Yearning for the Father: The Lord's Prayer and the Mystic Journey

By John Richard Sack

This is a warm and personal analysis of the hidden depths of the Lord's Prayer. This fine book offers a new level of understanding by tapping the insights of many religious mystics, the twilight speech of poetry, and years of contemplative study and meditation. John Sack explores each phrase of this much-loved prayer, including: its Aramaic roots; the original form Jesus taught to his followers; the history and literature of the prayer and Sack also offers an extensive appreciation of other religious traditions with quotations from Sufi mystics, Zen masters, and Buddhist philosophy, as well as poets from the Rig Veda, to the Psalmist, to the Carmelite Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit. This book will stir the inner monk residing in each of us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Richard Sack
• Release date: Jun 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983550037

John Richard Sack

John Richard Sack was born in Springfield, Ohio. He earned a BA in English from Yale University and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.As a young man, John spent two years as a Trappist monk under the tutelage of Thomas Merton, his novice master at Our Lady of Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky. In the 1970s, he trained in a Hindu ashram in Ganeshpuri, India. Spiritual transformation is a common theme in both his fiction and nonfiction books.He is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel: "The Franciscan Conspiracy" and a companion work, "Angel's Passage." "The Wolf in Winter" is a fictional tale of the early career of Francis of Assisi. His nonfiction "Yearning for the Father," "Mystic Mountain," "Views of the Moon" and "Lao-Tzu at the Border" are guides to contemplative prayer, the culmination of years of research and reflection and his exploration of numerous spiritual traditions. "Trappist Tales" is a collection of short stories loosely based on his years at Gethsemane Abbey.He now lives in southern Oregon with his wife, Christin Lore Weber, author of many books related to spiritual growth. Their blended family includes Bjorn Kristian, Jeff & Karen, and Bryana & Patrick.

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Praise for Yearning for the Father

John Sack’s Yearning for the Father gives us a cosmic map of the spiritual world. Across it are drawn innumerable lines, each a shard of spiritual illumination, a part of the truth of all. But as he traces them out, we begin to see that I the heart of the cosmic map they converge toward an unimaginable center, and understand that all paths of the mystic way lead to the Father and the prayers by which we strive to approach Him. Sack writes beautifully and movingly of these strivings.

—Jay Martin, professor of Government and Humanities, Claremont-McKenna College, California; author of Journey to Heavenly Mountain: An American’s Pilgrimage to the Heart of Buddhism in Modern China.

A joy to read! It does justice to the many mystical traditions of the world and shows their common search for the Divine. Sages in all the great traditions have so often and so unanimously emphasized the profound oneness of the deepest part of the human soul and highest Spirit. This is wonderfully brought out by John Sack, who deserves our gratitude.

—Ravi Ravindra, chair, Department of Comparative Religions, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia; author of Heart Without Measure: Gurdjieff Work with Madame de Salzmann.

An uplifting, fabulous romp through the world’s great spiritual traditions. In a world torn apart by a thousand hatreds, this book’s theme—that spiritual wisdom is timeless and universal—is urgently needed. Superb, simply superb.

—Larry Dossey, MD; author of The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things and Healing Words: the Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine.

Yearning for the Father:

The Lord’s Prayer and the Mystic Way

By

John Sack

Copyright 2011 John R. Sack.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without permission from the publisher, except in the case of quotes used in critical articles and reviews. You can contact the author or publisher at:

mailto:[e-mail]

http://www.johnrsack.com

Published by Cyberscribe Publications at Smashwords

9700 Sterling Creek Road

Jacksonville, OR 97530

E-publication ISBN: 978-0-9835500-3-7

Yearning for the Father was originally published in 2006 by

Hohm Press

P.O. Box 2501

Prescott, AZ 86302

800-381-2700

Print Edition ISBN: 1-890772-55-0

Cover Image: The Only Grace is Loving God

Original stained glass window by

Jeff Worob

The Lord’s Prayer in Latin

Pater noster — Our Father,

Qui es in caelis — (You) who are in heaven,

Sanctificetur nomen tuum — May your name be sanctified.

Adveniat regnum tuum — May your kingdom come.

Fiat voluntas tua — May your will be done,

sicut in caelo et in terra — as in heaven, so on earth.

Panem nostrum quotidianum — Our daily bread

da nobis hodie — give us today,

Et dimitte nobis debita nostra — And forgive us our debts

Sicut et nos dimittimus — As we forgive

debitoribus nostris — our debtors.

