Hallowed be thy name….

Soften the ground of my being…

To be hallowed is to be revered, made holy. The substitute line in the Lord’s Prayer for “hallowed be thy name” in Neil Douglas-Klotz translation is “soften the ground of my being.” So to be hallowed is to be soft, to be in relationship with infinite mystery and within that, the true self. The soft ground of being is to be with the wonderfully terrifying truth of interconnected reality. I do not want to minimize how challenging “just being” and allowing mystery to work within and between us is. We are surrounded by it all the time, unavoidably connected to everyone and everything at all times.

And yet…it can be so difficult to be at ease. This is in part because we, as a society, tend to avoid growing up and being with what is. We worry too much about who’s in and who’s out, who’s religion is right and who’s is wrong. We avoid facing one another and thus facing ourselves. We want to consume happiness rather than learn how to be it.

It i is hard to speak words into paradox that is infinitely knowable. So we propose here that two tendencies are either to infantilize or trivialize our experiences. It is tempting to want to blame others for our unhappiness or to minimize experiences that we just don’t know how to integrate into the soft ground of our being. To find our softness is, to me, like being belly up in the sun, to recognize the forces that drive us so that we may be released from them. To grow up, to become our authentic selves, it is necessary to take personal responsibility and engage with life beyond transactional relationships. Authenticity will soften us.

If you want to read along with some of the texts we reference, they are:

Sara Grant, Toward and Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian

John Tucker, Catch-22 Theology

Padraig O’Tuama, Daily Prayer

Thanks for listening!