Abba Amma

Improvisations on the Lord’s Prayer

Nicola Slee

• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781786223210
• eBook ISBN: 9781786223234
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Lord's Prayer unites Christians of all traditions. It is the first and perhaps only prayer that people learn by heart. However, its patriarchal and kingdom imagery do not resonate universally today. How do we pray the prayer Jesus taught us in ways which are authentic and life-giving?This volume, emerging from years of praying the Lord's Prayer, offers a series of prayers and poems written in response to it. They wrestle with its central images and bring our own stories and relationships into dialogue with it. Each prayer uses the address Abba or Amma: Aramaic terms of intimate address to God as father or mother which reflect Jesus' usage, drawing on the abbas and ammas of the Desert Tradition as well as our own parental relationships. It aims to integrate our whole human journey into the vocation of being a follower of Jesus.An extended introduction explores why praying the Lord's Prayer is significant, how it is problematic, and how contemporary theological reinterpretations offer fresh perspective on it.

1. Abba Amma

To repeat what was asserted in the Introduction: when we pray to God as ‘father’ or ‘mother’ – or, indeed, in terms of any human analogy (lover, beloved, friend and so on) – we cannot do so without drawing on the very human relationships, either consciously or, more likely, unconsciously, which have shaped our deepest convictions about, and experiences of, fatherhood and motherhood. In the first instance, then, praying to God as our heavenly mother or father is bound to bring into play, for good or for ill, our relationships to our human parents or, if we have for various reasons not experienced a direct relationship to our biological parents, to those who have stood in as surrogate parental figures for us. More broadly, we will have imbibed cultural norms of parenthood, perhaps drawn from a variety of different cultural settings; and of course, norms about both motherhood and fatherhood are much in flux in our own time. Even if our own mothers or fathers conformed to traditional norms of motherhood and fatherhood, we all know other people’s who represent different kinds of parental care and probably other figures in our lives who offered us contrasting models of parenthood. So we are likely to have experienced a range of different patterns and norms, all of which will inform, either positively or negatively, our understanding of the motherhood and fatherhood of God.

In this chapter, I draw quite explicitly on my relationships with my own parents in the prayers that follow. In some cases, they are addressed first and foremost to my own mother or father, and I have written them as ways of engaging and wrestling with the inheritance I have received from them: a mixed heritage of profound love and care, on the one hand, and painful woundedness and wounding, on the other. The ways in which I have experienced human motherhood and fatherhood have inevitably shaped the ways in which I relate to God as mother and father, and in the prayers that follow I have tried to bring this to consciousness and offer the full inheritance of these relationships – with their blessings and their wounds, their gifts and inadequacies – as part of my prayer. Some are angry, some are sorrowful, some are glad and grateful, and others partake of a range of emotions.

Of course, to name God ‘Abba’ or ‘Amma’ is not quite the same as calling God ‘father’ or ‘mother’, since we are unlikely to have called our own human parents ‘Abba’ or ‘Amma’ – even if, when we were learning to speak, we will have done something similar (‘mama’ and ‘dada’ are not so very far from ‘Amma’ and ‘Abba’, after all). One of the reasons I consider the address ‘Abba Amma’ or ‘Amma Abba’ to be a helpful one in prayer is that it both connects and separates us, at one and the same time, from the deep unconscious shaping of our relationships to our own parents. The heavenly Abba, the heavenly Amma, is both like and unlike our own earthly fathers and mothers, and there is a lot of space in that ‘like and unlike’ relation. This is how any metaphor or analogy works, of course, calling attention to what may be similar between two unlikely terms (in this case, parenthood and God); but equally, drawing on the frisson of what is unlike. A good metaphor or analogy bears this tension of ‘like and unlike’ within it and possesses the energy of that tension, which infuses it with the power to connect. To call God ‘father’ may be to employ a ‘dead metaphor’ – one that is so familiar that we no longer see or hear it as metaphor at all – whereas to name God ‘mother’ still has the shock and energy of novelty for many of us who have not been accustomed to naming God in female terms. To name God ‘Abba’ or ‘Amma’ or, as I do in many of these prayers, as ‘Abba Amma’ and ‘Amma Abba’, possesses both the frisson of the new and the rootedness in the familiarity of well-known terms for God. And because both terms – abba and amma – have deep roots in Scripture, in the prayer practice of Jesus and in the early desert tradition, these terms also partake of an ancient authority which makes them more than the idiosyncratic or personal preferences of one author.

It is highly unlikely that all readers will identify with all, or even many, of the prayers that follow; what I hope the prayers might do is encourage readers to reflect on their own personal inheritance of relationships with their parents, for good or for ill, and to draw the energy of these relationships into their prayer. When our relationship with God is infused with the reality of our human relationships – in all their muck, murk and ambivalence – it can take us to new depths of honesty, openness and vulnerability and thereby to a new capacity to receive the love of God whom we encounter within and beyond every human relationship.

