REFLECTIONS ON THE LORD’S PRAYER—III
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”
“As we forgive them that trespass against us” is a phrase which must be thought of as qualifying all the classes of the prayer. Forgiving is merely a special case of giving, and the word may be taken to stand for the whole scheme of nonegotistic life, which is at once the condition and the result of enlightenment. As we forgive, or, in other words, as we change our “natural,” egotistic attitude toward our fellow beings, we shall become progressively more capable of hallowing the name of God, of doing God’s will and cooperating with God to make His kingdom come. Moreover, the daily bread of grace, without which nothing can be achieved, is given to the extent to which we ourselves give and forgive. If one is adequately to love God, one must love one’s neighbors—and one’s neighbors include even those who have trespassed against us. Conversely, one must love God, if one is adequately to love one’s neighbors. In the spiritual life, every cause is also an effect, and every effect is at the same time a cause.
We have now to consider in what sense God forgives our trespasses or debts, as we forgive our debtors, or those who trespass against us.
On the human level, forgiveness is the waiving of an acknowledged right to payment or punishment. Some of these acknowledged rights are purely arbitrary and conventional. Others, on the contrary, seem to be more fundamental, more closely in accord with what we regard as just. But these fundamental notions of justice are the notions of the “natural,” unregenerate man. All the great religious teachers of the world have insisted that these notions must be replaced by others—the thoughts and intuitions of the liberated and enlightened man. The Old Law is to be replaced by the New, which is the law of love, of mahakarun, of universal compassion. If men are not to enforce their “rights” for payment or punishment, then most certainly God does not enforce such rights. Indeed, it is absurd to say that such “rights” have any existence in relation to God. If they exist upon the human level, it is solely in virtue of the fact that we are either isolated selves or, at best, self-sacrificing members of groups which have the character of selves and whose selfish behavior vicariously satisfies the ego-feelings of those who have sacrificed themselves to these groups. The “natural” man is motivated either by selfishness or that social sublimation of selfishness which Philip Leon has aptly called “alter-egoism.” But because God does not enforce any “rights” of the kind that unregenerate individuals and societies enforce, under the plea of justice, it does not follow that our acts are without their good or evil consequences. Here again the great religious teachers are unanimous. There is a law of karma; God is not mocked, and as a man sows, so shall he reap. Sometimes the reaping is extremely obvious, as when a habitual drunkard reaps bodily sickness and a failure of mental power. Very often, on the contrary, the reaping is of a nature which it is very difficult for any but enlightened eyes to detect. For example, Jesus was constantly inveighing against the Scribes and Pharisees. But the Scribes and Pharisees were models of austere respectability and good citizenship. The only trouble with them was that their virtues were only the virtues of unregenerate men—and such righteousness is as “filthy rags” in the sight of God; for even the virtues of the unregenerate are God-eclipsing and prevent those who have them from advancing toward that knowledge of ultimate Reality, which is the end and purpose of life. That which the Scribes and Pharisees reap is the more or less total inability to know the God they fondly imagine they are serving. God does not punish them, any more than he punishes the man who inadvertently steps over the edge of a cliff. The nature of the world is such that, if anyone fails to conform to its laws, whether of matter or mind or spirit, he will have to take the consequences, which may be immediate and spectacular, as in the case of the man who steps over the edge of the cliff, or remote, subtle and very far from obvious, as in the case of the virtuous man who is virtuous only in the manner of the Scribes and Pharisees.
Now, since God has no “rights” to enforce, he can never be thought of as waiving such “rights.” And since he is the principle of the world, he cannot suspend those laws or make exceptions to those uniformities, which are the manifestation of that principle. Does this mean, then, that God cannot forgive our debts and trespasses? In one sense it certainly does. But there is another sense in which the idea of divine forgiveness is valid and profoundly significant. Good actions and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the results of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called “the I, me, mine,” we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood—and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration. We become different from what we were and, being different, cease to be at the mercy of the destiny which, as “natural,” unregenerate beings, we had forged for ourselves by our evil thoughts and actions. Thus the Pharisee who gives up his life of self-esteeming respectability and uncharitable righteousness, becomes capable thereby of receiving a measure of grace, ceases to be a Pharisee and, in virtue of that fact, ceases to be subject to the destiny forged by the man he once was and is no more. The making oneself fit to receive grace is effective repentance and atonement; and the bestowal of grace is the divine forgiveness of sins.
