This is Part 3 in an exceedingly spontaneous series of Blog posts on the importance of the Lord’s Prayer in my life.
“…hallowed be Thy name”
In St. Peter’s dining hall the word ‘hallowed’ wasn’t of the two-syllable variety. It was fully three syllables sounding something like “Hal-oh-wed”. Hal-oh-wed be thy name. What…an unusual name this Father had. I listened to the entire prayer, and since no one at the misfit table spoke to anyone else, and as I had no intention of eating the “for what we are about to receive”, I thought about the prayer. I thought about it a great deal.
I thought about it every day. Monday through Friday. Dining Hall. Table of misfits. A lovely plate of steaming internal organs. And the Lord’s Prayer. And before long I had memorized it. I remember the first time I spoke it in unison with the rest of the fourth grade. I felt as though I had become a part of something. More than just a part of the class, who I could never truly be a part of, somehow I was connected to this God I knew nothing about outside of the Lord prayer. But I was sure that He, the Father, was accurately represented in the context of the prayer.
If we said, “Our Father”, then our Father he must surely be. If we said, “Which art in heaven”, the he must surely be in heaven. If we said, “hallowed be thy name, then his name must surely be…”Hal-oh-wed” (whatever that was). But I had the sense now that it was an important time; a moment of connection with someone larger than all of us. And I found myself each time I spoke the prayer aloud, filled with a sense of quiet and peace; something otherwise missing from the life of a nine-year old “Yank”, displaced in a time of moon landings, Soviet nuclear threat, and the drafting of American teens for the war in Vietnam. What a time to be alive and learning to believe in God.
