“This Day”
by Dr. Jay Worth Allen
Matthew had some strong ideas about prayer. It is in his book that we find the Lord’s Prayer, also known as “The Swiss Army Knife of Prayers.” This particular prayer, according to Matthew (who should know about such things), is the Alpha and the Omega of prayers. He stresses this when he writes in Matthew 6:9-6:13, “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven . . .”
Of late, and for obvious reasons, I’ve become more likely to pray than to curse. Indeed, my new program is to swap a prayer for a curse whenever I find I’ve slipped into the cursing mode. A good swap I must say.
In a world that is cursed, putting more curses into it is never a good idea. We are full-up at present, methinks. No shortage of curses that I can see. Still, slipping into the cursing mode is easy to do in today’s world. We’re encouraged to do it by the very nature of the secular society.
Add to that my thirty-plus year stint in cities like London, Los Angeles, New York City, and the like, where the standard reaction to almost any event is either a curse that involves the middle initial of the Savior (Just what does that “H” stand for anyway?); or, the invocation of unnamed males who have an affinity for crude sex only with females of the motherly persuasion; and, when it comes to most people’s ability and propensity to curse, we’re dealing with one crude and cold-hearted world.
Cursing is a bad habit and one that everyone should do their best to break. One way is, whenever you might catch yourself in an angry cursing moment, to recite a prayer instead. And the go-to prayer in these multiple moments is always the Lord’s. It’s brief. It’s beautiful. Plus, you can say it at high speed and by rote; a Christian prayer wheel . . . of sorts.
“Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day . . .”
The Lord’s Prayer also has a hidden benefit. It has, at its core, one simple but profound request:
“Give. Us. This. Day.”
That’s it! That’s the real core of all prayers if you think about it. On the human side at least. That is the one request of the Lord without which nothing else matters. “This Day.” This day is what all our past, lost-days flow towards and which all our future hoped-for days flow from. Without the gift of “This Day” the ones that have passed have no meaning and the ones that are to come have no potentiality. Both are but abstractions or, as the poet has it:
“What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
(T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets)
Which is a fancy way of saying that without the gift of “This Day” being given us, all else is lost.
Secular thinkers speak of “This Day” as being “in the now” as if “being here now” was all that it took to be really alive. Really? I’ve tried it. Tried it for years. And it don’t work!
I lived in that pop-cult, faux-world for years before escaping and, looking back, I seem to remember it not as replete with luminous headlands overlooking the sea, but as the Shadow lands that loom beyond a darker border. Being “in the now” was neither a gift nor a curse, a burden nor a blessing. It simply was and, as a result, was rather unremarkable.
That secular world originated out of nothing, out of the limited imagination of the noosphere, the “sphere of reason” according to Vernadsky and Chardin, and with no reach beyond itself, existed closer to the Alpha than to the Omega. That world had, as secular things often do, a tangle of bright, shiny deceivers clustered around it like gnats outside a privy. When you arrived at the center (“the now”) it had nothing to say about tomorrow, and very little to promise about “This Day” other than that it would be roughly similar to the day before. There was little inscape and no escape. The secular “Now” was always the same day, neither given nor taken but simply existing. It was the kind of day in which the existence of the Human and the existence of a sea slug was essentially, pretty much, equal. I, for one, would rather ask for my day than simply arrive in it.
Which is why, when I pray the Lord’s Prayer, I always pause — at the very least — when I come to the phrase, “Give us this day.” And in that pause, I remember another phrase derived from scripture, “Tomorrow is not promised,” as in Matthew 6:34: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Or, James 4:13-16: “You that say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain’ (It takes a certain pride in yourself to plan your future with such confidence, methinks) whereas you know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away. For that you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live, and do this, or that.’ But now you rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.”
I once knew that phrase, “Tomorrow is not promised,” in a rather dry, academic, vaguely poetic manner. Now, having had my all my tomorrows removed and then miraculously restored a few times, I understand the phrase down to the marrow of my bones. Coming into this day I always ask the Lord to “Give us this day.” Departing this day, I find I return to the early litanies of childhood, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake . . .”
But then, so far, I do wake and I continue in my daily project to replace curses with prayers. I’m not very good at it yet. Still fairly shaky. Then again, as another poet tells me,
“This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
(from Theodore Roethke’s book, The Waking)
The Lord give me (and give you) “This Day.” Amen.
