The Our Father

The Our Father, or Lord's Prayer, is Jesus' own teaching on prayer. Many commentaries have been written on this central prayer of Christianity, from the early Church to the present day. These commentaries have a basic similarity, but the writers' detailed perceptions vary.

In this contribution to the available literature, Sister Benedicta Ward chooses five writers from the third to the sixteenth centuries—Origen, John Cassian, the Venerable Bede, Alcuin of York and Teresa of Avila—allowing them to shed light on the Our Father in their own words. The result is a scholarly, yet accessible, book which affirms the Christian journey as one of pilgrimage, of being and becoming. Although our humanity is redeemed through the death and resurrection of Christ, each of us has to appropriate this fact entirely personally, in our prayer and in our lives.