The Lord’s Prayer – Nondual Style

Last time I started the section of the Sermon on the Mount that deals with Spiritual Practices, but I only got as far as almsgiving and prayer. I did not even get all the way through what Jesus says about prayer. I wanted to devote a whole episode to the Lord’s Prayer, because it holds such an important place in Christian tradition. So today I am giving a nondual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer.

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Transcript

Last time I started the section of the Sermon on the Mount that deals with Spiritual Practices, but I only got as far as almsgiving and prayer. I did not even get all the way through what Jesus says about prayer. I wanted to devote a whole episode to the Lord’s Prayer, because it holds such an important place in Christian tradition. So today I am giving a nondual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer.

As I mentioned last time, Jesus mainly gave this prayer as an example of brevity in prayer. It is not the greatest prayer that Jesus offered in the gospels. In my opinion that honor would go to his Gethsemane prayer recorded in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel, which is the longest prayer of Jesus and explicitly nondual. In that prayer Jesus prays that we might know oneness with God as he knows it. 

This Lord’ Prayer on the other hand is not explicitly nondual. At first reading it actually looks very dualistic. Jesus addresses his Father in heaven, implying a distance between him and God. He prays for the Father’s Kingdom to come, as if it were not already present. He asks for forgiveness from God, which presupposes that he is separated from God by sin. That is a stumbling block for traditional Christians who consider Jesus sinless! 

Traditional interpretations find a way around this, of course, by saying that Jesus was not really asking forgiveness for himself in the Lord’s Prayer. He was just modeling a prayer for his sinful disciples, not himself. That seems disingenuous to me. Nowhere does Jesus say he is sinless. But that is a subject for another talk. At the end of the prayer Jesus mentions the evil one, which is the epitome of dualism.

So there appears to be a lot of dualism in the Lord’s Prayer as opposed to the nondualism of the Gethsemane Prayer. Why is that? Well for one thing, in Gethsemane he is praying privately at the end of his ministry. In the Lord’s Prayer he is teaching a crowd at the beginning of his ministry.  Like all preachers, he knew that you have to preach to people where they are.  

I learned this firsthand after this nondual shift in awareness eleven years ago. At first I said nothing because I did not have the words. When I found some words to describe the indescribable weeks later, I tried to communicate nondual awareness in sermons. I got a lot of blank stares from my congregation. 

After a few weeks of doing this I learned to present this message in smaller doses. I peppered my sermons with stories and metaphors that pointed to nonduality, and I found that it worked better. Jesus did the same thing. The gospels say that Jesus would teach the crowds in parables and then explain them privately to his disciples later.

When I preach from the pulpit these days I speak differently than I do in these recorded episodes. I use different language. In sermons I use traditional Christian language and show how it points beyond itself to the oneness of God and our oneness with God. I think that is what Jesus is doing in the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer uses dualistic language but points beyond it to nondual reality. 

So let’s interpret the text. He begins the prayer addressing “our Father in heaven.” That sounds dualistic, as if he were separate from God, and God is way off in the sky somewhere. But we need to interpret this is in light of Jesus’ statement where he says “I and the Father are one.” He does not mean simply one in purpose, the way some interpreters say. Elsewhere he clearly says, “The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me….” In John’s gospel Jesus is clearly communicating a nondual understanding of him and the Father.

Matthew’s gospel is more dualistic, but even there he is trying to bring God closer by the use of the term Father, rather than other more common terms for God. To address God as Father was revolutionary in his time. It is seldom used in the Old Testament for God. Elsewhere Jesus uses the word Abba, which is an even more intimate term for God. 

Also “heavenly” does not mean way off in space somewhere. It simply means spiritual, not some physical place up in the sky beyond the clouds. Heaven is the spiritual dimension here and now. Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. That is how close God is. Closer than our jugular vein, the Quran says. So Jesus is addressing a spiritual God that he feels intimately connected to and elsewhere says he is actually one with – the Father in him and him in the Father. That is nondual. He uses the dualistic language of heavenly Father to point to nondual reality.

