Aan archetypal contemplation on "The Lord's Prayer"

Flemming Oppenhagen Behrend is a graduate from The Assisi International school of Archetypal Pattern Analysis and has since 2016 published articles in archetypal studies in the Assisi Journal. He practice as an archetypal pattern analyst and dream pattern analyst in Olympia WA. www.olympialifepatternanalysis.com & https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/olympia-life-pattern-analysis-llc-olympia-wa/267712

Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to explore the archetypal dimensions of the Lord’s Prayer and to establish a deeper understanding of the questions raised for contemporary readers. My writing is inspired by the Jungian understanding of archetypal content and archetypal pattern analysis, the discipline developed by Dr. Michael Conforti. The article explores what happen when the words of a prayer are no longer vibrant or when there is a loss of meaning. The prayer is explicated from the view of historical tradition, mythology and the form of fairy tales. The effect of the gendered language of the prayer points to the inequality between the masculine and the feminine. 

An archetypal look at the Lord’s prayer 

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 trespasses, 

as we forgive those 

Who trespass against us. 

And lead us not into temptation, 

But deliver us from evil. 

For Thine is the kingdom, 

and the power, and the glory, 

For ever and ever. Amen. 

(KJV) 

The last five years of study under the guidance of Dr. Michael Conforti at the Assisi International Institute for Archetypal Analysis has been a great inspiration and my incentive to write this article. Learning to look at life through a Jungian lens has expanded my understanding of so many aspects of life. I have been pushed to take a new look at my own spirituality and its patterns. This article is one of many reflections I have made on religious practices in general and my own in particular. It is not an attempt to dishonor the Lord’s prayer, but a meditation and an analysis of what is being said and how we can or cannot relate to those words today. Working as an archetypal pattern analyst, I have learned to look at patterns in our lives. I ask the questions about how we function within certain fields of behavior, what comes up and what is repeated, what is generative and what is holding us back from reaching our goals. The areas in our life where life patterns seem to be so obvious are in the fields of religious practice. It is exactly the repetition of sacred rites which makes people feel grounded and safe. 

Thus we look at the celebration of mass, styles and manner of worship, the observation of religious holidays, fasting , etc., to find the meaning of the experiences. C.G. Jung writes on religious rites and why we seek comfort in them and how they can protect us from losing our minds: 

Religious rituals can offer a measure of safety for the psyche in turmoil, as a
direct experience of the unconscious, or of God, can be destructive. When
people have an immediate experience of the numinous and not subject
themselves to the authority of the dogma, they go through periods of
passionate conflicts, panics of madness, desperate confusions and depressions
which were grotesque and terrible at the same time. So I am aware of the extraordinary importance of dogma and ritual, at least as methods of mental
hygiene. Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. London: Yale University Press.1 

I would argue that the religious rites at the same time hinders our growth of consciousness, especially when the rites are stuck in time and the Gods seem to be long gone. In this paper, I am talking about the specific prayer that we, in the Christian church, have repeated for more than two thousand years without much or any change. The Lord’s Prayer, similar to the American constitution or any other collective codex, presents itself as a foundation for a system of thoughts, an “I believe” statement. I am looking at this prayer, which when analyzed, 

raises many questions and inspires me to go deeper and try to understand its significance today. The Lord’s prayer is found in Matthew 6:9-13 - Where Jesus tells his disciples: “This, then, is how you should pray:”
Our Father who art in heaven. 

