This is from a series of eight editorial articles on "The Lord's 
Prayer" in the Cleveland Central Bulletin, an AA newsletter that 
began before the AA Grapevine.

 

February 1944

"Our Father..."

These are crucial words. Of all the words of the most universal of 
all prayers, these two words are of greatest importance to us.

In uttering them, we turn to a Power greater than our own. We turn 
from complete reliance upon our own egotistical natures, from 
exaggerated self love and self exaltation. We confess that our 
efforts to run our entire lives in our own willful way have led to 
error, frustration, defeat, failure. We admit that the self 
justification that resulted from our errors has only deepened our 
defeat.

Even when we have seen the depth of our failure, the folly of self 
justification and the pitfalls of egotism, we have discovered that 
our efforts to re-establish ourselves solely through will power have 
led to more stumbling. Our wills, as one writer has observed, are 
where we are sickest.

So we, out of desperation turn to the sure Power that has always 
existed and make that Power the rock upon which we will rebuild our 
lives.

Many of us had long since lapsed in belief in any Supreme Power. 
Most of us had not addressed ourselves to that Power for many years, 
except, perhaps, in an occasional desperate moment.

In the realization of the position in which we have found ourselves, 
we come to a crossroads. We may continue to rely upon our sick wills 
and our erring judgements, which so often speak the words of 
justification. Our experience should show us what the result of 
following along that path may be.

Most of us find it better to choose the other path. Certainly all 
who have succeeded in application of the AA program have found this 
other path better. We turn from our selves to anchor our lives on 
something outside. Preferably, we anchor our lives to that something 
outside that we consider greater than ourselves, and eventually, we 
recognize that something as being the Supreme Power.

We bring that Supreme Power into our lives, and by so doing, we lift 
ourselves up. We think of that Supreme Power in our own terms, but 
we know that the realm of that Power is of realm of the Good, where 
the spirit may find peace.

With these words, Our Father, we address ourselves to the Supreme 
Power. In the morning when we get up to prepare for the day's work; 
in the evening when we retire and think for a few moments about our 
actions during the day that has just past, we place ourselves in the 
presence of that Supreme Power with the words, Our Father.

When occasion arises during the day, when we are sorely tempted, 
when we are angry, when we are resentful, when we pity ourselves, 
when we feel frustrated or worried, we can shift gears and connect 
ourselves with the Supreme Power by uttering the words, Our Father. 
There we will find help.

 

March 1944

"Hallowed Be Thy Name"

"Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name…"

When we discovered ourselves powerless over alcohol and unable to 
manage our own lives, we turned to a Power greater than our own.

When we have denied that Power, or ignored it, or when we have 
turned to that Power only mechanically, we have failed in our 
efforts to meet our problems. When we have turned to that Power and 
have done so sincerely, we have succeeded in regaining control over 
our lives and have progressed in the solution of our problems.

So other test of the existence of that Power, or our dependence upon 
it, is necessary.

That Power we recognize as being the supreme power in the universe.  
It has, and has had throughout history, many names. To most of us 
today, the name of the Supreme Power is simply God.

In our prayer, we say, "hallowed be thy Name."  That means that the 
name of God is to be set aside as being holy; it is consecrated for 
sacred uses. It is revered, held in profound respect and at the same 
time regarded with love.

However, these are attitudes that are not limited merely to the name 
of God, as if the name were magical (as the ancients believed). 
These are attitudes that we take in our approach to God. We regard 
God as being apart from the profane world even though concerned with 
it. And in our approach to God, we are to put off all that is 
profane. We approach God with reverence, with profound respect, with 
love, and perhaps with fear. We acknowledge God's power over the 
universe. We acknowledge that the realm of God is the realm of the 
good. And we recognize that if we are to receive the help of God, we 
must strive consciously to separate ourselves from those things that 
are antagonistic to the good.

It is good for us to use restraint in the use of the name of God 
(the name being. for most of us, God), simply be-cause the 
profanation of the name tends to weaken and then destroy the meaning 
of the word in our minds. The name of God should call God into our 
minds, and should cause us to think of God's power, God's goodness, 
God's help to us. Through it, we should be able to shift gears from 
the profane world.

But again, "Hallowed be Thy Name" must mean something more to us 
than respect for God's name. It must be the supreme acknowledgment 
of God himself, and of our entire dependence upon God.

 

April 1944

"Thy Kingdom Come"

In our thoughts on the Lord's Prayer. we are inclined to pass over 
the words, Thy kingdom come. The words seem to us to refer either to 
life beyond the grave, or to the age-old hope of the prophets and 
the religious for the day when God's kingdom shall be set up on 
earth and swords shall be beaten into plowshares.

But the Lord's Prayer is essentially a prayer for our daily needs, 
one through which we strive to place ourselves within the sphere of 
God's works. While the world at large still does not conduct itself 
as the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom exists today for all those who 
will turn to it.