Then he says, “Hallowed be thy name.” The word hallowed means holy or sacred. Those who interpret this in a dualistic fashion stress the separation between holy and unholy, sacred and profane, clean and unclean, God and human. That is very dualistic interpretation. There is another way to look at holy. The English word holy comes from the Greek word holos which means whole or one. We get the word holistic from it. 

Yet the Greek word used in the Lord’s Prayer is not holos but hagios, which means to purify or cleanse. One could interpret this dualistically to mean to purify from evil and uncleanness and the profane and all that. That is the approach the Pharisees did. They separated themselves from people they considered unclean or sinful or evil. That is the dualistic approach. Jesus did not do that. 

But you can also interpret this word in a nondual manner. Hagios is not what separates us from God but what unites us to God. For example hagios is the apostle Paul’s favorite term for followers of Jesus. We are hagios, usually translated saints. This does not mean we are spiritual superheroes. It means we are one with the holy God.  Knowing that union purifies us, sanctifies us. Our sight is purified. We see as God sees. In spiritual awakening what appeared to be many is seen as one, whole. Two becomes one. 

That is also the theme of the next line. Jesus says, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This is explicitly talking about heaven and earth becoming one. We see this vision also in the Book of Revelation, where the heaven and earth are united. Looking at this dualistically this is the Kingdom of God coming to earth. But if the Kingdom of God is already here, as Jesus said, then the Kingdom has already come. 

As Revelation says, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord.” It is simply a matter of seeing this reality now. When one sees this, then one sees that everything that happens is God’s will. God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven now. That is the nondual perspective. That changes how we pray. When all of humanity sees this, then a shift of cosmic proportion happens. Then the Kingdom of God is realized, although actually it has always been the case. 

In the meantime – until everyone sees the Kingdom of God, nondual Reality - we carry on as usual, eating our daily bread. Chop wood, carry water. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Whether one sees the Kingdom of God as present here and now or to come some day in the future, we still need to eat. 

Jesus’ phrase “daily bread” is a reference to the manna in the wilderness in the Hebrew Scriptures. You may remember how God provided the Hebrews with miraculous bread from heaven for forty years as they were wandering in the wilderness. Every morning the Hebrews went out and gathered this manna from heaven. The key element of the story is that they had to pick it every day. It was daily bread. If they tried to store till the next day, it would spoil. Daily bread points to living here and now, and not in some imagined future. 

Then we come to the verses about forgiving our debts or trespasses or sins, depending on the gospel and translation. That also seems to presuppose duality until you realize what forgiveness is. Forgiveness breaks down barriers. Enemies reconcile. It brings together. It makes two one. It unites God and humanity. Notice that Jesus says nothing about sacrifices on an altar or on a cross as the prerequisite for divine forgiveness. That was not Jesus’ gospel. That was later Christianity’s gospel. Jesus says that our forgiveness is dependent on us forgiving. 

He prays, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus goes on to explicitly say: “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” That is conveniently omitted from the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. This means that if we live oneness with others, there is oneness with God. Forgiveness all the way around. You can’t get any more nondual than that.

Finally Jesus mentions the evil one. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” or more accurately “from the evil one.” Christians get bent out of shape with the implication here that God would ever lead us into temptation. The pope even changed the wording of the prayer. Instead of “lead us not into temptation,” it now reads, “do not let us fall into temptation.” I understand the motivation for the change but it is misguided. It undercuts the point I just made earlier which is that God’s will is being done now on earth in all things, for those with eyes to see. 

Lastly I have talked about evil and the evil one, the devil or Satan, in another episode entitled Satan’s True Identity, so I will not repeat myself here. I will just say that the devil is a product of dualistic thinking. So is evil. Evil is done by those enslaved to duality. There is a greater wholeness that includes what we label as good and evil. Spiritual awakening is seeing what we might call this Greater Good, the Tao, the Holistic One that supersedes and includes all duality of good and evil. The whole is seen as the Divine at work. God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. 

I could say a lot more about the Lord’s Prayer, but that is enough for today. Grace and peace to you.