Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
The Lord's Prayer
Pray the Our Father slowly, phrase by phrase, in private stillness — letting the prayer Jesus gave become a contemplative template that reorders the heart toward God.
The Lord’s Prayer in brief: Go somewhere private and shut the door. Pray simply, without piling up words. Then pray slowly, resting on each phrase: Our Father which art in heaven (turn to God) · Hallowed be thy name (reverence) · Thy kingdom come, thy will be done (surrender) · Give us this day our daily bread (trust for today) · Forgive us. as we forgive (release grievance) · Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil (protection) · For thine is the kingdom. (return all to God). The root prayer, prayed as Jesus gave it.
What it is
This is the prayer Jesus gave his disciples when they were learning how to pray — the Our Father (also called the Pater Noster), set down in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus prefaces it with two instructions that frame how it is to be prayed: not for show before others, but in private, and not by “vain repetitions” or heaping up words, but simply and trustingly, because “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him” (Matthew 6:8).
Then he offers the prayer itself as a pattern: “After this manner therefore pray ye” (Matthew 6:9). Used as a contemplative practice, the Lord’s Prayer is prayed slowly, phrase by phrase, resting on each line long enough to mean it.
It is short — a handful of clauses — yet it moves through reverence, surrender, daily trust, forgiveness, and protection in order. This is the canonical, root form of a prayer that an entire tradition has elaborated for two thousand years; the later Christian methods that take it apart clause by clause (see Cross-links) all grow from this Gospel original.
The Method
Drawn faithfully from Matthew 6, in the words of Jesus (short quotes, KJV):
- Withdraw into privacy first. Before the prayer, Jesus says: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Find a quiet, unobserved place. Close the door. Set the audience of others aside.
- Pray simply, without piling up words. Jesus warns against praying “to be seen of men” and against the long, anxious repetitions of those who think they will “be heard for their much speaking” (Matthew 6:5,7). The prayer is brief on purpose. Let it be unhurried but not padded.
- Pray the prayer slowly, one phrase at a time (Matthew 6:9-13): - “Our Father which art in heaven” — turn toward God as a child to a loving Father; “Our” because you pray with and for all. - “Hallowed be thy name” — let the name of God be held sacred; settle into reverence. - “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” — open to God’s reign and surrender your own will to his. - “Give us this day our daily bread” — ask only for today’s provision; trust for it. - “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” — receive forgiveness in the same measure you extend it; release any grievance held against another. - “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” — ask for protection and guidance. - “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen” — close by returning everything to God.
- Pause and let each line do its work before moving to the next, rather than running the whole through at speed. The clause on forgiveness in particular asks for a real act of letting go, not just words. (Sourcing note: this is a faithful summary of the prayer as Jesus gives it in Matthew 6, offered for understanding. The text quoted is the public-domain KJV; wording varies slightly across translations and the doxology “For thine is the kingdom.” is present in the KJV tradition though absent from the earliest manuscripts.)
Source & Lineage
The prayer appears in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:9-13, with a shorter parallel in Luke 11:2-4 given when a disciple asks, “Lord, teach us to pray.” It is the foundational prayer of Christianity, prayed in nearly every Christian tradition.
The instruction to pray privately (“enter into thy closet,” Matthew 6:6) and simply (Matthew 6:7-8) belongs to the same passage and sets the disposition for the prayer. From this Gospel root grew an immense lineage of elaboration: the line-by-line meditative method articulated in New Thought by Emmet Fox; the breath-paced Jesus Prayer of the Christian East; the wordless resting of Centering Prayer.
This file holds the original; those are its descendants (see Cross-links).
Common refinements
Racing through it. The whole point is slowness. Rattling off the words from memory empties the practice; pausing on each clause fills it.
- Skipping the privacy. Jesus’s first instruction is to shut the door. The practice is meant to be unobserved and unhurried, not performance.
- Treating forgiveness as a formality. “As we forgive our debtors” is conditional and demanding — it asks for an actual inner release, not a recited phrase.
- Reducing it to a relaxation tool. Within Christianity the prayer is worship; lifting it out as a calming technique misses what it is. Held respectfully, the calm is a by-product, not the aim.