For those of us who have found our lives unmanageable, the Kingdom 
of God is our sure refuge. By acknowledging ourselves as the 
subjects of a Power greater than our own, as obedient to the laws of 
life that have grown out of the experience of mankind throughout the 
ages, we can restore ourselves. We place ourselves in the Kingdom of 
God within us.

What is the Kingdom of God? The Apostle Paul ssaid it is not meat or 
drink.

That means it is not the material side of lift. Those whose 
interests lie alone in bread, in wealth , in the comforts of life, 
do not find the Kingdom of God. They are more likely to find 
themselves victims of lust and greet, to find themselves selfish and 
intolerant, to find themselves where we found ourselves as the 
result of our one-sided interest in material things.

The Kingdom of God, said Paul, is righteousness and peace and joy in 
the Holy Spirit.

Some of us shy away from words like "righteousness," which have 
a "goody-goodv" sound. But what is a righteous man but one who is 
upright and honest and fair and free from the will to do wrong.

The Kingdom of God. we might say, is the realm of honesty and 
unselfishness and purity and love, the four principles that guide 
our efforts to remake our lives. Some of our members call them the 
Four Absolutes.

The Kingdom of God is peace: the peace from the tortures of the mind 
and the flesh that we have suffered so many years. With honesty and 
unselfishness and purity and love, by being upright and fair and 
free from the will to do wrong, by casting from us the errors that 
have troubled us, we can relax and find peace in the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is joy in the Holy Spirit. Perhaps Paul meant to 
suggest that it is the joy that comes to us through acceptance of 
the Holy Spirit. And so it is. But many of us, who have spent so 
many years in error and have been inclined to look with contempt 
upon those persons who followed the way of God, tend to keep the 
Holy 

Spirit at arm's length. Many are inclined to think that it is not 
quite "grown up" to find joy in the Holy Spirit. Thus we persist in 
error, and deprive ourselves of the opportunity to find peace. We 
have to let ourselves find joy in the Holy Spirit.

It is well to recall the first three of the Twelve Steps. We 
confessed that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had 
become unmanageable. We decided that a Power greater than our own 
could restore us to sanity. We undertook to place our lives and our 
wills in the hands of that Power.

So now we acknowledge the Supreme Power, "Our Father." We regard 
that Power reverently. And we ask that we live today in the realm of 
that Power, when we are upright, where we find peace, where we find 
joy in the Holy Spirit.

Thy Kingdom come.

 

May 1944

"Thy Will Be Done"

So words that we can utter are as vital to us as these words in the 
Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done." In uttering these words we 
surrender to the will of a Power greater than our own. This is the 
essential act in the third of the Twelve Steps, the step that is the 
very heart of our program.

The instincts that rule our material selves are largeIy instincts of 
self-preservation. They make Self our first concern and they are the 
causes of most of the troubles that we can fall into. Self-concern 
leads to egotism, to self-assertion, to vanity, to lack of concern 
for the feelings of others: It leads to things that destroy us: 
lust, greed, and similar excesses of body passions.

A sane view of lift is that all things are good in their right use. 
But we have devoted ourselves to the misuse of a number of things 
and have regarded ourselves accountable to no man. Now that the bill 
for our misconduct has been presented, we find ourselves thoroughly 
rooted in misuse and thoroughly the victims of our impulses.

Now that we are in AA, most of us have recognized our chief errors. 
Most of us see the need for control, for responsible action, for 
curbs on selfish acts. We have seen how some of the results of our 
habits of thought, in resentment, in self-pity, in jealousy, in 
other aspects of self-love, return again and again to harass us.

Our head strong tendencies demand surrender, demand a yielding of 
ourselves to the will of an external power. To place ourselves in 
the hands of that Power, we have to create new habits of action to 
keep us out of old ruts.

We may continue to do all the things that nature intended us to do, 
bur it is important that we do those things under control. We must 
control impulses, particularly those associated with our excesses.

Most difficult, perhaps, are those times when there is an urge that 
we cannot define, just a general tension under the skin and a hazy 
hut strong impulsive feeling in the mind. These are times when it is 
particularly necessary to call on the aid of the Supreme Power.

We must develop the habit of turning to the Supreme Power at all 
times, at regular daily intervals, at times when we are under 
stress. Impulses should be discharged by addressing ourselves 
directly to the Supreme Power and asking for guidance. We must learn 
to see the signs of headstrong and self-willed action and remember 
the troubles that such action has brought in the past. Our watchword 
here is, "Easy does it."

It is the will of the Supreme Power that we love our neighbors, that 
we be merciful and just in all our action. Perhaps we should be 
especially mindful of the warning that we should not judge others. 
We have to learn to be tolerant and to improve our own ways of 
living.

