For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory Forever.
I have become friends with a lot of Catholics lately. This expansion of friendships began when I started going to retreats at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, CA, and continued as I went through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises with my Spiritual Director, went through a 3-year program on giving the Spiritual Exercises to others, and then as I have been going through a 2-year program on becoming a Spiritual Director myself. Not to mention my own sister becoming a Catholic.
One difference I knew of before but now need to remember more often is that Catholics end their recitation of the Lord’s Prayer earlier than we Protestants do—the Protestants have an extra phrase before the Amen. Here is the way I and many Protestants as well as Catholics begin the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
These are pretty much the words that we see in the Bible (Luke 11:1-4) where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. (There are variations with “you” instead of “thy,” “trespasses” instead of “debts,” and so on.)
Before I pray the Lord's Prayer with my Catholic friends, I remind myself I need to say “trespasses” and stop and say Amen right after “deliver us from evil.” I need this reminder because when I pray with my family and friends within my tradition, we add:
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.
and then say Amen. In Matthew 6:9-13, at least in the King James version, Jesus includes this phrase. (I won’t go down the rabbit hole of the many reasons people think two versions of the prayer exist.)
A while ago, I read something where the author noted this difference and said something that seemed disparaging about the use of the word “power.” I can’t remember the author or article, but it was my impression they did not approve of the emphasis on God’s power—its association with hierarchy and authority, maybe even male dominance. I may have been reading all this into it, but the idea of that sort of association kept niggling at me. I sometimes feel uncomfortable emphasizing God’s power because that can often negate God’s love, which I think should be at the forefront of all our thoughts about God. (Don’t get me wrong—I am glad God is all-powerful. It comforts me to know our human power is nothing compared to God’s. I am talking about what we, as humans, often associate with the word power—the people we consider powerful because they have the most money or the most control, who try to gain more and more power for their own gain, often making things worse for anyone who gets in their way.)
Today, though, I suddenly thought of other ways to define power. I read a portion of an old poem translated by Scott Cairns* that had this sentence (emphasis mine):
…Therefore, the flesh
is not to be excluded
from the wisdom and the power
that now and ever animates
all things…
There’s that word—power. But it is an animating power. The poem goes on to call it “His life-giving agency made perfect in weakness.” I like that! A whole different perspective on power. In the margin of the page, I listed other words for God as power that came to mind:
energy
motor
engine
creator
originator
engineer
maker
In a Dorothy Sayers book I just reread (The Busman’s Honeymoon), one of the characters is a chimney sweep who talks about “the power behind the rods” he uses for his work. God is the power behind us.
This is the kind of power I’ll envision as I pray the Lord’s prayer from now on, the power of God’s love, the animating, life-giving power that gives me and everyone and everything else life. That power of his love is all of ours. You included. May you feel and know the power of God’s love.
Scott Cairn, Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007), 5-6. (I read it in a book that quoted part of the poem in its epigraph, An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor.)