February 9th 2025 Bible Study: The Lord’s Prayer re-translated based on my own understandings

Good Superbowl Sunday everyone (assuming you are reading this on the day it is posted). Yesterday, I posted my understanding and rewritings of the 10 commandments based on my understanding of Jesus and the scripture. Per the request of one of my readers, I thought it would be fun to continue the project of re-translating scripture by interpreting the Lord’s Prayer in my own words. I will be coming to my conclusion based on three main interpretations: The Latin Interpretation, The Catholic Interpretation, and the most common Protestant interpretation that I’ve come across. Using those three, I will use what I know to come up with my own variation of the Lord’s prayer that I hope will convey the original message to a modern audience.

As someone that used to attend Catholic mass every Sunday, I have heard this rendition quite a bit. More or less, it translates to the common Catholic English interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Keep in mind, in the “Catholicreadings.org” graphic, it changed the translation from “debtors” to “trespassers” in the retranslated text in English. This is largely because when colonizers from the Catholic church went to other lands and retranslated the passage, many of those cultures lacked a concept of debt, as they did not have the same economic system that the Catholic church was used to. So it was re-translated as “trespassers” as this was a more culturally understood concept of doing a bad deed against someone else or having someone do that bad deed towards you. This is an important thing to consider in the translation I’ll be doing.

This is the protestant version of the Lord’s prayer I learned going to Methodist Sunday school as a kindergartener. Most Methodists I’ve met have the last line changed to “For thine is the kingdom,” but younger me understood it as “aligned as a kingdom”, which adds to a different understanding of all of God’s children being aligned with God.

Now here’s my updated rendition and re-translation of the Lord’s Prayer, gathering all of these renditions as context for my translation:

God, within us and in our surroundings

Your essence is divine.

Please show yourself, and give us space for your presence.

As above, so below.

Fill us with opportunity, so we may be empowered to serve your plan.

Give us the wisdom to learn from our mistakes

As we untie the tangled threads of others’ past mistakes.

Do not let us be seduced by diversions of your calling,

But illuminate the path towards the present moment.

For you are the Earth, dreams, and power that unites us all.

Blessed be.