Getting on God's wave length: The Lord's Prayer in Aramaic

Program Details

Did you know that there are various versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the Christian scriptures used by different branches of Christendom? During this Day Apart, we will take a look at these versions, then examine possible translations of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke. What a difference a translation makes! Aramaic yields astonishingly fresh insights into the nature of God, creation and human’s role in it, and prayer. Hints: Father does not specify a gender, and Heaven is not a place.

Aramaic is a vibrational language so it’s important to intone it aloud. Using a recording of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the singing bowls played by Doug Koch, and a book, Prayers from the Cosmos, by Neil Douglas-Klotz, a Sufi mystic who is a native speaker of Aramaic, we will engage in some “body prayers,” which encourage us to participate in the sound and feeling of the words as well as their intellectual or metaphorical meaning.

If you want to learn about this fundamental prayer of Christian worship around the world and practice attuning to the divine vibration, becoming one with the source of all creation, come to Rolling Ridge.

About the Leaders

Jean Chandler

Jean Chandler is a retired college teacher of cognitive psychology and second language acquisition. She has long done lots of reading about theology and has had a regular meditation practice for more than a dozen years. The Old Cambridge Baptist church has encouraged lay leadership since the 1970s, and she has led many Bible studies there, some with her late husband who was an ordained minister. She has been fortunate to have been exposed to many different meditation traditions from Buddhist to Sufi to centering prayer. Because of her panentheistic theology and love of the natural world, she is active in advocacy for creation justice.

Douglas Koch

Douglas T. Koch, B.D., M.Mus., taught music performance, philosophy, religion, world musics and sound healing at Curry College in Milton, MA for 35 years. A lifelong performer/composer of liturgical jazz and Third Stream, he continues to explore the gorgeous pallets of sacred sound within world spiritualities, and particularly the sounds of Himalayan singing bowls for their potential for awakening and supporting deepened dimensions of healing, spiritual listening and transformation. Doug has incorporated the bowls into the regular liturgical prayer life of his spiritual community in Cambridge, MA.