The famous prayer of Jesus starts with the father image. The creation story of the Hebrew scriptures, however starts interestingly enough with a reference to a plural God image. In Genesis 1:26 according to the Schocken Bible (The five books of Moses) we read: God said “Let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness.” Clearly this is a reference to plural beings. Since it is widely accepted in Judaism and Christianity that God is a ‘He’, the scriptures are ambiguous about the number of gods. To add to the confusion the verse in the first chapter continues, “God created humankind in His image, in the image of God did He create it.” (Genesis 1:27.) In the notes to this verse in the Schocken Bible it reads, “In our image” is an old problem”. Indeed! It creates a problem which Jesus does not at any time address. Nowhere in the gospels is he quoted to talk about a heavenly mother or multiple deities. If we put a gender on God it is only reasonable to think that there must be a feminine as well as a masculine power which together sets the act of creation into motion. This is expressed in the collective unconscious through many cultures for example in an Inuit creation tale where it is said that: The world before this one was resting on two pillars which collapsed and disappeared into emptiness. Then there grew up out of the earth two men; they were born and were grown up all at once, and they wished to beget children. By means of a magic song, one of them was changed into a woman, and they had children. (The  intellectual culture of the iglulik. P.37. Knud Rasmussen. Gyldendahl nordisk forlag 1929). In other words, even what we in the past have called primitive cultures, they inherit a collective understanding that it takes two opposites to make a whole.  The word “Father” directs our attention to the archetype of fatherhood, the masculine, the warrior and protector. The father is the one who teaches us how to navigate the vicissitudes of life. Without the teachings of the generative grandfather and the fathers we are a bit lost in the world. This is also known to the Native American people who go into the sweat lodge to call upon their ancestors. The heated ‘grandfather rock’ is brought into the center and prayers are performed. Erich Neumann writes in The Origin and History of Consciousness about the Heavenly father: The fact that the hero has two fathers or two mothers is a central feature in the canon of the hero myth. Besides his personal father there is a “Higher’ that is to say an archetypal father figure and similarly and archetypal mother figure . (Neumann, year, p.132) 

Jesus recognized the spiritual “Higher” father figure but he did not articulate the necessity of the balancing other force i.e. the “Higher” mother Goddess. 

One has to ask, where is mother God? Two thousand years of Christianity has not answered this question but the Catholic church understood this problem. They put the Virgin Mary as a substitute for God’s wife although she was, of course, traditionally the mother of Jesus who was not yet raised to god-hood. The Vatican in the sixties sought to correct this by giving Mary divine status and a place in the Christian pantheon. Why did Jesus not address the absent mother of the numinous? Obviously, he could not because he was just a human being and a product  of his time. For Jesus, there was no living ‘God Mother’ to be found in the Jewish tradition. They only knew of a male god before whom one should tremble and who one should fear because, as this God himself is quoted to have told Moses, “I am a jealous god”. Jesus understood his God to be a loving father but did not give us the nurture or wisdom of the Sophia, the divine feminine. The beginning of the Lord’s prayer thus puts us all into separation from the nurturing female Goddess. Late in the gospel of John 14:15-31, Jesus speaks about the spirit (the holy spirit) that God is going to send to his disciples. It is, as in all places in the Christian Bible, always male gendered although in the Hebrew language Ruach haChodesh (God’s divine spirit) is definitely feminine. Jesus understood the Ruach as something to come although it already existed in the Jewish religion. What was new, was that Jesus re-activated the Ruach by preaching that it was something “To come”. "When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me.” (John 15:26) Note that here it is again translated in male gender although the traditional understanding of the Ruach in the Hebrew scriptures was that of a feminine, a Sofia power. 

Who are in heaven 

In the prayer, God is in ‘Heaven’. Jesus clearly places his God in that other realm outside of our understanding, beyond our consciousness. That is with one exception. In the gospel of
Mark 1:14-15 where Jesus is supposed to have said that “The kingdom of God is within you.” This problem or paradox, that Heaven is outside but now suddenly inside, could have happened because Jesus’ followers wrote 15 different gospels out of which only 4 were canonized. What did the people of that time really mean when they talked about heaven? What did the Jewish Jesus think of when he uttered these words? To understand that, it is interesting to read what rabbi Or. N. Rose who is the associate dean of the rabbinical school at the Hebrew college in Newton MA. says about the Hebrew heaven:

Rabbi Ya’akov taught: This world is compared to an ante-chamber that leads to Olam Ha–Ba, (the World-to-Come)” (Pirkei Avot 4:21). That is, while a righteous person might suffer in this lifetime, he or she will certainly be rewarded in the next world, and that reward will be much greater.

In fact, in some cases, the rabbis claim that the righteous are made to suffer in this world so that their reward will be that much greater in the next

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/heaven-and-hell-in-jewish-tradition/ 

In the same blog, Rabbi Or. N. Rose also writes that the concept of heaven was more important after the destruction of the temple, i.e., after the life of Jesus, when the Jews needed a new vision and hope. At the time of Jesus, however, the Jewish people most likely referred to heaven as some otherworldly place, a paradise not of this world. C. G. Jung writes about the archetype of heaven: “The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologies, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands”. Carl Jung, CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Page 195, Para 392. 

