The Lord's Prayer

No. 63

Over the past week, I’ve been thinking about what would be my most familiar bible passage over the years. I came up with two: Psalm 23, “the Lord is my shepherd,” and the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, Who art in heaven.” I was going to write about one of them and was trying to choose which one. Psalm 23 I recite most days on my morning walk. The psalm has a special place in my heart as it came to me years ago while riding the bus home from Ottawa during a particular difficult time in my first year of university. I recited the psalm in its entirety multiple times during the trip, which seemed to come out of nowhere. The psalm has remained with me over the years. The Lord’s Prayer, on the other hand, has likely been with me the longest as I heard and recited it in school (back when we did such things in the late 60s and early 70s). I started in on Psalm 23 for this article when a friend asked whether I had ever read the original Aramaic-to-English translation of the Lord’s Prayer. He said it would blow my mind or something to that affect. There was a faint bell ringing in my ear that I’d heard something about this. I was curious.

A quick foray on-line, revealed an article comparing line-by-line what was written in Matthew 6:9-13 to this apparent new translation from Aramaic of the prayer. I was very intrigued as it brought the cosmos and the unconscious into the fold. In reading some of my previous articles, you’ll know of my interest in connecting biblical scripture to the unconscious and all that we can’t see in dark matter and dark energy. There was even an article circulating this week from Popular Mechanics saying that, “Scientists believe they’ve unlocked consciousness—and it connects to the entire universe.”