Soul4you · Georgina Kovacs
We can recite a prayer many times while barely noticing what we are asking. We can also pause over a single sentence and feel something draw close that, until then, we had known only as words.
In this reflection, I approach the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit through the experience of finding our way back within. I am offering my own spiritual reading, not a definition of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: how do wholeness, our experience of separateness and the guidance towards recognition relate to one another?
The Father: wholeness
For me, the Father names the Source and wholeness. Not a distant place to which we may one day be admitted on merit, but the unity to which we belong through our very being.
When I speak of a fatherly quality, I mean the assurance of love and belonging. I do not reduce this to a pleasant feeling, or describe it as a measurable physical frequency.
In everyday life, we may feel very far from that assurance. In my understanding, however, experiencing separation does not mean that our underlying unity has actually ceased to exist.
The Son: the relationship we may forget
I do not understand the Son as a fragment broken off from the Father and permanently severed from him. In this inward reading, the Son expresses belonging to the Father, even when we experience ourselves as separate.
That distinction matters to me. It is not the Son who represents separation, but the mistaken image through which we fail to recognise that belonging.
Using the language of sleep and awakening, I would put it this way: we experience exile while our relationship with the Source remains unbroken. Returning is therefore not the acquisition of a new worth, but the recognition of what we have forgotten.
We do not need to turn away from the Son in order to turn towards the Father. We can release the image of separateness that we have held about ourselves.
The Holy Spirit: guidance towards recognition
Within this reading, I understand the Holy Spirit as the guide towards recognition, the Inner Teacher. This is guidance towards understanding, not merely the accumulation of new information.
I sometimes use the image of a teaching programme to describe that guidance. I do not mean a mechanical sequence of instructions, but a way of learning that turns attention towards love rather than towards interpretations rooted in fear.
I recognise this same direction of return in the teachings of Jesus. That connection does not make the Son and the Holy Spirit interchangeable; it describes the direction in which I understand their help to lead.
When I speak of Atonement in this context, I use the term in the sense found in A Course in Miracles: correcting the belief in separation, rather than undergoing punishment. (A Course in Miracles, T-6.II.10) In my daily life, this asks whether I can meet myself and another person without returning automatically to the same fear.
Prayer: connection, not performance
For me, prayer is a turning towards God that also has a relationship with meditation. In the language of my own spiritual experience, I call it a gateway: an opening towards another state of being and a more conscious relationship with God.
I also understand the opening of the heart energetically. I do not mean this merely as a figure of speech, but neither do I present it as a scientifically established bodily process.
This does not mean that every prayer must produce a particular feeling. Silence, a question or a wordless turning towards God can each have a place; sincerity does not depend on bringing about an elevated state.
For me, trust also means that I am not alone with what I carry. It does not provide a timetable from which I can predict every outward answer.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the teaching before the Lord’s Prayer cautions against relying on the multiplication of words and directs attention to the Father’s knowledge of what is needed. (Matthew 6:7–8) For me, the value of repetition therefore lies not in how much I say, but in whether I am present to what I am saying.
Thirteen: what are we calling ominous?
I read and reflect on the version of the Lord’s Prayer below in thirteen lines.1 That arrangement matters to me because it questions the fearful meaning that can be attached to the number.
If a prayer expressed in thirteen lines brings me closer, in my own faith, to God, salvation and recognition of our true nature, why should I regard that same number as inherently unlucky? In this prayer, I find the possibility of connection, not a prediction of misfortune.
I see a distortion when a fear associated with a number is passed on as though it were an unquestionable property of the number itself. I do not want to begin by treating thirteen as a warning of trouble when, in this prayer, I recognise a path towards God.
I am not replacing one compulsory interpretation of a number with another. My question is whether we have examined what we fear, or simply carried an inherited judgement forward.
The words and the way we pray matter
I do not believe that a prayer’s wording can never change. I believe that a new prayer may reach us through higher guidance.
Yet the words we use, their order and the way we speak them are not indifferent. Their meaning, sound and rhythm shape the whole prayer, whose particular resonance, in my spiritual understanding, supports connection through the heart.
The question is not whether change is always wrong. It is what we change, and how.
