Versions of the Lord's Prayer

I say the Lord's Prayer every day.

Not always the same version.

And not really through any sense of duty, or because "that's how Jesus taught us to pray", either.

I wrote before that maintaining a regular prayer life keeps me together.

And what do you know,I just happen to find the rhythm of a daily, regular prayer comforting and a way of stabilising a prayer life with our family life and all its commitments. It's almost like God had this is mind!* That whether you are attending a Mass, a Morning Prayer, a children's service, a non-denominational Christian worship in the hospital Chapel - there will always be the Lord's Prayer to encounter somewhere.

And if you don't - well, there's The Lord's Prayer cube. For those of you have never encountered this, it is AMAZING! It was a Baptism gift for 3rdSister - at the moment we use it most nights. (Sometimes we don't use the cube, we just pray it. She pretty much knows the whole prayer off by heart because of it.)

There's something about holding and folding it in and out, as well - something similar to the beads on a Rosary, perhaps? - something soothing yet profound.

But all this praying The Prayer - encountering different versions at the different services we have in our Anglican church, for starters and in the non-denominational services in the hospital chapel - set me thinking.

I have my favourite.

Ssssh! Not favourites amongst my children (although at the moment, any that allow me to get 7 hours sleep are champions.) But favourite version of the prayer.

Because I have prayed it since I was small, the traditional Anglican text beginning "Our Father, Who Art in Heaven" was always going to have a hold on my heart.

But I'm not necessary a traditionalist (ahem, women in ordained ministry, people!), so there has to be other reasons, right?

Oh and just to be clear, I say what we Anglicans know as The Lord's Prayer. I don't say an 'Our Father' like the Catholics, although sometimes in my head I call it this. But to me - marked especially by the time I was loudly praying after my nephew's Catholic baptism - the doxology always goes on the end:

For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, forever and ever, Amen. 

And this, this is where I prefer the traditional version. FOREVER and EVER. The Kingdom, forever and ever. That's just amazing in itself.

So where did "For the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory are yours, NOW and Forever" come from? The 1970s, that's where. And I know. I know that the Kingdom is everlasting and amazing. But that's in God's time. It's not now. It's still coming. I can't get my head around it completely in the now. And yes, I'm quibbling! But if it was all now, where would we have to go?

So this personal, ridiculous reason is why I like the prayer I grew up with.

And - I like the THYs and THINEs in the older version. Just because. (The same reason I had the thys and thines in my civil marriage service, which I think most people tend to avoid because they want something modern.)

And the only other variant I do like is when we say 'HOLY' is your name rather than hallowed. I mean what does hallowed mean, anyway? Other than to 'make holy', of course. See, I kind of like saying 'Your name IS holy' rather than 'We make your name holy'. Although some regard holy and hallow as synonymous. We could go round in circles here. Again, just a personal preference.

As for debts, trespasses, and sins - I don't really mind. All in all, it's the same to me. Stuff I shouldn't do. Stuff I need to set before God and make right with Him. Stuff I need to avoid doing if I can help it, in thought, word and deed.

Now, must be time to start thinking which Bible translation is my favourite :-)



* yep, I know, OF COURSE HE DID. (Why doesn't Blogger do footnotes?!)

Christmas Round-Up, in pictures

Well, I think we got so busy with Advent and Christmas in the end that blogging has just fallen by the wayside. That's fine by me though, there were more important things to think about! Meanwhile I've just uploaded a random selection of photos I took on my phone that represent the season for us. Enjoy! (?)

Sophie's 'cowtapult' in the manger. We now have everyone in the manger apart from the 3 Wise Men who are expected on Sunday, but at this point of Advent, when 1stSister was home ill from school, she was still being her creative self. 

My Christmas cake mix. The baked article ended up falling apart, but as with most foodstuffs, I enjoyed the creation and anticipation and we served it at our annual open house and it was appreciated.

Some pretties that 2ndSister made at our Church's Advent Activities. Most of them are on our Jesse Tree....

....our main Christmas tree being a new, white, pre-lit, £125 beauty from Marks and Spencer. The last time my husband and I purchased a tree was before we were married, when we were renting a home in the North-East of England, I was studying for my PhD, he had his first corporate job in the 'dot com boom' years, and we had a small cheap artificial number which is now our Jesse Tree. We will celebrate our thirteenth wedding anniversary this year, so I think we were finally due a new one!

Advent traditionally involves rolling out, shaping and dipping marzipan in melted chocolate for our family...

....some of us (3rdSister) like to throw our work on the floor along with our reindeer antlers. Terrible twos. Sigh.

Our Advent wreath came packaged with the over-large candles you can see, which have hardly burned down much, despite being lit every suppertime! Please note on the kitchen door, some stuck on snowflakes from Lakeland Limited - they promise to keep year after year, and made our kitchen look more festive.

  

2ndSister and 3rdSister dressed up for the Church Nativity. They are pictured by the altar, which has a nativity scene underneath. (1stSister was in the pews, huddled in her coat, with a book. She's 8 now, y'know. Not too old to stand and sing the carols, though.)

