The Poetry of Praise
The Lord’s Poem
Anthony Esolen
When we pray, Jesus says, we are not to heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. It’s as if sheer volume could batter down the walls of a god who does not want to hear. What we want instead is a prayer that encompasses all that a human being may need or should ask for—a universal prayer. New wine should be stored in new wine-skins, says Jesus, but he also says that every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
And that makes me wonder. What if the Lord’s Prayer does more than tower above the old prayers of the Jews, the psalms. What if it is itself a psalm, a poem—the psalm of psalms?
Imagine Jesus, sitting upon the hilltop, teaching the people who have come to hear him by the thousands. He wants to do more than teach them about God. He wants to bring them into a personal relationship with the Father. That means he must teach them how to speak to the Father—how to pray. That will require more than advice about prayer. Advice, we know well, goes in one ear, rattles about the brain a bit, seems agreeable enough, then goes out the other ear, and we go on doing what we were doing already. We need not just the advice, but the prayer.
But what kind of prayer? Again, imagine the thousands. Many are hungry. Some are women with small children tugging at their skirts. The birds are twittering, the flies are buzzing, the wind rustles in the grass. If the prayer is long, no one will remember it. If the prayer is too short, no one may notice it. It must be short, but it must be all the more powerful for being short, and it must be easy to learn by heart.
So our Lord gives them a poem.
The music of Hebrew
We are probably the least poetic people in the history of the world, and that is much to our harm; it’s as if we have denied ourselves a fundamental vitamin for the human heart. Eskimos living in the frozen north had no marble to sculpt or clay to mold, but they had minds and voices, so they had poetry—they had songs. The Guarani of the Amazon jungles had no canvas for paint, but they had minds and voices—and songs, to pass along from one generation to the next.
The Hebrews had their songs too, their beloved poetry of worship. Now, the songs of one language aren’t going to be just like the songs of another, just as paintings with watercolors aren’t just like paintings in oil, and a composition for the flute is not going to be just like one for the cello. Hebrew is extraordinarily terse. The Lord is my shepherd, we say in English, there is nothing I shall want. That’s eleven words; in Hebrew it is four. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, we say, for his mercy endures forever. That’s fourteen words; in Hebrew, seven, and two of the seven don’t count in the poetry.
Think of Hebrew as made up of big stark blocks of meaning. The poet sets two blocks—two words—on one side, then two on the other, that correspond to the first two, or that explain them, or that contradict them. Sometimes it is three and three, sometimes three and two, sometimes two and two and two. The “rhymes,” so to speak, are in the parallels. The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty. Or Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. Are there rhymes such as we in English expect? Oh, yes, sometimes, and other ways of playing with sound. You see, in Hebrew, possessive pronouns are attached to the end of a noun, as suffixes, so that thy face will rhyme with thy love and thy glory. It’s the same with pronouns that are direct objects; they are attached to the end of the verb. What in English sounds redundant, as in “all creeping things that creep upon the ground,” in Hebrew involves a playful change in the vowels of a word, as if we said in English, in a jaunty way, “the singer sang a song.”
But what language did Jesus use for his poem? I can’t be absolutely certain, of course. I wasn’t there. But the most obvious choice is Hebrew, the sacred language, not Aramaic, the language of the streets and the fields and the firesides. When Jesus read the words of Isaiah in the synagogue, they were in Hebrew. If you sang the psalms, you sang them in Hebrew. More: the Hebrew of the psalms and of the prophets was itself a poetic Hebrew, and not the ordinary language of that older time. Think of an Italian singing a Latin poem.
What was it like?
All right, but then we had better keep the words simple, so that everybody can understand them. And Jesus does just that. When you think of how much the poem has to do, how easy it must be, how it must echo all the old sacred poetry, and yet be as new in the world of prayer as Jesus was new in the world of man—new, and unique—then it seems that the Lord’s Poem was his greatest miracle before he rose from the dead, a miracle as quiet as a still small voice, and as mighty as thunder.
Here’s how I think the poem works. I’ll link with hyphens what would be a single word, and put the elements in the order we’d find them in, in Hebrew. The brackets are for little words, sometimes but a single consonant, that don’t “count” in the poet’s numeration:
Father-our in-heaven, be-hallowed name-thy,
Let-come kingdom-thy, be-done will-thy, on-earth [as] in-heaven.
Give-us today bread-our of-day,
[And] forgive-us debts-our, [as] forgive-we debtors-our,
[Nor] lead-us into-temptation, [but] deliver-us from-evil.
That’s twenty-two words. The three words ending in “our” rhyme. The three words ending in “thy” rhyme. The three words ending in “us” rhyme. “Heaven” is the same as “heaven,” and “day” is the same as “day.” Can a child remember it? Why, how can anyone not remember it?
So much for the form. What about the words? They too are simple. They appeal straight to the heart. Jesus does not lead us into thickets. Abenu: Our Father. A child could hear it and say it. What it means, that God is our Father, not like a Father, but Father himself—that is an inexhaustible mystery. So too is the Gospel: humble and small on the outside, but inside, it’s a temple wider than the universe. And God’s kingdom? It has long struck me that it is easy to explain to a child what a king is; it’s the president or prime minister whose role is a muddle. That God is our king, the child will know. But to pray that his kingdom will come, that too is like the humble door. A child can approach and enter, but not the wisest man in the world can exhaust its meaning.
Then there is the bread. The first time we hear the word in Scripture, it is in the curse of Adam, the curse that conceals a great blessing: In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. Bread is the fundamental food, the staff of life. The children of Israel remembered not so much the quail they captured in the desert as the manna, the “what-is-this?,” that they boiled to make wafers. Jesus asks us to pray for our bread of the day, and that is like what he says about letting tomorrow be anxious for itself. When we pray for the kingdom of God to come, we are not praying for some specific future event, something that might make the newspapers, for the kingdom of God is both among us now and stands above the world of time and change. So when we think of our daily bread, and about the kingdom of God, we should remember that Jesus himself gives us the true bread of life, which is for this day, right now, and is for the kingdom, for the wedding feast of the Lamb, beyond all time.
Who taught Jesus the art?
We’ve all seen those tender paintings of the home life of Jesus when he was a boy, learning the craft of the carpenter from Joseph. From whom might he have learned his first poems? No doubt from both Joseph and Mary, because, as I’ve said, sacred songs are part of the heritage of all mankind. But we know for a fact that Mary did compose a wonderful poem, what we know as the Magnificat.
Imagine then the Blessed Mother, singing in the home in Nazareth while she was about her daily work, with the small boy Jesus at her side, listening and sometimes singing along. A beautiful picture; and like the Lord’s poem, humble in appearance, and boundless in import; just the place for a little child. So also is the kingdom of heaven.
Anthony Esolen is professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in N.H., translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House)…
[Obviously, a writer I consider worth reading. The essay comes from the Magnificat app. Also a book by Anthony Esolen that is excellent. I’m just saying…. LES]
