Maybe in the generations before rapid changes in technology, livelihoods, and outlook on life there was a closer connection of the present-day to what the ancestors lived and what could be expected for one's descendants. In such times the words of the Lord's Prayer or any personal prayer spoken or written might talk about current situations but still resonate implicitly with times long ago and times yet to come in the same breath: "nowadays" really was more or less like the old days and the future times, too.
But in 2023 and for much of the 1900s, too, one generation to the next has faced different obstacles and opportunities, imagined different future possibilities and had different relationships to the past ways of thinking and acting, too. As a result, for people alive today to recite the Lord's Prayer (lead us not into temptation, for example) the assumption is about temptation right about now and maybe the next several days, or maybe in a more abstract sense of indefinitely for all time going forward. What if the meaning applied equally to now and the past and the future: God's Time, when distinctions of past-present-future are collapsed into everything-all at once-right now?
By taking into account the way God dissolves boundaries of past-present-future, one's own personal prayers and the congregational ones spoken together from prayerbook or psalter can mean all these things at once - prayers for those in one's life who breathe now, but also equally meaningful to pray for those long departed and even those before whom you never have met personally. Equally meaningful would be the prayers we make today for those yet to be; those in the near and distant future whom we never know personally. By taking this wider point of view, the Lord's Prayer and personal ones can be "time travelers" in a way to speak far into the past and future, not just the small circle of one's own knowledge. As a result, one's own relationship changes: instead of being one generational step on the staircase of history, now we are both this moment in time AND also integrally part of the whole of time, the whole staircase - not just an isolated step. Imagined barriers between the breathing moment of today and those long gone and those far in the future fade away and the connections become alive and ever present.
Here's the concluding part of the The Lord's Prayer (an uncommon translation to defamiliarize the usually taken-for-granted lines)
- Hawai'ian Pidgin English for Matthew 6:9-13
No let us get chance fo do bad kine stuff,
But take us outa dea, so da Bad Guy no can hurt us.
[Cuz you our King,
You get da real power,
An you stay awesome foeva.
Dass it!]'By habit we see the petition "lead us not into temptation... forever and ever, Amen" talking about nowadays personally, and also a kind of generalization for all time (not just for ourselves personally, but for all people everywhere). But by seeing The Lord's Prayer and any other prayer as applying to past AND present AND future, then the words ripple across the sky and across all centuries in a much bigger and deeper meaning. We speak on behalf of ancestors and descendants; also, for strangers and for friends/family.
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