Jesus most likely must have heard the Rabbis of his time talk about heaven in these terms and then related it to his followers. An undefined heaven remains a total abstract which unfortunately is stuck in the projection of something outside of ourselves, beyond our human understanding. According to a 2002 Newsweek poll, 76 percent of Americans believe that heaven exists and, of those, 71 percent think it is an actual place, 13 percent think it is like a garden, 13 percent says it looks like a city, only17 percent admit that they don't know. The rabbis use the term Olam Ha-Ba to refer to a heaven-like afterlife as well as to the messianic era or the age of resurrection, and it is often difficult to know which one is being referred to. When the Talmud does speak of Olam Ha-Ba in connection to the afterlife, it often uses it interchangeably with the term Gan Eden (“the Garden of Eden”), referring to a heavenly realm where souls reside after physical death. Clearly, most Americans believe Heaven is a place, but there is no clearly no consensus as to what that heaven looks like or where it is. The closest explanation I find acceptable is in the explanation of parallel universes. Erin Macdonald, astrophysicist, engineer and self-proclaimed "massive sci-fi nerd," explained during a panel on Saturday (June 17.2017) at Future Con, a festival that highlighted the intersection between science, technology and science fiction in Washington, D.C. [Top 5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse] 

Our universe exists within the fabric of space-time — 3D space combined with time, to create a 4D continuum, explained Macdonald. But scientists can't say for sure what space-time looks like, which means it might hold countless universes that are invisible to us, she said. This could be a “New science” way of explaining our limited understanding of Heaven as a place. A place parallel to but beyond our current understanding of time and space. 

Hallowed be thy name. 

The name of God in Judaism is traditionally so holy that it cannot even be verbalized. Rabbinical Judaism teaches that the name is forbidden to all except the High Priest, who should only speak it in the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. In other words, the priesthood took on the power of saying the name of God. It was taken away from common people and further distanced the godhead from the worshipers in the Jewish tradition. That is most likely why Jesus said “Our father” instead of uttering God’s name directly. Saying God’s name Jahwe would have been blasphemy and Jesus, despite being a rebbe was aware of what was tolerated in his time when it came to addressing God. Jesus did however provoke the priesthood by transforming the unspoken and unreachable into a more direct relationship with a loving father figure. One does have to repeat the question, if he was the son of this father god of Israel, why did he not have any knowledge of a Mother God?
The text in the prayer is still only directed towards the male, the masculine god and that’s a weakness since the ultimate mystery cannot really in our present time be understood as singular gendered. If it is gendered then we would be in the pagan realm of multiple gods. That is not acceptable in the Christian tradition except of course for the notion of the trinity. Here God is taught to be “One” despite being three which is hard to grasp. In Greek antiquity Gods often had dual gender as for example Cybele Agdistis and Tiresias to name a few. In the pagan Norse, the God Odin would appear as a woman when needed. People clearly understood the importance of their gods being both male or female and sometimes both. 

Your kingdom come.

The kingdom is mentioned in the beginning and in the end of the prayer. It is a doubling of a theme. It is a way of saying: This starts and ends with the King. The three words put us in the mood of a fairy tale. The good king who rules with justice and wisdom and as a result all the people of the kingdom live in happiness and safety forever after. Unfortunately, we still miss the notion of a queen who would be the force of nurture and wisdom, the Sofia in the constellation. In the Hebrew Scriptures (the proverbs) there is however a clear reference to the feminine wisdom which was not mentioned by Jesus. Wisdom (Sofia) addressed human beings: 

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, Before His works of old.I have been established from everlasting, From the beginning, before there was ever an earth.  When there were no depths I was brought forth, When there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills, I was brought forth;  While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields, Or the primal dust of the world.  When He prepared the heavens, I was there,When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,  When He established the clouds above,When He strengthened the fountains of the deep, When He assigned to the sea its limit, So that the waters would not transgress His command, When He marked out the foundations of the earth, Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman; And I was daily His delight, Rejoicing always before Him, (The new King James version Prov. 8:2-30)  

The embrace of the feminine wisdom was to be hidden for generations of women to come. This king that Jesus believed in, as in the fairy tale, gives him half of the kingdom (after he is first sacrificed to save the human race). Now this naturally must raise a new question. What kind of father would really put his son up to die on a cross? Is it a sacrifice of this God or is it plain murder of the son. Sacrifice is normally understood as someone giving something up for and by themselves. Is the archetypal king threatened by the son? The son does not dethrone the father but gives himself up to the hands of the prosecutors as an example of good behavior, of being the good son. We are left with Jesus saying (King James Bible) , “From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.” (Matthew 20:17)

