Whose Prayer Is It, Anyway?
by
Brittany Dowdy*

 Our Lady who is the Essence of the Earth
We have called you by many names**
Return now unto Your People
Speak Your Will, and it shall be done
As Above, so Below.

Please give us each moment: our life, light & love.
If we have let you down,
Please forgive us and cleanse us,
According to our own willingness to forgive others.

Lead us away from Lures
And deliver us from Evil
For You are Goddess, Queen of the Universe,

Yours is the Power, the Grace, the Wisdom & the Beauty
Age unto Ages
Ah-Main

 So goes The Lady's Prayer, or the "Our Lady," according to an "Esoteric Christian" site[i] that tries to combine pagan and Christian elements into a religion intended for the select few who can really understand.  It is intended as a replacement for or a supplement to the Lord's Prayer, and it is just one of the many profanations of Jesus' template for prayer available to radical feminist worshippers.  While these prayers tend to make many Christians vaguely uncomfortable, it can be difficult to determine what, exactly, is so wrong with them until we go through and, line by line, compare it to Jesus' original words.  When we do that, however, it is amazing what things become clear to us. 

This particular version hails the deity with "Our Lady who is the Essence of the Earth."  By contrast, Jesus instructed us to pray to "Our Father, who art in Heaven."  First, of course, are the obvious gender differences, which I will mention here with the general disclaimer that, as I (and countless others) have argued before, God has revealed Himself to us in primarily masculine, not feminine terms, and nowhere in his Word is He referred to as Lady or Goddess or Queen.  Any time a prayer is addressed to such deities, there is cause for suspicion.  For my purposes here, I will continue to refer to Him in the masculine regardless of whether I am speaking of the orthodox perception of Him or the feminist profanation.  Apart from the feminine language, this salutation emphasizes the deity's relationship with the earth.  Calling God the "Essence of the Earth" implies that that the most fundamental part of His identity is His relationship with creation.  Jesus' version, however, reminds us that God is in heaven--He is fundamentally other than His creation.  There can be no confusing the created with the Creator in the Lord's Prayer, as there can in the Lady's.  Equally important, the familial relationship inferred in calling God our Father is lost with "Our Lady."  The speaker is not praying to a loving Father, but a distant, impersonal Lady. 

The prayer moves on to declare that "We have called you by many names," and gives an option of reciting the names of many pagan goddesses—goddesses whose stories are completely contradictory, in some cases, like those of Diana, the virgin and Venus, the epitome of free love. The emphasis is on what the speaker likes to call God, what she has named Him, instead of what He has named Himself.  It also puts all the names and images that have been attributed to God, whether rightly or not, on an equal footing with one another.  Contrast this with the Lord's Prayer: "Hallowed be Thy name."  Here, the focus is on the holiness of God's name--His one, holy Name, not the imperfect metaphors with which we must speak of Him.  Note that it is not the speaker who has made His name hallowed--it simply is hallowed.  Everything in the opening of the Lady's Prayer focuses on the creation, and everything in the opening of the Lord's Prayer focuses on the Creator.

The Lord's Prayer continues with the plea that "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."  But the Lady's Prayer has changed it to "Return now unto Your People, Speak Your Will, and it shall be done, As Above, so Below."  At first, it looks as though little has changed between the two versions.  But look closer.  The Lady's Prayer asks God to "Return unto Your People"--as if He'd ever left us!  We are to pray that God's kingdom will come, but we are never to assume that He needs to come back to us.  Nowhere is that even implied in Jesus' prayer.  The change in the second half is more subtle.  It is well enough to pray that God's will be done, but must He speak it in order to see it done? Is He really limited so? No, His will is to be done whether He speaks it or simply wills it.  God is not a magician that He must chant a spell in order that His will be done.  And what purpose does it serve to replace the concepts of Heaven and earth with Above and Below?  All it does is create ambiguities that are not there in the original, which can only create confusion if not resolved.