Behold your child

Abba Amma, I cry to you

behold your child

Amma Abba, I cry to you

hold your child

Abba Amma, I cry to you

enfold your child

Amma Abba, I cry to you

clothe your child

Abba Amma, I cry to you

ensoul your child

Amma Abba, I cry to you

embolden your child

Abba Amma, I cry to you

make whole your child

Amma Abba, I cry to you

know your child

Abba Amma, I cry to you

own your child

Amma Abba, I cry to you

behold your child

Born from your womb

Amma,

born from your womb,

I gaze at you,

your image mirrored in me.

Of your beholding there is no end,

you hold my life in the hollow of your hand.

I return it to you

from where it is given back to me.

All that is yours in me

is released, set free,

shared with those you’ve given me

to love and forgive

and hurt and learn to love again

until, pardoned and freed,

we learn to let go our need

to be needed, noticed, applauded.

In your disregarded, unrewarded life,

poured out again and again, time without end,

we’ll find our way home,

back to the origin and source of all we’ve become:

children of one mother,

sister of all, to each one your brother.

At your breast

Amma. Mmmm.

Mout...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Of whose family we are
• Introduction
• The Lord’s Prayer
• 1. Abba Amma
• Behold your child
• Born from your womb
• At your breast
• A prayer towards my mother
• A mother’s love
• Prayer of a fifty-six-year-old woman
• A prayer to Mother God
• A creed to our Mother God
• leaving
• When did you ever say?
• Dutiful daughter
• Reversing the roles
• As death approached
• God our potter, maker
• Intercessions for a baptism, and the Feast of the Presentation
• 2. Hallowed Be Your Name
• Hallowed be your name
• Praying the alphabet
• God beyond binary
• Our light and peace and joy
• Jesus my brother
• Mother of the broken-hearted
• Name above all names
• Friend of the world
• I come to you
• Holy holy
• God my clothing
• 3. Your Kindom Come, Your Will Be Done
• God our affinity
• Bone of your bone
• The kindness of God
• On earth as it is in heaven
• Your will be done
• Prayer of the household
• In the shepherd’s fold
• To be holy and human
• Parable of the mustard seed
• The descending way
• The threefold cord
• A prayer for our work
• Looking towards the promised land
• Intercessions for Easter Day
• 4. Give Us Today Our Daily Bread
• Midnight prayer
• Our daily bread, broth, breath, breadth
• We are your children
• When we ask
• The bread you give us
• Prayer against worrying
• Gathering the fragments
• The bread of tomorrow
• Daily manna
• Yeast
• The breads of the world
• No yeast
• Making soda bread in the blue kitchen
• Give us this day our daily bread
• Prayers for harvest (1)
• Prayers for harvest (2)
• Every day
• Prayer of the commode
• 5. Forgive Us, As We Forgive
• Confession
• Forgive us
• Prayer for the imperfect work of parenting
• Confession for one who is rich
• A litany for Black Lives Matter
• Confession of a middle-aged woman
• Confession for gender justice
• How to forgive
• A confession for returning
• The sins that cling
• Confession for a lack of trust
• Confession for a lack of passion
• Receiving forgiveness
• 6. Lead Us Not Into Temptation, But Deliver Us From Evil
• Deliver us from evil
• Judas
• Litany for hard times
• Psalm from the abyss
• Prayer of an ageing woman
• 4 a.m. prayer
• Pain
• Lullaby
• Prayer for deliverance
• Remove the cup
• Grenfell Tower lament
• A litany of struggle and remembrance
• 7. Prayers From the Desert
• Arriving
• The absence of God
• To be set alight
• To assist a sister or brother
• Abiding in the cell
• To bear fruit
• Prayer for simplicity
• Those who hurt us
• Rising, falling
• The daily round
• The grief that is useful
• Knowing when to speak
• Love without judgement
• Prayer for patience
• This day’s labour
• For a hard heart
• To keep God’s commandments
• A teachable spirit
• To accept the human lot
• To be delivered from folly
• Prayer against the weariness of words
• Prayer against the weariness of others
• The well in the wilderness
• Prayer for the midday sun
• 8. Canticle of the Creatures
• The cat’s prayer
• The dog’s prayer
• The sheep’s prayer
• The donkeys’ prayer
• The blackbird’s prayer
• The primroses’ prayer
• The rivers’ prayer
• The sea’s prayer
• The road to the isles
• Aldeburgh
• Sunday morning at the abbey
• Our mother mountain
• 9. For Yours Is The Kindom, The Power and The Glory
• The kindom, the power and the glory
• One word
• Deo gratias
• Prayer for radical trust
• The Spirit prays
• Teach us to pray
• Seeking the face of God
• Welcome, death
• Meditation
• Prayer of the senses
• Coming to you
• Potting out the sunflower
• Notes and Sources