  

More festive food! Braised red cabbage with apples, onions and red wine. Roasted parsnip, tomatoes and spices to be whizzed into a curried soup. And, of course, a magnificent KellyBronze turkey stuffed with clementine, red onion and rosemary.

And finally, the Pièce de résistance - Jesus birthday cake! Yes, he gets one made every year and we get to eat some for Christmas breakfast if we like, after singing Happy Birthday (and before opening gifts.)

Merry Christmas everyone, and wishing you moments of true peace and joy in 2013.

7 Quick Takes Odds and Ends

1

It's been a bit of a surreal week so far. On Monday 3rdSister (aged 2) informed me that she had a 'little ball stuck up my nose.' I believed her, initially, but my cautious exploration made me think my fingernail was scraping on an inside bone of her nose (shudder), so I put it down to a snot bubble and shipped her off  to Gran's while I did my antenatal pool workout. Later on, when I was changing her nappy beneath a direct light, I found she was telling the truth after all - I managed to help her push out a small circular bead, thankfully with a hole through the centre, and got on with making dinner. On the one hand, I just put this down as one of those normal, everyday things a mother has to do; but on the other, I thank God for being on this and ensuring it didn't get any worse!

2

The reason she'd found the bead in the first place was because, now I've got my 16-weeks-pregnant mojo going on, we had a bit of a house-sorting weekend and the sofas in the lounge were re-arranged, thus revealing an assorted array of toys, tissues, tiny playthings and dust. We also extracted ALL of the toys that were in there for a big sort, so in my kitchen I am trying to box up dolls/doll clothes/cot, lego/wooden blocks, books in a bag, and so on. The lounge, however, is completely empty, and I find it weird. "You like mess, " my husband said. "No, I like a lived-in look, " I replied. "Mess," he reiterated.

 Mess (not even our house, either, and we made it messy.)

3

Since I wrote Take 1 above, coincidentally, a friend of 3rdSister's from church and Pram Service had to be taken to the Accident and Emergency department after lodging a kernel of SWEETCORN up her nose. Unlike my bead extraction, this required surgical implements and a lot of screaming at nurses. (The little girl's mum is a nurse. Uh-oh.) TOLD you it's a weird week.

4

During this second trimester I've been having seriously odd dreams. I know it's TMI, but some of them are emanating from some deeply-buried warped erotic subconscious. At the weekend, for example, Justin Bieber was begging me to sleep with him (and although I may enjoy his tunes, any other type of attraction to him just makes me go ewww!!) in real life. This isn't the weird thing, though (all the best pregnancy websites assure me these types of dreams are completely normal.) The weird thing is that I tweeted about the weird dream, and not long afterwards someone posted back that Justin Bieber was visiting my city soon and wanted to make a film with us both in it! (I can only guess what sort of film it would be based on my odd dream.) And then, mysteriously, the tweet disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Obviously, a case of silly spam and an efficient spam-removal service. But it made me feel like I was living in a parallel universe for a couple of hours, in which I imagined I was going to be walking the red carpet with The Bieber.

5

I'm frustrated today - a longtime friend who kept trying to make plans to visit when I was ill in my first trimester, cancelled on us today. In a way it's a relief not to be hosting, but I've spent the week focusing on some small details for the visit - ensuring fresh soup was delivered, a cake baked yesterday, and baking little cakes at 7.30am this morning. I even listened to the breadmaker kneading dough at 3.30am! I'm still planning to mop the floor though (after we've eaten lots of cake as a second breakfast), so at least domestically things are looking up, even if I feel exhausted because of an event that never happened!

Cake for breakfast

6

Another odd thing - I've recently realised how good 1stSister has become at lying. Not evil, bad lying, but lying nonetheless. She's been writing 'thank yous' from her eighth birthday. In fact she designed templates on the computer, which she then filled in with the gift that had received, and then wrote a little bit about it. About a book she had been gifted but wasn't bothered about (we're talking an 8 year old who's tackling Lord of the Rings, here), she wrote "I read it all the time!" and about a jewellry crafting kit which kind of fell apart when she tried to use it, she wrote "I've made lots of lovely things!" I find this a bit surreal - one the one hand, she's imitating socialised, adult behaviour, but on the other - they are complete untruths!

