Our Father

“When we call God ‘Father’, we are called to step out, as apprentice children, into a world of pain and darkness. We will find that darkness all around us; it will terrify us; precisely because it will remind us of the darkness inside our own selves. The temptation then is to switch off the news, to shut out the pain of the world, to create a painless world for ourselves. A good deal of our contemporary culture is designed to do exactly that. No wonder people find it hard to pray. But if, as the people of the living creator God, we respond to the call to be his sons and daughters; if we take the risk of calling him Father; then we are called to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in the healing light of the love of God.”

– N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer