The Power of Repetition

My mom always tells me to pray the Lord’s Prayer every day. I used to find that advice annoying. Why would I want to say the same words over and over, especially when they’re not even my own words? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say the things that are on my own heart, rather than to repeat something like a mantra that comes from outside myself? Lately, I’m changing my mind about this. Is it possible that repetition contains a forgotten power?

Countless people over many centuries have said the words of the Lord’s Prayer. In the darkest imaginable situations, through starvation, imprisonment, tortures we cannot imagine, and the deepest and most hopeless experiences of the human soul, the words of this prayer have been spoken across the ages and around the globe. The prayer is one for enlightenment, for help, and for forgiveness.

Words are a creative force. When words are spoken, they create a reality of their own; a sort of potential arises from words that can indeed become a part of the living world around us. God spoke the world into being. We ourselves speak things into being. When countless millions or billions of people speak the same words, the creative force of those words builds a kind of channel through reality. The more the words are said, the deeper the channel becomes, and the more real the whole vision becomes. It begins to permeate reality, and over time, with enough energy behind it, perhaps those words even become reality themselves.

There’s no way to measure how many times the Lord’s Prayer has been said on this planet, but I imagine it. Billions and billions of times, the same words said over and over by billions of people, asking God as our Father to complete the work of human development, to bring heaven to earth, to end the torments we inflict on each other, and to guard us from the fatal temptations that arise in us and lead to these torments. Deliver us from evil.

The emotions of those who have prayed these words, the deep movements of the heart which for two thousand years have accompanied their utterance, are not lost forever. They are carried behind and within the words themselves. When we invoke this prayer, we invoke a whole force that is carried by it, a vast web of human experience, desire, and longing that has been poured repeatedly into this small group of words. The deep emotions and commitments of many, many hearts and souls seeking truth, well-being, and divine help stand in the words, and we take this into our own being.

When we align ourselves with this powerful soul movement, that is to share in an act of creation. We are bringing the peace, forgiveness, and well-being of heaven itself to earth. A repetition of words such as these that Jesus advised us to pray is laden with the soul movement of human development. It works in and through us when we speak them. My mom is right. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” contains a great power for good not yet realized, but it is building and growing with each generation that speaks the words.