Et ne nos inducas in tentationem — And lead us not into temptation,

Sed libera nos a malo — But deliver us from evil.

—Matthew 6: 9-13, from the Vulgate

Man must do his part and rise from everything that is not God, away from himself and all created things. As he rises, a powerful yearning to be denuded and freed from everything that separates him from God seizes … his soul. And the more he leaves behind all that is finite, the stronger his yearning grows. It transcends itself, and when this denuded ground is touched, the desire often overflows into flesh and blood and bone.

—Johannes Tauler

What God is doing in the core of my soul is hidden from me, and that is a great benefit. Since the soul itself does not know, it wonders and, wondering, it seeks, for the soul knows very well that something is afoot, even though it does not know how or what. … As long as it is concealed, man will always be after it. It appears and disappears, which means that we shall plead and sigh for it.

—Meister Eckhart

How long will you be a shepherd,

Single-filing us in and out of the human barn?

Will I ever see you as you secretly are,

In silence?

—Jalal al-Din Rumi, from Hoofbeats

(trans. Coleman Barks)

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the following for permission to use poems in copyright.

Coleman Barks: for the extracts from ‘Hoofbeats,’ published in The Glance, Viking Penguin, 1999, and ‘Who says words with my mouth,’ ‘Unfold your own myth,’ ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing,’ ‘My worst habit,’ and ‘A Thirsty Fish’ published in The Essential Rumi by Harper San Francisco, copyright 1995 by Coleman Barks.

The Carmelite Monastery, Pewaukee, Wisconsin: for the excerpts from ‘Prayer,’ ‘Come, South Wind,’ ‘In a Cloud of Angels,’ and ‘The Kingdom of God,’ from Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, published by ICS.

Penguin Group (UK) Ltd: for ‘The Royal Crown,’ by Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, translated by Israel Zangwill, and "The Face of God,’ translated by T. Carmi, from The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, edited and translated by T. Carmi (Penguin Books, 1981).

Penguin Group (UK) Ltd: for haiku by Basho, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, from The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, copyright by Nobuyuki Yuasa, 1966.

Alfred A Knopf, a division of Random House: for the excerpts from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, copyright 1997 by Jane English, copyright 1972 by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.

Liveright Publishing Corporation for the excerpt from ‘pity this busy monster, manunkind,’ copyright 1944, 1972, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems, 1904-62 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage.

The author and publisher have made every effort to secure permission to reproduce material protected by copyright. They will be pleased to make good any omissions brought to their attention in future editions of this book.

Introduction

The Lord’s Prayer is universal. Each of us can pray it, bring our own understanding and needs to it, and draw our own comfort from its words. A gift of the Son, Jesus, it is the simplest, most direct way to speak to our Father. Yet the deep wisdom ingrained in its few phrases has spawned questions and commentaries since the first defining days of Christianity. For twenty centuries, truth seekers have considered it afresh, sharing insights meant to help fellow pilgrims draw nearer to the Father.

Each age has unique reasons to reach out to God. Modern searchers cross a very different terrain than the trailblazers of past centuries. Our landscape is cluttered with the frenetic excess, the stuff and rubble of today’s world. As a society, we are light years removed from the harbor of ancient Carthage, from the warm humanity of picturesque Avila in Old Castile, or the quiet isolation of a Trappist monastery in 20th-century Kentucky. That said, the journey to the Father still winds, as it has in all ages, through the Sinai of self-purification, and relies, as it ever has, on the manna of his grace. The whole point of the journey that begins with our birth and ends when we die is to cooperate with this grace and align our rebellious small selves with our One, original Self. Who is the Father. Who is Love, the Lover, and the Beloved.

Sir Isaac Newton honored his debt to earlier scientists when he said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. The spiritual giants whose thoughts appear in this book deserve our gratitude for recording their insights, received of the Holy Spirit, into the Lord’s Prayer. But while their words nourish our minds, it is their all-consuming desire to become one with the Father, their total commitment to living the wisdom of the prayer, which is their real gift. And so we thank them a second time for the examples of their God-fired lives.

