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Office Of Readings | Week 29, Tuesday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Letter Of Saint Augustine To Proba | On The Lord’s Prayer
‘On the Lord’s Prayer.’
In his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, Saint Augustine presents not a set of verbal formulas but the structure of Christian desire. The prayer given by Christ is, for Saint Augustine, a complete guide to the orientation of the soul. It teaches not what God needs to hear, but what humanity needs to learn to desire rightly. To pray well is to have the heart corrected and enlarged, so that its longings accord with divine wisdom.
When the believer says, ‘Hallowed be your name,’ Augustine observes that God’s name is already and always holy. The petition, therefore, is not for God’s sake but for ours: that God’s holiness may be acknowledged and revered among human beings, that we might live in a way that sanctifies God’s name in the world. In this, prayer becomes a mirror of mission. The holiness of God must be made visible in human conduct; to pray these words sincerely is to accept the task of reflecting divine purity through life and action.
‘Your kingdom come’ follows as the natural development of this desire. God’s kingdom, Augustine notes, will come regardless of human will, for divine sovereignty is unassailable. Yet the petition expresses the longing that the kingdom should come to us — that our hearts should be open to receive it, and that we may be made fit to reign within it. It is a request for readiness and for transformation, not for change in God but in ourselves.
The words ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ extend the same movement. Heaven represents perfect obedience, the harmony of all created wills with the divine will. Earth, by contrast, is the sphere of disobedience and disorder. This petition therefore seeks the uniting of the two realms: that human beings may learn to will what God wills, freely and joyfully, so that the order of heaven may be reflected in the life of earth. For Augustine, this obedience is not servitude but freedom — the restoration of the will to its true end.
The request ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ carries a deliberate double sense. On the surface, it is a simple plea for daily sustenance — the necessities of life, granted by divine providence. Yet Augustine also reads it sacramentally. The ‘daily bread’ is the Eucharist, the bread of life, given not for temporal comfort but for eternal joy. In this way, the same words embrace both the body’s need and the soul’s nourishment; the earthly meal becomes a sign of the heavenly banquet.
When we pray, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,’ Augustine finds both a reminder and a condition. The prayer recalls our need for mercy, yet it also binds forgiveness to the act of forgiving. The petitioner must not only seek reconciliation with God but must practise it towards others. In this way, the community of believers becomes the visible expression of divine pardon. The act of forgiveness is itself a participation in the mercy of God.
The next petition, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ is not, for Augustine, a fear of divine betrayal but a humble acknowledgement of human weakness. We ask that God’s grace may not depart from us, lest we be overcome by temptation or despair in the face of trial. Prayer here is a confession of dependence: an appeal for the constant presence of the divine helper without whom even the strongest will falters.
Finally, ‘Deliver us from evil’ gathers all petitions into one. It is the cry of humanity still on pilgrimage, conscious of its incompleteness. The prayer looks forward to the state of blessedness where evil is no more, yet it also sustains the faithful in their present condition of struggle. This final plea can encompass every sorrow, every loss, every hope; it is the prayer of the Church waiting for redemption.
Augustine concludes that every legitimate prayer is contained, in some form, within the Lord’s Prayer. Whatever else the Christian may say in prayer should arise from these same principles and return to them. To pray in any other spirit is to speak ‘in the flesh’ — to ask for what is unworthy of the new life given by the Spirit. The Lord’s Prayer is thus both measure and model: it directs the heart, disciplines desire, and keeps the soul within the orbit of divine love.
The believer learns to seek what is eternal rather than transient, to let God’s holiness, kingdom, and will become the true content of all asking. In this way, prayer becomes not an act of persuasion but of participation: the sharing of human longing in the movement of divine purpose.
A Reading From The Letter Of Saint Augustine To Proba | On The Lord’s Prayer
Thus, when we say: Hallowed be your name, we are reminding ourselves to desire that his name, which in fact is always holy, should also be considered holy among men. I mean that it should not be held in contempt. But this is a help for men, not for God.
And as for our saying: Your kingdom come, it will surely come whether we will it or not. But we are stirring up our desires for the kingdom so that it can come to us and we can deserve to reign there.
When we say: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are asking him to make us obedient so that his will may be done in us as it is done in heaven by his angels.
When we say: Give us this day our daily bread, in saying this day we mean ‘in this world.’ Here we ask for a sufficiency by specifying the most important part of it; that is, we use the word ‘bread’ to stand for everything. Or else we are asking for the sacrament of the faithful, which is necessary in this world, not to gain temporal happiness but to gain the happiness that is everlasting.
When we say: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, we are reminding ourselves of what we must ask and what we must do in order to be worthy in turn to receive.
When we say: Lead us not into temptation, we are reminding ourselves to ask that his help may not depart from us; otherwise we could be seduced and consent to some temptation, or despair and yield to it.
When we say: Deliver us from evil, we are reminding ourselves to reflect on the fact that we do not yet enjoy the state of blessedness in which we shall suffer no evil. This is the final petition contained in the Lord’s Prayer, and it has a wide application. In this petition the Christian can utter his cries of sorrow, in it he can shed his tears, and through it he can begin, continue and conclude his prayer, whatever the distress in which he finds himself. Yes, it was very appropriate that all these truths should be entrusted to us to remember in these very words.
Whatever be the other words we may prefer to say (words which the one praying chooses so that his disposition may become clearer to himself or which he simply adopts so that his disposition may be intensified), we say nothing that is not contained in the Lord’s Prayer, provided of course we are praying in a correct and proper way. But if anyone says something which is incompatible with this prayer of the Gospel, he is praying in the flesh, even if he is not praying sinfully. And yet I do not know how this could be termed anything but sinful, since those who are born again through the Spirit ought to pray only in the Spirit.
Christian Prayer With Jesus
Eternal Father,
teach us to pray with the mind and heart of Christ your Son.
Sanctify your name in our lives,
make your kingdom present in our hearts,
and conform our will to your will on earth as in heaven.
Give us each day the bread that sustains both body and soul;
forgive us as we forgive,
and uphold us in the hour of temptation.
Deliver us from the power of evil,
that we may rejoice in your presence,
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Desire – In Augustine’s thought, the movement of the soul towards what it loves. True prayer enlarges desire so that it may be filled with God’s goodness.
The Lord’s Prayer – The prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples (Matthew 6:9–13), containing in brief all rightly ordered petitions of the Christian heart.
Kingdom of God – God’s reign over all creation; both a present reality in those who live according to his will and a future consummation in eternal life.
Bread – Symbol of both material sustenance and the Eucharist, the sacramental food of the faithful.
Forgiveness – The mutual pardon by which the believer receives and extends divine mercy; an indispensable condition of prayer.
Temptation – A trial or testing of the human will; not willed by God but permitted so that faith may be strengthened through grace.
Evil – The absence or corruption of good; ultimately conquered in Christ, yet still experienced in the present age.
Spirit – The Holy Spirit, through whom believers are able to pray and in whom their desires are purified and brought into harmony with God’s will.
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