The Lord’s Prayer: thirteen lines, an inward journey
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory
Now and for ever
Amen.
The reflections that follow are not offered as the prayer’s only meaning. They describe the inward response its words awaken in me.
Our Father, who art in heaven
The word “our” reminds me of shared belonging. In my own reading, heaven points towards wholeness, not geographical height.
Turning towards the Father does not ask how far I can rise above someone else. It asks how fully I can recognise the Source we share.
Hallowed be thy name
I approach this request with reverence for the Source. It is not my task to make God worthy.
What I can attend to is how I use his name. Do I turn towards God, or use the idea of God to justify a fear I am unwilling to question?
Thy kingdom come
For me, this request opens towards a life ordered by love. It is not only a waiting for a distant future.
I can also ask where I might make room for that quality now. What could change in the way I listen, speak or respond?
Thy will be done
I hear here the possibility of trustful surrender. Not the abandonment of my own responsibility, and not the declaration that every harmful act is God’s will.
It is a willingness to be guided by something other than my most familiar fears. I do not have to confuse the strength of a fear with the truth of its direction.
On earth as it is in heaven
This line brings the two directions together. In my inward reading, it invites me to live the love I recognise here, in embodied life.
What I seek in prayer need not remain outside my relationships. It can have a place in an ordinary conversation or a decision that requires care.
Give us this day our daily bread
I take the request for bread seriously as a request for bodily provision, while also hearing a need for spiritual nourishment. I may ask for strength, help and teaching that I am able to receive.
The inner journey does not make our everyday needs unnecessary. Receiving practical help does not make a prayer less spiritual.
And forgive us our sins
I do not hear this as a final condemnation of who we are. I can become willing to see differently what I have done from fear or from a belief in separation.
Alongside seeking forgiveness, there is room for responsibility and repair. I can acknowledge an action without making it the whole truth of my being.
As we forgive those who sin against us
Here the two directions of forgiveness meet. For me, this is neither a compulsory emotional performance nor a command to return to a harmful relationship.
It is the possibility that an injury need not become the sole author of who I am and how I live. Forgiveness can be approached without giving up protection, discernment or a necessary boundary.
And lead us not into temptation
In this request, I hear a willingness to receive guidance. I ask for help in recognising when fear or possession offers itself as security.
Not every question or doubt leads us astray. Some allow us to see more clearly what we had previously accepted without examination.
But deliver us from evil
I also approach this request through the errors of my own perception. I do not call someone evil because they do not yet understand something.
I ask to be released from the constricted view that chooses attack and separation in place of love. That inward work does not require me to deny harmful behaviour or leave it unchallenged.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory
For me, this is a sentence of turning back. I do not want the separate self’s need for control to become my permanent point of reference.
I make room for the Source as the ground of my orientation. That does not remove my choices; it changes what I ask to guide them.
Now and for ever
I do not hear an endless assignment in these words. I hear that time does not create or sever our relationship with the Source.
Learning belongs to our human journey. It is not an indefinitely postponed condition for becoming worthy of love.
Amen
For me, the final word can become an inward yes. I am not saying that I already understand everything.
I am saying that I wish to be present to the relationship towards which I have turned. I can begin there.
Returning through the heart
The repeated practice of prayer is, for me, a way of walking this path. I do not simply recite its words; I open myself, again, to the connection they express.
That is why I do not find an ominous number in these thirteen lines. I find the possibility of returning through the heart: to God, to unity and to who we truly are.
With love,
Georgina
Soul4you
Note on the prayer text
1 This English rendering follows the version used in my Hungarian reflection and preserves its thirteen-line arrangement; it is not presented as a verbatim quotation from one named English Bible or as a line division shared by every Christian tradition. In Hungarian, the Szent István Társulat version of Matthew 6:13 ends with the request for deliverance from evil, while the Magyar Bibliatársulat’s 2014 translation also prints the closing doxology and notes its absence from some manuscripts. (SZIT, Matthew 6; RUF, Matthew 6) A closing doxology also occurs in Didache 8.2, an early Christian teaching text, so these variations cannot simply be attributed to an arbitrary modern publisher’s addition. (C. Clifton Black, “The Lord’s Prayer”, Bible Odyssey)