ola sigurdsonherself. Phenomenologically this could be described as a decentering
of the praying person(s).^14 It is not the human self or the human
community that is at the center of the act of prayer, not even, to begin
with, in the form of prayer as a petition that asks God to grant the will
of the praying person. This decentering does not exclude the activity
of the praying person, however, as if prayer was a way of coming to
terms with an unavoidable fate or a way of looking forward to God’s
will being realized at the end of time but not now. Rather, it would be
correct to understand the praying person as the active partner of God.
But the threefold prayer is at the same time not a disguised imperative;
the emphasis is on human action as a Nachfolge of divine action, as a
response to God’s primary action of creation and salvation. Our own
will as human beings is thus thematized by Our Father more explicitly
first at the end of the prayer, through the three prayers for “our daily
bread,” for forgiveness and for the deliverance from evil. God becomes
in this final part of the prayer also the source of quite mundane goods
and the prayer itself becomes an exercise of trustful expectation that
God eventually is the giver of all good gifts. But even here the activity
of human beings is emphasized in the prayer for forgiveness where it
is expected from us as praying persons that we also will “have forgiven
our debtors.”
The very order of the prayer Our Father could also be said to have
a decentering function in that it starts with the wish that God’s will
should be made manifest “on earth as it is in heaven,” goes on to ask
God for the possibility of discipleship and first after that continues
with a prayer that more directly concerns our own will as praying
persons, a prayer concerning the reception of quite ordinary things.
This implies a plan where we as human beings no longer are our own
conditions of possibility, but rather have to accept our lives as a gift
from God. Prayer does not make human action redundant — as Kant
believed — and neither is it a form of flight from action, but rather it
- See Merold Westphal, “Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self,” The
Phenomenology of Prayer, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, eds. Bruce
Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005,
13–31.