Abba

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Evelyn Underhill. Abba

Treasures from the Spiritual Classics

PREFACE

HOW TO PRAY

CHILDREN OF THE FATHER

THE HOLY NAME

THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM

THY WILL BE DONE

DAILY BREAD

OUR TRESPASSES

DELIVERANCE FROM EVIL

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

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ABBA by EVELYN UNDERHILL

Compiled by Roger L. Roberts

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This is a sovereign instance of that spiritual stupidity with which we treat the ‘awful and mysterious truths’ religion reveals to us; truths of which Coleridge has rightly said, that they are commonly ‘considered so true as to lose all the powers of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul.’1 But when we ‘centre down,’ as Quakers say, from the surface of human life to its deeps, and rouse those sleeping truths and take them with us, and ask what they look like there—in the secret place where the soul is alone with God and knows its need of God—then, all looks different. These great declarations disclose their intensity of life, their absolute quality; as a work of art which has hung respected and unloved in a public gallery glows with new meaning when we bring it into the home or the sanctuary for which it was really made. Seen thus, the Paternoster reminds us how rich and various, how deeply rooted in the Supernatural, the Christian life is or should be, moving from awestruck worship to homely confidence, and yet one: how utterly it depends on God, yet how searching is the demand it makes on man. ‘Every just man,’ says Osuna, ‘needs the seven things for which this prayer—or this scheme of prayer—asks.’2 Taken together they cover all the realities of our situation, at once beset by nature and cherished by grace: establishing Christian prayer as a relation between wholes, between man in his completeness and God who is all.

And we note their order and proportion. First, four clauses entirely concerned with our relation to God; then three concerned with our human situation and needs. Four hinge on the First Commandment, three hinge on the Second. Man’s twisted, thwarted and embittered nature, his state of sin, his sufferings, helplessness, and need, do not stand in the foreground; but the splendour and beauty of God, demanding a self-oblivion so complete that it transforms suffering, and blots out even the memory of sin. We begin with a sublime yet intimate invocation of Reality, which plunges us at once into the very ground of the Universe and claims kinship with the enfolding mystery. Abba, Father. The Infinite God is the Father of my soul. We end by the abject confession of our dependence and need of guidance: of a rescue and support coming to our help right down in the jungle of life. Following the path of the Word Incarnate, this prayer begins on the summits of spiritual experience and comes steadily down from the Infinite to the finite, from the Spaceless to the little space on which we stand. Here we find all the strange mixed experience of man, over-ruled by the unchanging glory and charity of God.

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