move about on earth just as if he were in Heaven, for his every move is a manifestation of the Kingdom. The heart of our spiritual practice is thus elucidated: to the extent that we are able to act from the power and glory of God, we follow the path of the Kingdom and literally dwell in God and he in us. When effort and surrender take their proper place within us in service of divine intention, He moves our loins, and we manifest him in the world because we come from him. Jesus came from him. He lived fully in the Father. We drift in and out of him, and therefore need this spiritual method to stay constant in him. Jesus asks us to affirm with him God’s Kingdom, and Power, and Glory as a way of avoiding temptations and being delivered from evil. What he offers is more than a mere affirmation. It is a declaration of reality, a beam and a beacon offered to us, to aid in our alignment with the most high reality of the Father.
What we drift away into are lesser reflections of that reality, that is, conceptions of power and glory that are products of our lesser selves, our egos, and their lesser qualities of greed, jealousy, fear, anxiety, and so forth, as we saw in Essay #9. The whole tenor of our spiritual practice is to rise above these temptations into something greater, something “forever and ever,” instead of momentary and illusory. Because we again and again encounter challenges which would put us out of tune with the Father, the presentation of this spiritual practice in the form of a prayer is appropriate. It not only needs to be constantly on our lips, but still more so in our steps, in how we move our loins. The Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, wrote a book entitled, Peace is Every Step.3 That title reflects the same understanding, and the same practice.
Of course, a recurring question is whether or not the ontology of the Lord’s Prayer is true. Is there really a God, a Being we can rightfully refer to as “forever and ever,” a Creator whose name we can hold holy though authentic discernment of his holiness? And can he really deliver us from evil? At the level of the understanding, the existence of such a Creator would have to be established independently of the Lord’s Prayer in order for the ontology it refers to be declared “true.” But as we have already explored in Essay #7, understanding cannot reach beyond itself to grasp true knowledge.
As we said there, it is at the limit border of understanding that true knowledge can and does spring up in us. It is vital to comprehend that the Lord’s Prayer is not an instrument of the understanding. Nor does it admit of the methodology of the understanding to verify its truth. For, as we said, that would require a separation from the object of its affirmation. On the contrary, the Lord’s Prayer draws its truth precisely from its proximity to its Source. To inquire into its truth as if that were something separately verifiable would be like attempting to verify the purity of a musical tone as something separate from the instrument that produced it. In reality, musicians know that the instrument “inhabits the tone” to an uncanny degree, such that virtually all attempts to digitally recreate the sound of the purest and best instruments fail. The best recreations are actually analog to digital copies of the instruments themselves not creations from scratch, and even these digital copies can be told apart from even mediocre purely analog recordings of the same.
Once again, the Lord’s Prayer “works” by leading us to the limit border of our understanding. It brings us to that vibratory pitch on the unstable edge where the truth it invokes can literally take hold of us. In this way, it is exactly like those vibratory mantras of the East that draw us into the mind state required to perceive the truths they foreshadow. The vibrations of those chants and mantras emanate from the source they echo. Likewise the Lord’s Prayer was crafted to invoke and reinforce in us the very truth of the Godhead in which we seek to dwell. It draws its power from an extraordinary connection to that Godhead and we can keenly feel that power as we pray it with the same intention with which it was originally given. Even with little or no comprehension of the esoteric dimensions of the prayer, its divine vibrations still shine through enough to move millions daily in recitations around the globe.
Thus the recurring question about the veracity of the prayer issues into an unforeseen benefit. We encounter the limits of the understanding once again not as terminal but as seminal, that is, as a passage into something greater. For when we we shift from trying to understand the Lord’s Prayer to engaging with it, we begin to shift our whole mind state into true knowing. This is the mind state that is concentric with the Godhead, to the extent that we are capable of attaining it. Surely, our grasp of true knowledge in this earthly incarnation will always be incomplete. Still, the Lord’s Prayer–and other centering practices with it–can strengthen our resonance with the Godhead keeping open the eye of the soul to its oneness with the same. Practicing the Lord’s Prayer strengthens the loins of our soul with God’s Power and Glory. Our own effort and surrender become illuminated from within. Effort grows into dedication to God. Surrender grows into trust in him under all circumstances. Intention grows into the aspiration to manifest his kingdom as fully and completely as possible on Earth.
Because we are in the process of returning to Perfection, our use of the Lord’s Prayer will never be complete despite any elucidation or application. But its continual use will strengthen both our resistance to events and forces that would decenter us from the cross and our resilience when those forces do decenter us. The wounds we carry have put us out of tune with the Godhead. The assaults of daily living tend to pull our resonance farther adrift. But the Father has not forgotten us. He continues to broadcast his homing signal through the Lord’s Prayer and other practices, so that the Way of Return remains a living reality for us. We could say that his primary homing frequency comes through the Lord’s Prayer while other–perhaps temporary–tuning or corrective frequencies come through other practices that Jesus gave us. These are the balancing and edifying practices of the Quadrants of the Cross, which we will examine in essays that follow. Together with the core centering practice presented here, they offer us in sum the complete method of the Christology for making our way home.
Notes:
1. Essays #14, #15, #16, #17, #18, and #19 collectively describe the set of spiritual practices we attribute to Jesus as the Christology of the Cross.
2. The Tree of Life has been taught not merely as a representation of divine qualities expressed in Creation but also as a guide to the location or expression of divine qualities in specific areas of the human body.
3. See Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step, Bantam, 1991.
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