In a rather crude form, this truth is expressed in the doctrine which teaches that merits have the power to cancel out their opposites. Moreover, if divine forgiveness is the bestowal of grace, we can understand how vicarious sacrifices and the merits of others can benefit the soul. The enlightened person transforms not merely himself, but to some extent the world around him. The unregenerate individual is more or less completely without real freedom; only the enlightened are capable of genuinely free choices and creative acts. This being so, it is possible for them to modify for the better the destinies unfolding around them by inspiring the makers of these destinies with the wish and the power to give, so that they may become fit to receive the grace which will transform them and so deliver them from the fate they had been preparing for themselves.
“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.”
The nature of the evil from which we pray to be delivered is defined by inference in the succeeding phrase. Evil consists in forgetting that kingdom, power, and glory are God’s and acting upon the insane and criminal belief that they are ours. So long as we remain average, sensual, unregenerate individuals, we shall constantly be tempted to think God-excluding thoughts and perform God-eclipsing actions. Nor do such temptations cease as soon as the path of enlightenment is entered. All that happens is that, with every advance achieved, the temptations become more subtle, less gross and obvious, more profoundly dangerous. Belial and Mammon have no power over the advanced; nor will they succumb when Lucifer offers them his more material baits, such as worldly power and dominion. But for souls of quality Lucifer also prepares more rarefied temptations and many are those, even far advanced along the road to enlightenment, who have succumbed to spiritual pride. It is only to the perfectly enlightened and the completely liberated that temptations do not present themselves at all.
The final phrases of the prayer re-affirm its central, dominant theme, which is that God is everything and that man, as man, is nothing. Indeed, man, as man, is less than nothing; for he is a nothing capable of evil, that is to say capable of claiming as his own the things that are God’s and, by that act, cutting himself off from God. But though man, as man, is nothing and can make himself less than nothing by becoming evil, man as the knower and lover of God, man as the possessor of a latent, inalienable spark of godhead, is potentially everything. In the words of Cardinal Bérulle, “man is a nothing surrounded by God, indigent of God, capable of God and filled with God if he so desires.” This is the central truth of all spiritual religion, the truth that is, so to say, the major premise of the Lord’s Prayer. It is a truth which the ordinary unregenerate man or woman finds it hard to accept in theory and harder still to act upon. The great religious teachers have all thought and acted theocentrically; the mass of ordinary human beings think and act anthropocentrically. The prayer which comes naturally to such people is the prayer of petition, the prayer for concrete advantages and immediate help in trouble. How profoundly different this is from the prayer of an enlightened being! Such a being prays not at all for himself, but only that God may be worshiped, loved, and known by him as God ought to be worshiped, loved, and known—that the latent and potential seed of reality within his own soul may become fully actualized. There is even a kind of irony to be found in the fact that this prayer of Christ’s—the theocentric prayer of a supremely enlightened being—should have become the prayer most frequently repeated by millions upon millions of men and women, who have only a very imperfect notion of what it means and who, if they fully realized its revolutionary significance, so immensely remote from the more or less kindly humanism by which they govern their own lives, might even feel rather shocked and indignant. But in the affairs of the spirit, it is foolish to think in terms of large numbers and “public opinion.” It may be true that the Lord’s Prayer is generally misunderstood, or not understood at all. Nevertheless it is a good thing that it should remain the most familiar formulary used by a religion which, particularly in the more “liberal” of its contemporary manifestations, has wandered so far from the theocentrism of its founder, into an entirely heretical anthropocentrism or, as we now prefer to call it, “humanism.” It remains with us, a brief and enigmatic document of the most uncompromising spirituality. Those who are dissatisfied with the prevailing anthropocentrism have only to look into its all too familiar, and therefore uncomprehended depths, to discover the philosophy of life and the plan of conduct for which they have been looking hitherto in vain.