Our Father who art in heaven
O Birther, Father-Mother of the Cosmos
Hallowed be thy name
Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us
where your Presence can abide
Thy kingdom come
Create your reign of unity now through our fiery hearts and willing hands
Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in heaven
Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with your desire
Give us this day our daily bread
Grant what we need each day in bread and insight
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those
who have trespassed against us
Erase the inner marks our failures make
Just as we scrub our hearts of other's faults
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
Don't let surface things delude us, but free us from what holds us back
from our true purpose
For thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory, forever, Amen
From you is born all ruling will,
the power and the life to do, the song that beautifies all
may they be the ground from which all my actions grow
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Many of us can recite The Lord's Prayer from memory because it was and still is one of the most recited prayers in Western Christianity. For me, the Prayer of our Lord was a weekly staple when I was a child attending a Catholic elementary school and continued to be while a student at a Catholic University. Despite this ongoing exposure to the Word of God, there never was any in-depth discussion of its deeper meaning or true origin.
It wasn't until recently that I discovered that the Lord's prayer of my youth was based on translation originating from the Aramaic language - the native tongue of Jesus the Messiah - to Greek, and finally to English. With that said, we can begin to comprehend how the original and sacred words of Jesus could be lost in mere semantics and interpretation. More so, according to , Dr. Neil Douglas-Klotz, author of Prayers of the Cosmos, "most of the English translations of the words of Jesus come from Greek, a language that differs greatly from Aramaic".
While reading the Aramaic interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, understand that the language can have many layers of meaning. For example, when Jesus refers to the kingdom of heaven, it is more allegorical than literal and refers to the kingdom within and among us.
Another thought to keep close at heart is that The Lord's Prayer is found in the Peshitta, the standard Bible of the Eastern Christianity countries and is believed, according to some biblical scholars, to be the oldest and most definitive version of the Bible. The name Peshitta in Aramaic means "straight" and implies the original and pure version of the "Word".
The Aramaic translation of the Lord's Prayer presented here is not intended to be a divisive tool for theological debate, but more of a means to enrich our connection to the One known by a thousand names. It serves as an invitation to broaden and deepen our understanding of the sacred words of Jesus.