7

Finally - someone more superstitious than I would put the weird week down to the impending doom of Halloween. But we don't really 'do' Halloween in our family anymore, not even in a Fulwiler way (see pictures below which include FirstSister dressed as a ghost in a towel). Here in the UK, churches seem to be a lot more anti-Halloween, and I am an official church minister after all these days, and our church is throwing a 'Light Party' to celebrate all the good stuff in the world/Jesus, instead of trick or treating for charity, or something. To me, this misses the point a little bit, although we've attended previous Light Parties. I agree to an extent with Dan Lord's piece on why it's good to confront our evils in a fun-filled way. As a  social anthropologist, I'm convinced that mocking the nastiness in the world is a great way of helping confront it. But UK Halloween stuff seems to take elements of what happens in the USA and just render it a bit lame, really. Almost ALL of the costumes are based around witches, ghosts, skeletons etc - no happy pumpkins or glorious fancy dress. People moan about children wandering around the dark streets unaccompanied frightening the elderly. Most kids tend to make little effort - I remember one year a teenager in a black binliner growling 'trick or treat' and seeming offended by the sweets which we gave (I think most kids expect money). FirstSister gets to go to a Pumpkin Party at Brownies, mind you, and I've compromised by focusing on holy dead people (we're reading the wonderful Lion Book of Saints this month and next) and having a saint party with party food with bright colours, and a saint's treasure hunt that copies Kate Wicker's. Oops - I think this turned into a Halloween post! Have a good week everyone - and those of you in the USA, enjoy Halloween for us!

1stSister & 2ndSister Halloween 2007

And you will honour him.

Yes, I know it's been aeons since I blogged. 

But we've had Advent, a house move and Christmas since then! 

Yes, a house move - not far from our old abode, but a big, big change, nevertheless. A big, positive change, in so many ways. We have more space, more bedrooms, more bathrooms and it does mean that life feels easier (despite not being able to find the exact thing I want out of a box at the exact time I need it, obviously.) We can walk easily to the town, Church and school and the whole experience feels healthier and more community-centred. I can walk down the street and see people I know and who are friendly. (This is all in addition to the fact that we no longer live in a house attached to another house that contained two people who did not contribute at all to my quality of life). I feel truly blessed.

But I didn't dip in to blog about the house move. Rather I wanted to dwell a little on my word for 2012, which is HONOUR. We don't think that much about honour, these days. It remains something biblical, or royal, or something which you do for your husband. But I'm going to reclaim honour for 2012.

I'm mainly going to put in a lot of work trying to honour the Lord our God, not only in prayer and thought but in ACTION. I'm pretty well practised in offering up all sorts of praise in the shower cubicle, before emerging and revisiting the same old patterns of anger and non-appreciation during my day. I'm going to try to stay THANKFUL and PRAISING and PATIENT as much as I possibly can, for His sake - to HONOUR Him.

It's easy to know this as I sit typing, looking out over the roofs of our town and hearing the shouts of schoolchildren playing on the wind. But I'm finding it not only in the joy of a new house, but the water that comes out of a tap, the warmth from a boiler, the feel of a new bedsheet and the closeness of a family. I am blessed with such amazing things, I need to ensure I appreciate them and demonstrate my gratitude by Honouring God....by ensuring my demeanour stays grateful and appreciative, by offering up thanks, by doing and thinking things in His name.

Luckily the Holy Spirit seems to have bestowed self-control on me this year already, and the Christmas holidays have allowed me to slow down and appreciate the pace of life, and not to focus on too many things. Getting the kids back to school this morning was tricky, but not overwhelming, and I wasn't yelling. THIS is how I need to honour him - in the moments of difficulty. Remembering to discipline with love. Remembering WHY the situation makes me angry and to offer that up. To raise a patient, peaceful house - a happy home.

LORD our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone do we honour. (Isaiah 26:12-14)

New Handbook of Pastoral Liturgy - 1

I'm unsure whether this book is on my reading list, but something has jumped out at me straight away:

Worship is to enable us to reach up to grasp the hand of heaven, to glimpse, albeit fleetingly, the life of heaven, to plug in, for a moment, to the worship of the angels and the praises of the saints. (Perham 2000: 4.)

As someone who gets more than a tad riled up by imperfect music, an uninspired sermon, the difficulty of engaging with the church community when caring for children's needs, liturgical change and so on, I need to remember this. Worship is more than the total of all the things you struggle with in a service. It's those true glimpses of God that are there - in the place, in the singing, in the intercessions; it's that engagement with the Holy Spirit, hugely powerful one week, quietly experienced the next. As Perham continues:

"Of course it will rarely be a vision of God in all his beauty, and nearly always grasping the heel is the nearest we shall get. But we must not settle for less than a yearning to be touched by the glory, and to sense the angels and the saints." (Perham 2000: 5.)

He also makes an illuminating point that clergy (and others) who are aware of the rules by which a service is put together, are much more likely than 'ordinary' members of the congregation to be annoyed by aspects that they do not like. Studying theology over the past two years has made the content, structure and aim of church services much more transparent to me. I'm not yet at the stage where I could either a) identify an ideal service I should like to worship at or b) identify an ideal service I should like to lead as a minister. But I do have preferences fed by study and experience that shift my focus from what is happening to what I would like to be happening. Learning that this has possibly caused me to be more picky and detract from my worship (and possibly my relationship with the Spirit) is a good thought for the week.

Reference

Perham, Michael. (2000) New Handbook of Pastoral Liturgy. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. (NB - the author is an Anglican Bishop in the UK and the liturgy he refers to is that of the Church of England.)