ABBA

Meditations based on the Lord’s Prayer

by

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Hon. D.D. Aberdeen

Fellow of King’s College, London

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

LONDON ◊ NEW YORK ◊ TORONTO

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LTD.

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First published 1940

For B. B. G.

CONTENTS

chapter

I. Introductory

II. The Father

III. The Name

IV. The Kingdom

V. The Will

VI. Food

VII. Forgiveness

VIII. Prevenience

IX. Glory

CHAPTER I

introductory

PRAYER is the substance of eternal life. It gives back to man, in so far as he is willing to live to capacity—that is to say, to give love and suffer pain—the beatitude without which he is incomplete; for it sets going, deepens and at last perfects that mutual in dwelling of two orders which redeems us from un reality, and in which the creative process reaches its goal. There is, as Bremond has said, even in the poorest and crudest prayer “a touch of Pentecost.” It awaits and expects the action of the Spirit, acknowledges the most mysterious and yet the most certain reality of our experience; the intercourse of the Transcendent God with fugitive man, and of fugitive man with the Transcendent God. Yet all our attempts to describe this mysterious reality are like the scientists’ attempts to describe the universe; at worst diagrammatic, at best symbolic and allusive. It eludes definition, refuses to be caught in the meshes of the mind. We cannot say of it on God’s side, “Lo! there the beginning”; nor on man’s side, “Lo! here”; because it comes not with observation, but emerges unperceived from that deep ground of being where we do not know ourselves apart from Him. There, beyond thought, the pressure and invitation of God is experienced by the creature, and thence there filters into consciousness some response to the Unseen; an act of loving attention, a submission, a supplication. Here is the beginning of prayer, and hence it spreads to include at last every level of our being, every aspect of our existence, and bring into conscious expression its fundamental relation with God.

This is a conception of prayer which we easily forget; for the cheap fussiness of the anthropocentric life has even invaded our religion. There too, we prefer to live upon the surface and ignore the deeps. We seldom pause for that awed recognition of pure Being, so steadying and refreshing to the soul, which is the raw material of the interior life. Yet the true growth and development of humanity seems to depend on this constant re-orientation towards the Holy, this deep thrust of the spirit to the unchanging sources of its life. When a seed germinates, first the radicle pushes down into the nourishing earth; its delicate exploring tip penetrates that dense and hidden world, seeking and finding food. After that, ...