Archive Essay: Our Father, Our Mother, Our Neighbor
June 19, 2022
A social media viral post has been going around on Mother’s and Father’s days in recent years, sympathizing with those for whom these days are hard. For those who have lost their parents, for those with absent or abusive parents, for those who wanted to be parents but it never happened, for those who are parent figures. It unearths the pain and exclusion people have felt for many years on these days, when they go to church and see mothers honored with a flower or see everyone’s Father’s Day pictures on social media today. It can be complicated. One story, one image won’t do.
When my ex-wife and I originally separated, and my kids and I began having our time together alone at bed time, we introduced two traditions. One was the comforting imaginative act of creating forcefields to protect them in their room, made of different creatures and objects, like attack penguins or lightsabers or the cast of Hamilton. While this tradition faded with time, the other remains 7 years later, our bedtime prayers.
We created our own family prayer, which we alternate with the Lord’s Prayer. This classic of Christian faith is based on the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples (two versions found in the gospels of Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4) and recited in the worship services of many denominations. Roughly, with some translation differences, it goes like this in English:
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 (trespasses) as we forgive our debtors (those who trespass against us). Deliver us from evil and lead us not into temptation. For thine is kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.
Some notes on translation. We retain the Elizabethan “thy”, because while many things have improved since then, you can’t improve on thy. “Thine” slaps. And “Art” in heaven? It’s not only a nice turn of phrase, but also – think on that image.
We are Presbyterians, so we are debtors. However, after our brief sojourn among the Episcopalians, who trespass, my daughter decided she would like to trespass. In time, she determined that we should blend these traditions and now we “Debtpass” which would sound like a consumer product in an email, but in our prayers, a treasured portmanteau.
The real liberty we take, however, is with the first two words. Our Father. Since the beginning, I wanted my kids to understand that this is one way to understand God but not the only. A father can be a comforting, loving presence, as I hope I have been for my kids. Yet, the Bible itself understands that Mother can also be such an image for God, a mother nursing her child, a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings. In part, I wanted my kids to know that feminine images help us see God, like the idea of spirit or wisdom being images of the divine feminine.
Ultimately, I wanted them to understand that images like Father, and even Mother, are limited for a God who loves all the world, in its teeming, multifaceted diversity. So we introduced another image, one which challenges even the language of authority and kingship, and may make some as uncomfortable as Mother does or moreso: God, our Neighbor.
This image is not without precedent. The Hebrew word interpreted as “Neighbor” in such famous passages as “Love your neighbor as yourself” is also the Hebrew word used to characterize an encounter in the Hebrew Bible book of Exodus, between Moses and God: “And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as one would a neighbor.”
Our Neighbor, who art in heaven. The sacred we can see in the faces of earthly neighbors. In a father sometimes, in a mother other times, perhaps in other faces altogether. There is enough room for all of us and the images we need, for our pain and our joy, our complicated histories and our best hopes.