A scientist once dissected a bird to find out which part of its body held its life force. In doing so, he killed the creature and the vital force escaped. Likewise, those who would dissect the Lord’s Prayer with the intellect alone or approach it purely as verbal prayer are bound to miss its inner spirit. Books like this can offer themes for reflection, but it is only when the Holy Spirit enlivens our reading and leads us to act on what we read that we draw closer to, and ultimately can rest in, the Father. It is only in living the prayer that we come to understand it and discover our true birthright, which is nothing less than union with him, a union St. John of the Cross calls the most noble and sublime state attainable in this life.

* * *

This work draws much on the reflections of the saints of centuries past. They range from the traditional teachings of Christian writers on this prototypal Christian prayer, to the insights of non-Christian sages who may never have heard the prayer but still shed light on its inner message from different angles. Once we move beyond the rituals and parochial beliefs of the world’s great religions into the sphere where the mystics of all faiths operate, the language is strikingly and reassuringly similar — a phenomenon Aldous Huxley calls perennial wisdom. Religions based on the world’s diverse cultures provide equally diverse paths up the foothills of the mountain, through the forests and around obstacles, but once we climb above the tree line and reach the open meadows, these paths would seem to converge into a single trail to the mountain’s peak.

My hope is that the words of these spiritual masters will stir the inner monk residing in each of us as part of our ancestral memory ― whether that memory is cloaked in the robes of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Sufism, Orthodox Christianity, or the monastic traditions of the West. Bernadette Roberts, using another metaphor from nature, writes of the mystic journey: Though I know that each religion feels it can ford the stream alone, I would think it far superior to ford it together, because it is a difficult stream to cross. Theoretically, such an eclectic approach may be impossible, but after taking this journey, I am convinced … this is the way the stream flows¹

Another favorite resource appearing throughout this book is the inspired lineage of poets, from the Bhagavad Gita to the psalmist of the Old Testament to the Carmelite Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers). Poetry comes as near as language can to verbalizing the inexpressible, to visualizing the dark invisibility of God, to discovering the words God whispers in silence.² As Mathew Arnold says in an essay on Wordsworth, Poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man.

Poets can reawaken us also to those truths that resonate with singular energy through Jesus’ original Aramaic and the centuries-old Middle Eastern tradition in which he was steeped as a boy. This tradition sparkles brilliantly, for example, in the gems of the Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose verses penetrate deeply into Jesus’ teachings.

It is another poet, the haiku master Basho, who reminds us, Do not follow in the footsteps of the Ancients, but rather, seek what they sought, and such this book tries to do. From this perspective, should any reflections of my own prove useful, I would count it a bonus and blessing from our loving Father. May he share his Spirit with you as you read and with me as I write, for without his generous help, our efforts are fruitless and our wisdom folly. To him be the thanks for any words of value shared here.

"May God grant me to speak as he would wish

and to conceive thoughts

worthy of the gifts I have received."

—Wisdom, 7:15

* * *

Biblical references in this book follow the New Jerusalem translation for the most part. The line-by-line musings on the Lord’s Prayer, however, use a contemporary English rendering closer to the traditional King James Version and the Vulgate Pater Noster. The very free translation of the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer preceding Chapter 2 is my own, but draws from the several possible renditions suggested in Neil Douglas-Klotz’s Prayers of the Cosmos. Several other versions of the Lord’s Prayer appear in this book, simply to show how the Spirit inspires sundry ages and temperaments.

Excerpts from writers whose works predate the General Council of Nicaea in 325 CE are from the ten-volume work, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson — specifically, the reprint of the T & T Clark Edinburgh Edition published by Eerdmans in 1996. References follow the format volume.page. For example, ANF 3.681 refers to Volume 3, page 681 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Tertullian’s treatise on prayer.

Quotations from later Church Fathers are from the twenty-eight-volume series, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, edited by Philip Schaff. This is the reprint of the Edinburgh Edition published by Eerdmans in 1998. References again follow the format volume.page. For example, NPNF 10.134 refers to Volume 10, page 134 of the series, St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on Matthew 6:6. I’ve edited ANF and NPNF passages and other older translations into contemporary English, updating the Victorian language of the original translators and editors.

Unless noted otherwise, selections from the writings of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton come from a single collection of his work, the excellent Thomas Merton Reader edited by Thomas McDonnell. Footnotes refer to this book as MR. For example, a note might read: "Thomas Merton, Ascent to Truth, MR p. 382," to indicate both the original source and where it can be found in the Reader.

