With Thanksgiving Day coming up, and given the social climate in our country, I am moved to reflect on the connection between love and criticism.
Word to Enkindle
The two petitions that conclude the “Our Father” prayer form a single sentence. “And lead us not into temptation” is inseparable from “but deliver us from evil,” according to faith as well as grammar. And just as the word “temptation” needed to be mined for deeper insights, so too does the word “evil.”
As Catholics, how should we imagine our relationship with the world? We often talk about “walls” and “doors” and “bridges” to explain how the Church should either connect to the world for the sake of evangelizing it or separate herself from the world for the sake of remaining faithful to God.
In the last decade, the liturgical versions of the Our Father have been changed in both French and Italian to soften the apparent harshness of this petition. The French translation is now “Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation,” “Do not let us enter into temptation,” and the Italian runs “Non abbandonarci alla tentazione,” “Do not abandon us to temptation.”
Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option” (2017) has been on my list of things to read for a long time. As a Cistercian monk rooted in the Benedictine tradition and apostolically engaged as a priest and teacher, I basically felt like it was required reading, given how often people refer to it.
This petition is the most scandalous of them all. The verb tenses reveal the heart of the matter.
I recently read a book about discernment and the spiritual life that I’d recommend to just about anyone but especially to the young: Stacey Sumereau, “Adventure Awaits: How to Interpret Your Desires and Hear God’s Voice” (Ave Maria Press, 2025). It is short and divided into bite-sized sections filled with stories, explanations, and spiritual exercises. It is written in a friendly style and rooted in Catholic faith.
My ideal translation of this phrase would be “Give us our ‘supersubstantial’ bread today.” That would sound gloriously awkward at Mass, and ‘supersubstantial’ would be a liturgical tongue twister for children trying to say the word quickly five times in a row. That translation, though, grants immediate access to the mystery at work in the first petition of the Our Father prayer.
Gambling is growing in our country — and quickly. My impression is that we have work to do to be informed about what is happening and to let ourselves be formed by what the Church teaches, lest so much happen without the constructive engagement of Catholics and of anyone else concerned about social justice.
Death, disobedience, and sin are not part of the original divine plan, and yet they are manifest facts of human life. How, then, is the divine will to be done by me or any other weak-willed man or woman dwelling in the valley of the shadow of death?