The next line asks the deity to "give us each moment: our life, light and love" instead of "give us this day our daily bread."  Instead of providing for our material needs, God is reduced to providing only the abstract ideals of life, light and love--not His (or even her) life, light and love, but our life, light and love; that which somehow already belongs to us, or which God somehow "owes" us.  Not only that, but instead of intending to give each moment of our lives to Him, the speaker asks that God give each moment to her, as though she might keep it in a treasure chest.  The focus is, once again, shifted from God to the speaker, from the concrete realities in which God is grounded to abstract concepts which are more difficult to grasp.  I can maintain, even in my darkest and most doubtful moments, an idea of what it looks like for God to give me my daily bread.  It is more difficult to imagine Him giving me only "life, light and love" when I feel as though I can find none of them. 

When we ask forgiveness of our sins, Jesus instructs us to be quite straightforward.  "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," as the Presbyterians translate it, implying that we owe something to God which we cannot repay.  The Lady's Prayer changes it to ask that, if we have let God down (as though there were some question as to whether we'd sinned or not), He should please forgive us and cleanse us.  It is very nice, very polite, and very sterile.  It belittles the great wrong we have done against God, as though we had only stepped on His toe and all that is necessary is a quick "beg your pardon."  Additionally, it asks God to forgive us "according to our own willingness to forgive others."  It is no longer whether or not we actually do forgive others that matters, only if we are willing to do so.  And it is no longer allowed that we forgive someone against our will, though certainly it is possible for us to do so.  

"Lead us not into temptation," Jesus tells us to pray, while "Lead us away from lures," says the Lady's Prayer.  The distinction here is incredibly subtle; the Lord's Prayer asks that we not be led into temptation in the first place, where the Lady's Prayer asks that we be led away from temptation once we've already found it.  After all, how can we be led away from something that is not already before us?  Both imply that we are being led by God, but the Lady's Prayer suggests that we are being led toward temptation, so that we can be then led away from it.  The Lord's Prayer asks that we avoid temptation altogether.  It's a very small, but very important difference.

Finally, the closing attributes to God "the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever" in the Lord's Prayer.  In the Lady's Prayer, however, aside from invoking the "Queen of the Universe" (who sounds suspiciously like Jeremiah 7's queen of heaven[ii]), the goddess is given "the Power, the Grace, the Wisdom, and the Beauty, Age unto Ages."  The kingdom is missing; God no longer has a domain in which to rule, and we are no longer His subjects, citizens of His kingdom.  He is stripped of his kingship and left with more abstracts, and nothing concrete in which to use them.  His power remains and His grace emphasized, but where can He show or use them if not in His kingdom?  In addition, His glory is replaced with superficial beauty.  It is no lie that God is beautiful.  But He is so much more than that.  "Glory" implies dignity, praise, honor, fame, adoration, worship, splendor and prosperity, in addition to beauty.  Why must He be stripped of all but physical attractiveness?

The valediction of the Lady's Prayer, "Ah-Main," is pure nonsense which stems from a foolish refusal to use any word which can be associated with men, even when, as in the case of "Amen," the word has nothing to do with the male sex. It means truly--it's the word Jesus was using when He said "Truly, truly I say unto you...," suggesting that what He is about to say is firm and trustworthy.  And we use it at the end of a prayer to say "let it be so."  It's ironic that removing that word from their prayer implies, in a sense, that it is not to be so, that it is no longer firm and trustworthy.

God wants us to worship Him, to come before Him in humble prayer as His Son taught us.  But this prayer is a mockery of His intentions for us. In its need to make God seem more palatable to the radical feminist, it has promoted the glorification of creation and of self at the cost of the worship of God.  Some of the changes in meaning are subtle, others are blatant, but all are theologically unsound.  Humility has been replaced with selfishness.  Certainty has been replaced with ambiguity.  And God has been replaced with "Goddess, Queen of the Universe," an idol of our own creation.  Whom shall we worship?