These things are hard at first because they run so contrary to the 
habits we have developed. Our task is to develop new habits in which 
we place the direction of our lives in the hands of a Power greater 
than our own. We have to do it first by conscious effort. Eventually 
we find that when we turn to the Supreme Power and accept the 
guidance of that power, the painful shackles fall away and the 
driving impulses lose their force and we find a measure of peace.

 

June 1944

"Give Us this Day Our Daily Bread"

This is the 21-Hour Plan of life in the Lord's Prayer, and as such 
it is far from being the simple petition for the gift of food that 
it seems. This petition is worthy of our particular consideration, 
since it has special meanings for us in AA.

"Bread" in the Lord's Prayer means all the things that man needs to 
sustain life. The petition is concerned wholly with material things. 
Every material thing, whether it is food, clothing, shelter, a 
convenience of life or a means of pleasure, is solely the product of 
the labor of man applied to the gifts of nature. We get nothing 
without labor, but our labor would not be fruitful were it not for 
the gifts of nature, which are the fruits of the labor of God. It is 
a fundamental law that man must work if he is to live. It is a 
fundamental truth that life depends on God's bounty.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is first of all an acknowledgment 
that we are dependent upon God's bounty. But those who will take the 
trouble to read the Sermon on the Mount, in which the Lord's Prayer 
appears, will discover ample evidence that the word "daily" in this 
petition is of greatest importance.

"Give us today bread for today," the petition means tomorrow's bread 
we will seek tomorrow. Thus, this is a renunciation, one that grows 
out of the last of the Ten Commandments (covetousness). It is linked 
spiritually with the declaration that "Man doth not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." 
Granted that man must have bread, he must not make the pursuit of 
material things the ruling passion of his life.

Now this is of particular interest to us. For most of us in AA 
became alcoholics largely because of our concern over material 
things. A few of our younger alcoholics are simply undisciplined 
children who have devoted themselves to the pursuit of pleasure and 
escape from the responsibilities of life. But most of our older 
alcoholics are men and women who have suffered frustration and 
disappointment, who have discovered that the aims they had in youth 
never are to be realized. We have had to cut our patterns to fit our 
opportunities, to walk when we had hoped to soar aloft. Moreover, 
the depression that preceded the present war made alcoholics of many 
men who ordinarily would have escaped.

Devotion to material things made tragedy out of disappointment.

No one would suggest that we turn away from the material entirely. 
We must care for our needs and our family's needs. And in our 
present economic order, a prudent man will save something if he can.

But if we are to have health, economic pursuits must not be our 
ruling passion. Ambition and pride and covetousness, the desire for 
wealth and the demand for power must be curbed, and with them, the 
resentment and jealousy that come in the wake of frustration. We 
have to learn to be satisfied with what we can achieve, and in 
learning to be satisfied, it is well to renounce something of our 
aims. We may start by being practical. We may

go on by finding interest in higher things. The man who has given up 
greed is on the way to happiness.

 

July 1944

"Forgive Us Our Trespasses"

"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against 
us."

No one who has completed his moral inventory can pass over this 
petition lightly.

First, what are trespasses? Any act contrary to the moral law, a 
neglect of duty, an injury or wrong to another person, is a 
trespass. "Moral" is used here in its proper sense as pertaining to 
action with reference to right and wrong and obligation of duty. It 
refers not only to things we have done but also to things we have 
neglected to do.

Some of our trespasses are easy to recognize. We have no difficulty 
in seeing our guilt in them. Others may be more difficult, partly 
because we have spent so much time in justifying and excusing our 
acts or neglects that we have come to think of justification as 
answering the accusation. It is precisely at this point that our 
moral inventories must become fearless. Every excuse or 
justification must be challenged as being in itself evidence of 
guilt.

We should examine our conduct in detail and specify each trespass. 
This is important. The Lord's Prayer does not excuse us from 
responsibility for our acts. Nor is it a license for repetition of 
wrongful acts. We are bound to make reparation for harm that we have 
done, and we are bound to cease doing harm.

Our prayer is made daily. So should our inventories be made daily. 
In our prayer, we should keep in mind the things the inventories 
have revealed, so that we may make progress in correcting our faults.

"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against 
us." This petition is conditional. No one who is not willing to 
forgive can expect to be forgiven. No one who harbors hatred, malice 
and resentment in his heart can expect to find peace.

This condition is of particular concern to us, since so many of us 
suffer through resentment, self pity, jealousy, self love. It has 
been the experience of all of us who try to control resentment that 
most of the causes of our resentments are found to be either 
imaginary or petty, and that they actually have done us no real 
harm. When we can rid ourselves of these resentments, we shall make 
progress.

