Father Help Us, Send Some Guidance from Above - Part II

Last post was an entire post about just two words: “Our Father.”  I’m going to try to double my efforts here and go for 4 words, because at the rate of 2 words per post, it would’ve taken 27.5 posts, and that, even for THIS blog, is quite ridiculous.

The next 4 words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Who art in Heaven,” have pretty significant meaning, and are pretty confusing at the same time.  Paragraph 2794 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church paints a pretty good picture of the deeper meaning behind this phrase:

This biblical expression does not mean a place ("space"), but a way of being; it does not mean that God is distant, but majestic. Our Father is not "elsewhere": he transcends everything we can conceive of his holiness. It is precisely because he is thrice-holy that he is so close to the humble and contrite heart. (CCC 2794)

Addressing God the Father as being “in Heaven” can sometimes (for me, anyway) make God seem distant.  Unless Belinda Carlisle was some unexpected prophet, heaven is NOT a place on earth, which inherently makes us feel alienated from God.  We’re down here—He’s up there.  But we need to remember (as the Catechism points out very well here) that not only is Heaven not a place on earth, it’s not a place at all!  God is infinite and has no boundaries or physical limits.  Being in heaven with God seems to logically imply that heaven would have no bounds, because God has no bounds.  With me so fra?  FRA?? I meant to say “far.”  Typographical errors ARE a problem, but the REAL problem is why didn’t I just hit the backspace button?  Why did I go into this completely and ridiculously unnecessary tangent about a typographical error?  We can’t, then, legitimately call heaven a “place,” because our human (and even further, our English) definition of a “place” implies that there are boundaries that separate one “place” from another.  Saying that God is in a place called heaven implies that there is some other “place” where God is not.  This is not possible, because God is infinite and has no boundaries. 

Saying, “Who art in Heaven,” should not give us a feeling that God is distant, but rather that he is, as the Catechism put it, majestic.  Heaven is that state of being we are in after we die once we have accepted God’s ultimate forgiveness and have been freed from sin.  It is a state of perfect being, and we should have a deep and profound respect for all entities in that state of heaven.  THIS is the image we need to mentally remind ourselves of when we pray the Lord’s Prayer.  Remember: without fully understanding what we say when we pray, we CAN fall into the trap of what many Protestants call “vain repetition.”

Now that we know who we’re praying to—the guide and provider for the universal Body of Christ here on earth who exists in a state of perfect existence and majesty—we can move forward in the next post and dive further into the (obviously) super deep meanings behind each and every word of this prayer.