In the story of Abraham and Isaac, an angel intercedes in the brutal murder and offering of Abraham’s son, Isaac. Abraham so wanted to be a ‘good man’ in the eyes of God and was willing to kill his own son. Today we would doubt the sanity of a person who was willing to kill of their own child because they thought God asked them to do so. I recall a brilliant lecture on this story by Rise Kaufmann, PhD at the Assisi Institute in 2015 where she argued that there are times when you need to say NO to God and that the moral right thing for Abraham would have been to say no to killing his own son, despite the consequences. I also remember that some people in the audience became very upset by this statement. In the story of Jesus, no angels come to the rescue. Abraham ended up not killing his own son but the heavenly father in the story of Jesus does not intercept or send any angels. Why? Who would not reject such a father? It does not make any sense since clearly, because humanity despite the sacrifice of Jesus struggled on for another 2000 years killing each other in more and more sophisticated ways, contrary to the message of love brought to us by the heavenly son. The religious arguments raised for and against Christian dogmas related to the story of Jesus resulted in the 30 year wars. It was a war fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. One of the longest and most destructive conflicts in human history, as well as the deadliest European religious war in history. It resulted in eight million fatalities. It is hard to relate to this story about the 30 year war 

other than in a fairytale kind of way especially if one compares it with many other cultures on this planet which also developed mythologies around a pantheon of gods and were willing to go to war for it. 

This also makes the story archetypal. The universal need for humanity to project onto a God and make it theirs. It is, as Marie Louise Von Franz writes about in The Grail Legend: On a higher level than the mythological or the childish, the same idea is expressed when the unknown father is considered as being a spiritual divine being or principle. This idea is particularly expressed in Christ the son of God and man. It is evident that this concept means a great deal more than just a support in life or an infantile fantasy. It expresses in itself the fundamental and ineradicable feeling that something dwells in man which is more than purely human or animal, namely an immortal soul or a divine spark. (P.48): The story of this “Spark” or archetypal kingdom seems at least controversial and it raise a lot of questions about this divine king.
Thy will be done on earth,
As it is in heaven. 

How do we use this statement? If we look at it collectively it becomes dangerous. What happens when a religion tells its followers that God has a specific plan with them? We saw that in the story of Jonestown on November 18, 1978, when 909 members of a sect drank cyanide. The Mormons went into great suffering in the wilderness before building Salt Lake City because, according to Joseph Smith, it was a part of God’s plan. Whenever we project our own ideas unto God in a collective way, we are in trouble. There are, however, other ways to communicate with the holy according to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. In accessing the unconscious in our own being by listening to our dreams we have an inner connection to the numinous. We know this phenomenon whenever we are in doubt about something and we start listening to what our psyche is trying to tell us. We seek the inner balance of the pros and cons of a problem as we listen to our inner voice of reason. Humans are archetypically spiritual beings and we search for meaning and guidance in our lives. We don’t know how God’s will is being executed in Heaven and we will probably never know, but we can individually search for the inspiration from what we call holy in our own self. This shift from the collective ‘knowing” to the personal makes it a safe exploration because we have to be accountable for our own visions and beliefs. This is, yes, an act of faith or spirituality which is difficult to explain other than with psychological lenses or through an archetypal understanding of the human soul’s search for truth and meaning. 

Give us today our daily bread. 

I see people lying on the streets in my small town and it breaks my heart. They don’t know who to turn to and they succumb to all kind of illnesses because of their life on the cold streets. The government has abandoned them and it seems, so has their God. They sleep in doorways on the ice- cold concrete. For them, that is their everyday reality. They sit in the pouring rain with small signs asking for handouts and they have clearly given up on receiving anything from above. Yet, asking the holy for a helping hand is archetypal. The Inuit hunter asks the spirits of the seal for help when they go hunting and the fishermen in Italy have their Saint Andrew. We stretch out our arms and hope for the best. That is as old as the history of humankind. I find this sentence the most forgiving in the Lord’s Prayer. Social injustices is something we, or I myself am responsible for. It is up to us to change the plight of the downtrodden. 

However, it is archetypically correct and understandable to kneel down for that which is bigger than we are and ask for some wind in our sails or for some goodness to come our way. Whatever the holy is, I have heard it expressed like this “The holy is that which brings us to our knees.” 

Forgive us our trespasses

 as we forgive those who trespass against us. 

