Our Father

The whole topic of fatherhood is a delicate theme for many who were subject to abuse, neglect or various forms of paternal abandonment. For this reason, it can be helpful for us to notice that Jesus doesn’t just give us the word “Father” as is, but “Our Father who art in heaven” (and the Greek in Matthew’s rendering of the prayer doesn't even have a verb, but simply “Our Father, the one in the heavens”). Jesus gives us an image for our prayer, “Father”—but then he takes it away with what follows: “in the heavens.” Immediately, the term is given a cosmic context that takes God’s fatherhood “out of this world.”

 

The appeal to “the heavens” opens up an overwhelmingly vast reference that we in the 21^st century may miss. We do not even see “the heavens” in our night sky. The light of our cities dulls the edge of night’s darkness and dims the very stars. The few flickering lights we do see are as likely to be satellites as stars. We can’t even “see the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you arranged” (cf. Ps. 8: 3), much less wonder at the care of the “Creator alma siderum”  for the human being, so small on the face of the earth. And yet Jesus gives us the language of fatherhood: of origin, sharing of life, intimacy, connection, similarity. This Father in the heavens reigns in the interior castle in the center of our souls: not apart, not away, not beyond, not “out of reach” (cf. Dt. 30:11-14). To say “Our Father in the heavens” is to say that each one of us, too, is somehow “of the heavens,” or, to use Merton’s expression, “blazing like the sun.”  Our interior depths are “platytera tou ouranou” (vaster than the heavens). This celestial reference also puts all of us on earth on an equal footing. In the Lord’s prayer, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (cf. Gal. 3:21), all in need of the same blessing. We are more than “brothers and sisters,” because Jesus’ reference to “the heavens” takes us far beyond the range of earthly fatherhood. It is the maker of the stars Jesus brings us before: “Our Father who art in heaven.”