Excerpts from another favorite collection of spiritual readings — Ordinary Graces, edited by Lorraine Kisly — follow the same format. Footnotes refer to this book as OG. Thus the note "Sergius Bolshakoff, Russian Mystics, OG, p. 108" cites both the original source and its location in Ms. Kisly’s collection.

A final comment on the modern English translations of the Lord’s Prayer. These typically replace the antiquated thee/thy/thine with you/your/yours — a gain in readability, but a loss in intimacy. English speakers no longer distinguish between the familiar and impersonal you, but earlier generations reserved thee for family and loved ones. When we offer this prayer, then, we do well to remind ourselves that we speak in this same familiar way to our most loving, most intimate, Father — the head of the spiritual and human family in which we are all his children.

Chapter 1: Rilke’s Rose

This is a world that whirls around,

But in the quiet center

The round rose dares to rest.

—Rainer Maria Rilke¹

As children we rubbed the velvety petals and imbibed the heady fragrance of the rose. Then we grew older, learned the purpose and astonishing craft behind the flower’s design, the role of pollination in nature’s cycle, and the effort and pruning needed to cultivate and preserve this unique beauty — thorny issues beyond childish curiosity. Artists like Rilke even see in the rose a symbol of deeper truth — in the lines above, for example, linking it to the silence of that interior sanctuary hidden within each of us.

Simple and subtle as the flower, the Lord’s Prayer inspires both the earliest devotion of infants and the deepest reflections of the mystics among us. Like petals folded in upon themselves, this blend of poetry and petition offers layer upon layer of meaning to those willing to penetrate to its core. Children learning to pray by rote might marvel at a Father up there in heaven who feeds us bread and guards us from harm. But as adults, we also can appreciate the prayer’s underlying design, the spiritual abundance contained in its sparse words, its multiple layers of meaning, its potential for leading us to perfection, and the self-pruning needed to cooperate with its promise of grace. In moments of inattention, it might skim our minds as superficially as the flutter of a passing butterfly. When the time is ripe, however, it can reach into the depths of our being and change our lives forever.

The first time Jesus spoke the prayer, he offered it, as it were, to children. After a brief respite in Bethany at the home of his friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus, he went off alone to pray. When he returned, a follower asked: Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples (Luke 11:1). This was a normal request of a rabbi, a teacher, as we see from the reference to the Baptist.

But Jesus’ first apostles were unlearned for the most part — new at discipleship, constantly baffled by his parables, seldom getting his drift when he told of events to come, men to whom he had to explain the scriptures and whom he chided for their lack of insight, spiritual infants who had not yet received the Holy Spirit. He saw how they needed a prayer to guide their devotion through their early, toddling, spiritual steps. But he also knew this same powerful prayer must one day guide their mature strides toward union with ultimate Being. And so he answered, "When you pray, you should say:

Father, may your name be held holy.

May your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread,

and forgive us our failures,

for we forgive each one who fails us.

And do not put us to the test."

—(Luke 11:2-4)

The Gospel of Matthew offers the longer, traditional version of the Lord’s Prayer, including it as part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:

Our Father in heaven,

may your name be held holy.

Your kingdom come,

Your will be done

on earth as in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our failures,

as we have forgiven those who fail us.

And do not put us to the test,

but save us from the Evil One.

—(Matthew 6:9-13)

The naiveté of Jesus’ original followers calls to mind the nuns under St. Teresa of Avila’s direction centuries later. Learned men had warned her spiritual daughters to limit their contact with God to vocal prayer. They definitely should not attempt mental prayer or meditation, they were told, nor even imagine themselves as contemplatives! In a humorous passage Teresa lists the objections:

It is dangerous. So-and-so was lost through doing this. … It is bad for virtue. It is not meant for women. It may lead them into delusions. They would do better to stick to their spinning. … It is quite enough for them to say their Paternoster [Our Father] and Ave Maria [Hail Mary].²

We can almost picture the good sisters applying cold compresses to their throbbing temples from straining to deepen their prayer. But fortunately, Teresa reassures them, even vocal prayer, when practiced perfectly, brings us closer to God.

I must tell you that while you are repeating the Paternoster or some other vocal prayer, the Lord can grant you perfect contemplation. … The faculties rejoice without knowing how they rejoice; the soul is kindled in love without understanding how she loves.³

She cites the case of a nun disturbed by her inability to practice mental prayer:

She came to me once in great distress saying she did not know how to make mental prayer, nor could she contemplate, but could only say vocal prayers. … I asked her what prayers she said … and found that