I am a firm believer that if I have caused someone harm it is up to me to ask them to forgive me and not project the forgiveness onto some Godhead. Remember the opening sentence: Our father who art in heaven. If I have caused harm I need to humble myself not to a God in heaven, but to the person I have harmed. I can hope for redemption but it is not a given. It is not a given because it is grace.  I can pray for this grace but it will not be mine to bestow. To let God forgive us instead of those we hurt, we are navigating around the problem of what we have inflicted. The idea in the prayer is that if I forgive then I will be forgiven. In real life, however, it does not always work like that. One can read the Bible and find arguments for both being forgiving as well as slaying your enemies. In Leviticus 26.7: “You shall chase your enemies and they shall fall before you by the sword.” Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is encouraging the peaceful solutions: “Happy are the peacemakers, because they shall be called Sons of God. (Mathew 5:3-12) It is really up to each individual being to decide what to do from a collective moral aspect when being wronged. Besides, there are trespasses which should not be forgiven, such as: sexual abuse of children, spousal abuse, or killing somebody or some thousand somebodies. Or how about 5 million Jews? Or any other ethnic cleansing atrocity. If my family got gassed in the Nazi concentration camps should I forgive the perpetrator? I don’t think so! This is the problem of believing that a God sent his only son to die for the sins of the world. Two thousand years of military conflict and continuously human suffering does not show the success of that idea. As humans we have collectively failed to walk the path of peace, and no sacrifice from any gods in the pantheon of the Pagan or the Christian world has changed that, unfortunately. Having said that, of course it is a noble thing to forgive, but as in grace, it is not a given.

Lead us not into temptation 

I have to ask why any god or goddess would occupy themselves with 4 billion people’s daily lives playing the trickster. Why would the gods want to lure us into sinful acts? Isn’t the holy there to call us into glory, inspiring us to do good and just acts, to be courageous and stand up for the weak? Is any God really there to put something irresistible in front of us just to see if we pass or fail? Is God out to incriminate us? Is entrapment one of God’s ideas? It does not seem to be believable. Since we have developed a thinking function, it is probably up to our sound judgement to figure out what is appropriate and helpful in any situation and to judge what is right or wrong to do. Sound old psychology states that we get further with sugar than with vinegar. You are more happy when you love than when you hate. It’s healthier to smile than to frown. That is not reserved for people of the Christian faith. We seem to project the core act of temptation to a snake who lured the first woman to eat a forbidden apple. Since then, women in the Christian tradition have been looked upon as unreliable. After all, it was a woman who handed the apple from the tree of wisdom to a man right! That she gives wisdom (The gift of knowledge) to the man seems right but that she should be punished for it, not so right. Women are leading the men into temptation and men project the core reason for getting into trouble onto the female. The story of how God actually tempted his own children using a snake and a woman is an example of how ancient stories can be anything but generative. 

Carl Jung writes about our projection of evil unto the feminine: 

Since [in the Middle Ages] the psychic relation to woman was expressed in the 

collective worship of Mary, the image of woman lost a value to which human beings had a natural right. This value could find its natural expression only through individual choice, and it sank into the unconscious when the individual form of expression was replaced by a collective one. In the unconscious the image of woman received an energy charge that activated the archaic and infantile dominants. And since all unconscious contents, when activated by dissociated libido, are projected upon the external object, the devaluation of the real woman was compensated by daemonic features. She no longer appeared as an object of love, but as a persecutor or witch. The consequence of increasing Mariolatry was the witch hunt, that indelible blot on the later Middle Ages. (• Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1969)

The female temptress is a Hebrew/Christian archetypal invention which is still with us today and which is used by men as an excuse to assert their power over the feminine. Although archetypes cannot be invented if they are not existent it is fair to say that a repeated projection originating in a religious practice makes it seem invented.  In the islamic world the men have put a veil over the female in order that their beauty should not lead the men into temptation as in sinful thoughts or acts. Interesting enough, there is no place in the Koran where it is written if or how a woman should cover herself. This is an outrageous objectifying and brutalization of the feminine which is caused by cultural collective medieval religious practice. 

Page 14 

Deliver (save) us from evil. 

That is a beautiful thought. I would personally be very happy if the powerful politicians who are in the hands of big money took all their nuclear arms and pledged that they would never make another bomb and destroy those they already have. I would like to be saved from losing my wife, being fired from my job, be homeless or see anyone I love be in pain. Please save me from getting old and die in misery or from seeing my relatives become victims of random violence. That is the one part of the Lord’s prayer that I can wholeheartedly understand and subscribe to even if it is the case that bad things happens after all. The fact is that evil exists in this world and we are so lucky if we are spared the horror of evil. So we hope and pray that we will not encounter evil. This part of the prayer to me, makes up for all the other lines which to me seem so difficult to accept. 

