A NEW year is not only for new things, but also an occasion, a prompt, to make old things new; and nothing needs that renewal more than the over-familiar words of old prayers.

One of the oldest and best is, of course, the Lord’s Prayer, whose well-worn phrases slip so easily from my tongue that I can say that prayer in the morning and then ask myself only minutes later, “Did I remember to say the Lord’s Prayer?”

Just before he gives us that prayer in St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus asks us not to “heap up empty phrases”. Indeed, the brief prayer that he gives us is meant to be an antidote to the long orations of the Gentiles — to be a simpler, clearer, less ostentatious alternative. Yet, often enough, at least in my experience, that prayer itself is in danger of becoming a string of empty phrases. What is to be done?

Well, one approach is, of course, to slow the prayer down, to utter it slowly, perhaps over the course of a whole day, in a kind of lectio divina, chewing over and “inwardly digesting” each petition, so that it becomes one’s own, a part of who one is.

Since poetry is language slowed down, I set myself, some years ago, to write seven sonnets on the Lord’s Prayer, savouring and meditating on it, phrase by phrase. As a result, I began to see things that I simply had not seen before.

For example, once I took the time to reflect more slowly on the phrase “deliver us from evil,” I thought of something that had never occurred to me in all the thousands of times that I had uttered those words. It occurred to me, for the first time, that, for Jesus, this prayer was not answered.

“Do not bring us to the time of trial but deliver us from evil.” Neither of those petitions was granted him. What could I make of that? Why would he ask us to pray something that did not come true for him? And then, of course, I saw something so obvious that I should have seen it years ago: the prayer was not “answered” for him, precisely so that he could answer it, he could grant it for us. He asked us to pray for something that could be granted to us only at the cost of his own life. That was real love in action.

It was only the writing of the poem which revealed to me that embedded in the Lord’s Prayer is the whole mystery of atonement. The sonnet came out like this:

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

Oh do not bring us to the time of trial,
Deliver us, deliver us from evil.
How is it that your own petitions fail
As evil slams its hammer to the anvil?
For you were brought to trial and not delivered.
You let the prince of darkness do his worst,
The sun shrank from that sight, the whole world shivered,
The fount of blessing let himself be cursed.

How is it? Is it that your dereliction
Makes possible the answer to my prayer?
Am I delivered by your bitter passion,
As you face every evil for me there?
Unanswered answerer, forsaken friend,
Bring me to my beginning through your end.