The Lord’s Prayer as chiasmus

Numerous texts in the Bible exhibit the rhetorical device known as “chiasmus,” based on the letter X, where the passage is a mirror image of itself turning on the middle phrase, with corresponding phrases at the beginning and end having some similarity or connection. The classic example is the opening of the Gospel of John.

What if we read the Lord’s Prayer that way? It would produce an interesting effect. Using each phrase, or “line” as it is typically divided, the pairings would go as follows, beginning with the first and last, and ending with the culminating center:

Our Father who art it heaven, deliver us from evil

Hallowed be thy name; lead us not into temptation

Thy kingdom come, as we forgive those who trespass against us

Thy will be done, and forgive us our trespasses

On earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily bread

This reading unites in the center of the chiasmus the two most eucharistic and incarnational lines, to reveal the reality of the Real Presence of Christ as heaven on earth (here’s to you Scott Hahn), and the central object of Christian prayer and faith. It also, interestingly, pairs the Fatherhood of God with that ultimate, fearful deliverance from evil, it pairs his holy name with our preservation from temptation, the coming of his kingdom with our forgiveness of those who wrong us, and the working out of God’s will in the earth as the forgiving of our trespasses.

May the Lord hear our prayer, and give us his Son, that we might become people in whom heaven and earth are brought together in sacred mystery.

Can we say “The Church did evil”?

An Anglican priest’s recent sermon said, “We must listen while secular people talk about how we’ve been the aggressor, while we were in power. We were the people who enslaved people in the south. The Church did that.”

Is it right to speak thus of the Church doing such evils?

I take comfort in the fact that the Catholic church never did endorse slavery, even while the American Protestant churches did. However, I want to take a different tack, to argue why it is wrong for any church with an incarnational ecclesiology to speak like that.

A man may sin in two ways: (1) because his body is not in complete obedience to his spirit; part of him who rebels against his essence. “I did not do as I am.” Such people are deserving of mercy. They struggle. (2) because his spirit wills what is bad. In this sense, a disobedience of the body against the spirit is the only saving grace, for obedience to it is the perfection of sin. Such people, inasmuch as they are not blessed with incontinence, are deserving of wrath, for they do not struggle against evil, but actively will it, and are thus agents of the devil.

Now the spirit of the world is the spirit of Satan, and the grace of the world is that it as yet does not fully obey this spirit with its body, for it yet bears the residual graces of its maker, and the memory of good still lingers.

But the spirit of the Church is the spirit of Christ, and its struggle is to bring its body into conformity with its willing spirit, to act as it aspires to. “For the Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Therefore, it is perfectly right to accuse the Church of incontinence, because that is to accuse the sinful men that are its Body. But to accuse the Church, as such, of bad intention—of a bad heart, a bad spirit, and wrong aims and purposes, is wrong, because that is to accuse Christ, who is its Mind. Christ’s Bride fails often to act according to His intention, but Christ never intends for the Church to do evil.

Therefore it is wrong to speak of the Church as committing sins of intention, of believing wrong and affirming what is false, because these sins are proper to the Mind, not the Body.

Now, when we speak of someone doing an act which is by nature an intentional act, it implies the cooperation of both mind and body, unless we specify otherwise. Thus when we say, “He ran away from home,” it implies that he intended to do so, unless we clarify that he was delirious or insane or disoriented, or any other way which the body may run away from home without the mind intending to.

Therefore it is not right to speak of the Church doing evil, unless we clarify that it was only the Body of the Church, not the Whole Church, body and soul, who did evil. Otherwise, how can we avoid accusing Christ of doing evil by means of the Church?

How children, and we, know God

I had a delightful conversation with Beth yesterday reflecting on her experiences at Rainbow Riders Childcare Center, where she currently works, and the idea of whether we would send our children to a Christian preschool or school. Our sense is that many of today’s Christian preschools are kind of propaganda machines. We agreed that we value teaching our children about God, but we think that an overemphasis on the story of Noah, our weekly memory verse, and a simplistic message of salvation can make children “get saved” when they really have no clue what they are doing, they are just being herded blindly into demonstrations of Christianity by teachers too eager to “get them saved young.” The better way is to follow Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s parents and instill critical thinking, asking them to question why. If you do this in a context where Christian practices such as liturgy are observed, and which the children are made a part of, eventually children will ask questions like, “Why do we eat the bread and wine?” And then parents will genuinely answer their questions. This puts an exploration of the sacred mysteries of faith on the same ground as any learning a child does: it’s best done when there is a level of self direction and autonomy by the child. Beth’s Reggio Emelia method supports this, and it makes sense. Now don’t get me wrong, we’re in favor of explicitly teaching the Bible and Christian doctrine. But just in a gradual way that treats doctrines as holy and recognizes that the ability of a child to participate in Christianity grows with their ability to comprehend abstract thought.

At that point I had a thought worth remembering:

As a father, regardless of how much I try to make my children understand the abstract ideas of their Heavenly Father, I am the concept of God they will understand.

Children understand things symbolically and incarnationally. They can have some ideas about Jesus and God, but at a young age he will be in the same category as Santa Clause to them. Beth was saying how her children made up some wild extrapolations about Santa Claus. One said, “Santa Clause lives in the cold, so if he comes out of the cold, he will die!” Child logic is not very trustworthy. Don’t give them guns and knives, and don’t give them complex conceptual structures. I think this goes for telling them about God too.

In fact, really, all of us humans can only really know things through incarnation. I saw this the other day, speaking to my colleague. She said, “I explained everything about an opinion essay to my students, in excruciating detail. Then we went to write one and my students didn’t have a clue.” My response was, “I find that my students don’t have a clue what I’m talking about until they actually do it, or at least look at a good example.” ESL students need concrete examples and models, and they need to participate personally in something, before the intellectual understanding really comes through. Intellectual understanding rarely produces real comprehension by itself.

It occurred to me: This is why Jesus came! He is the incarnation of God to us. He knew that, without him, all of God’s revelations would eventually produce distorted constructs in our minds. We would go about saying, “God can’t leave heaven because he’ll melt,” or things like that. So he took on flesh and dwelt among us, the image of the unseen God.

It puts an immense pressure on me as a future father. Lord, help me not only teach, but BE a right image of you.

And it creates a beautiful sense of awe at the Christian faith, which, more than any other religion, understands the needs of the humans, the incredible mix of spirit and flesh, angel and animal, that we are. Thank you Lord for coming incarnate so that we might know you.