Teach Us How to Pray

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us..."

Strong words Jesus spoke when his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams offers some poignant insight into these ingrained words we utter at Christian services on a daily basis: "'Forgive us our trespasses' is in some ways the hardest bit of the Lord's Prayer to pray, because it tells us straight away that to pray is also to be willing to change."

Let us consider the common usage of the word trespass in our lexicon. For most of us, images of trespassing do not conjure up all the various grievances and sins we have committed or have had committed toward us. Rather, it's an image of someone being somewhere they should not be. Breaking the law by intruding into someone else's property. Jumping over a wall, climbing a fence, breaking a window - going into or through some place where one does not belong or has not been invited.

How many of us are praying for forgiveness for this country's invasion of Iraq? Do images of burnt-out buildings, blood-stained streets, over-populated and under-resourced hospitals come to mind for the U.S. trespasses into Iraq? War, in the modern age (if not for all of history), has always been the story of one trespass against another. Why, then, can we sit in our churches and in our homes, praying to the Lord, Our Creator, Mother, and Father, for something we really do not believe in? Do we believe in a world without trespass? Without war? A world where change is possible? Where one can turn away from trespass and "sin no more?" If we pray these words that the teacher taught us to pray with hardened hearts and embittered ideas of our world and our God, we blaspheme the Holy Name of the divine and reduce our humanity to a stoic, fatalistic community of despair and un-redemptive suffering.

Forgive us the trespass that our country has done to the people of Iraq (and Latin America, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, etc.), as we forgive those who have trespassed against us (those who seek to terrorize us, al Qaeda, the criminals of 9/11, etc.).

We cannot pray these words, neither in the silence of our hearts nor in the sanctuaries of our communities, without recognizing the invitation to reconcile with our transgressors, make friends with our strangers, and forgive our enemies. No national identity or patriotic call for retribution replaces the supremacy of God's divine call to forgive seventy times seven.