For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
We are back in fairytale kingdom with the lonesome king siting on the throne holding the orb and the sceptre as seen painted unto the walls of old churches. This image of the sceptre goes back to the Egyptian rulers . One of the earliest royal sceptres was discovered in the 2nd Dynasty tomb of Khasekhemwy in Abydos.
In the  Hebrew scriptures in the book of Esther, there is a description of the sceptre of the King of Persia. "When the king saw Esther the queen standing in the court, she obtained favor in his sight; and the king held out to Esther the golden sceptre that was in his hand. So Esther came near, and touched the top of the scepter.” (Esther 5:2)
Moses also used the symbolic sceptre or staff when he hit the rock to provide water for his people and he is mostly shown holding a staff as the symbol of power. Napoleon used it at his crowning to become emperor of France. The king holds the world symbolized by the orb in his hands, and uses the magic sceptre to command his people. That is the vision of a God king who rules with unrestricted power. “As above so below” is the image we humans project unto the God figures. In order to christen the ‘heathen’ Scandinavians, the Christian missionaries changed the image of the suffering Jesus on the cross to a king figure standing, not helplessly hanging, victoriously on the cross. Only by bringing a king image to the Vikings could they be persuaded to take on the new religion of Christianity. It was a very smart political move and it worked. 

The Christians submit themselves to this king, his kingdom and to the power they project unto him. This power is supposed to go on forever or at least until the end of the world where light and shadow is separated and the son is supposed to come back, no longer sacrificed but glorified. Beyond that, there are no further plans for the planet and the prayer ends with the word : Amen which is from Hebrew ' āmēn ‘truth, or certainty,’ The word may have its origins in the Egyptian god Amun, which is also sometimes spelled: Amen. Today, the word it is mostly meant as “so be it.” The end of the fairytale is the final word, just as it is in the Norse Mythology where the world ends with the battle of the gods at Ragnarok and everything comes to a crashing apocalyptic finale. Any good story, any fairy tale has an intriguing beginning and a captivating end. That is also true for The Lord’s Prayer when analyzed as an archetypal tale. 

The Lord’s prayer thus can be looked upon with the eyes of Marie Louise Von Franz, as a fairy tale. At least it has a somewhat both dramatic as well as a happy ending for the believers. However, the projections unto a remote male deity are just that, projections from our own psyches that may have no real hook. There is the just the king and his son who first has to go through so many bad things and even being sacrificed (killed off) by the father. Luckily, everything turns out well for Jesus in the end. He is at home with the heavenly family in the ever lasting kingdom which the good king then shares with his son. The problem is that there is too much masculine and no feminine to be found anywhere. Three men and no women! There is an imbalance, and because the feminine is lacking, it results in a catastrophic outcome for past and future generations of female believers in the Christian faith. It is tempting to ask if words cannot be changed, if the feminine could not be incorporated into such a central prayer in the Christian tradition? When religious rites are locked or stagnated, it leaves the chance for the gods to leave. When the words no longer relates to the worshippers needs, the words become meaningless. It is like walking into an old stone church and looking at the dusty sarcophagus with long gone noblemen and women or pictures of forgotten saints who are no longer relevant to us. If God or the Numinous is what Jung understood as the source of energy within the psyche then the believer has to be able to analyze the content of the Lords prayer and go beyond and even change it. I would suggest, to also incorporate the feminine aspect of our deep psyche into the prayer. I would even suggest that this prayer should no longer be recited, or at least modified, as it’s vocabulary is no longer useful for a contemporary congregation. 

Reference 

Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. London: Yale University Press.1 

Carl Jung, CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Page 195, Para 392

(• Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1969) Page 22

Genesis 1/26 according to the Schocken bible (The five books of Moses)
Erich Neumann writes in The Origin and History of Consciousness P.132
Rabi Or.N. Rose https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/heaven-and-hell-in-jewish-tradition/ 

(The  intellectual culture of the iglulik. P.37. Knud Rasmussen. Gyldendahl nordisk forlag 1929)

Emma Jung/Marie Louise Von Franz. The Grail Legend. Princeton University Press 1998 (P.48)