Intimacy and community

While personal prayers are an important spiritual discipline in maintaining and developing our relationship with God, communal prayers like the Lord’s Prayer are equally important. These words, given to us by God, guide our conversation with our Father and prevent our own praying and our image of God from becoming subjective and end up reflecting ourselves more than the living God.

The word “our” at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer requires stepping out of the closed circle of “I.” It requires that we surrender ourselves to the community of other children of God. It requires that we strip ourselves of that which separates and divides.

It also requires that we accept and open ourselves to each other. In the Lord’s Prayer, we simultaneously share an intimate moment with the Almighty Creator who allows us to call Him Father, and we pray in communion with the whole family of God, with the living and the dead, with humans of all conditions, cultures, and races.

The Lord’s Prayer overcomes all boundaries and makes us one family. In these moments, this petitionary prayer becomes a prayer of intercession. We not only pray for ourselves, but also that bread is given to our neighbor, that the sins of the person sitting next to us can also be forgiven, and that we are all delivered from the evil one by the grace of God.