Honest inventory often will reveal that in those cases in which we 
have suffered in our dealings with others, some of the fault, much 
of the fault, or even most of the fault has been ours. But even in 
those few instances in which we have suffered genuine injury at the 
hands of others, we are bound to forgive. Certainly we gain nothing 
but harm to ourselves when we allow resentment to fill our minds and 
consume our energies. When we forgive, we heal our minds.

 

August 1944

"Lead Us Not Into Temptation"

These words of the last petition of the Lord's Prayer come from our 
lips with greatest fervor. We have turned to prayer in a desperate 
hour to plead for deliverance and we ask that we may be taken out of 
the path of temptation.

There is no doubt in the mind of any one who is in trouble what the 
words of this petition mean, and there is rather little doubt, at 
least at first, what we wished to be saved from.

Temptation has sly ways, however. After we have all the gaps 
plugged. Temptation begins to whisper fairy tales into our ears, 
trying to get us to open up at least one of the gaps. Temptation 
hints that the diagnosis we made when we took the first of the 
Twelve Steps was not quite right. Why not take just one now and 
then? And why not ask to be delivered from the temptation of taking 
more than one? But then, three would be better, why not never more 
than three?

Or, Temptation may make a more direct assault. We're as big as God 
is: we can step off that cliff!

Well, maybe not quite; but we are capable of handling ourselves, and 
there is no reason why we cannot go down to the water's edge and 
wade around abit! We forget that for us there is no shallow water.

Temptation stays with us, trying to build up our confidence, trying 
to make us believe that we have been cured, scoffing at the old 
troubles. Temptation slips in at the side door when we become proud 
and satisfied. It is the greatest to those who have persisted in 
remaining at the threshold of evil by always having that "Some day!" 
in the back of the mind. The most persistent temptation we have is 
the temptation to change the diagnosis. When we turn our backs 
firmly against that temptation we are likely to stay out of trouble.

Self love is a great pitfall, and the source of the great sins. Many 
of the temptations here seem rather innocent. But they lead, step by 
step to denial of the Supreme Power, to exaltation of the self.

For us, deliverance and temptation go together, and one of the most 
important evils that we seek to be freed from is temptation. Drink 
has become so much a part of our lives that we associate virtually 
every act with it. The result is that the idea of drink, the urge to 
take a drink or to go to get a drink constantly pops into the mind 
for no apparent reason. The Devil here is experience.

As our sins may be forgiven if we are truly contrite, so may we be 
delivered from the evils we have created for ourselves, by being 
sorry for our misdeeds, by undertaking to make good for any injury 
we have done to others, and by striving not to offend again. We are 
bound to take positive action for the right and the good, and we are 
bound not to allow ourselves drift with our inclinations. We place 
ourselves in the hands of the Supreme Power and follow the lead we 
receive from that power, away from temptation, away from evil.

 

September 1944

"For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory Forever."

Thus the Lord's Prayer ends, with words of surrender. The kingdom of 
God is God's kingdom. The power in the kingdom is God's power. And 
the glory for the works in the kingdom is God's glory.

The kingdom is not ours, though we are part of it. The power is not 
ours, though God gives us a little of his power for our own use. The 
glory is not ours, but God's

We should do well not to mumble these words when we say the Lord's 
Prayer, and not to hurry through them. We should do well to think as 
we say them. The kingdom and the power and the glory are God's, not 
ours.

Many of us thought the whole kingdom ours, or thought it should be. 
Many of us thought the power ours, and abused such power as we had. 
Or we thought the power should be ours, and WE kicked at everything 
when we found it was not. We finally kicked ourselves down. And many 
of us, all too may of us, thought the glory ours. Big shots. 
Important guys. Bigger than our neighbors. Bigger than God. Spoiled 
children when no one else agreed with our notions.

Now, the sin that the Bible talks about is the sin of imagining 
ourselves bigger than God. We start by imagining ourselves bigger 
than any other person. We insist on running everything our own way, 
regardless of the rules that men have found necessary throughout 
civilized life. We went from the great sin to the deadly sins and 
thence to the gutter. We fount it hard to learn, and some of us find 
it is easy to unlearn.

When the bad days are gone and good days come again, some of us 
forget the lessons of those evil days. Old yearnings stir up in us. 
Pride awakens, with perhaps an extra urge to wipe out the memory of 
the bad days and to show the world that we are great. Some want 
power in business, some in politics, some in AA, some elsewhere. 
Some of us want others to bow to us, to admit our power and our 
glory. Some of us go so far as to act on these urges. The result is 
trouble. Eventually, it is the same old trouble. We have seen it 
happen many times, sometimes with men quite old in AA.

The kingdom and the power and the glory are God's not ours. The wise 
man yields first place to God. The wise man avoids seeking advantage 
over others, or even seeking equal place with others. The wise man 
keeps himself on a leash and thus gains peace. The wise man is 
humble.

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