“How do you begin to pray?” It is a natural question to ask someone who already takes the spiritual life seriously and who is seeking further guidance. When I raised this question once the person replied: “I say the Our Father.” Then after a slight pause he added: “It usually takes me about 20 minutes.” He wasn’t boasting. He was just giving me information.

It may at first seem extraordinary that that prayer, even though it is the prayer the Lord taught his disciples, should absorb someone for so long every day. It has become so familiar. And yet the words invite us to return again and again, not for precise analysis, but to ponder. Each one will find something different.

For me the hub of the prayer, its central petition, is “Thy kingdom come”. That is the request and indeed the desire that drives the prayer as a whole. And whose kingdom is it? It is the Father’s kingdom. Which Father? The one who is in Heaven and who is defined by holiness: “Hallowed be thy name”. This name is not an arbitrary word; it identifies who the Father is. It does so by calling Him holy. Holiness is not a property, something the Father has; it is rather code for the very depths of the divine being.

Then we cast our central petition in fresh terms. The kingdom we pray for is that condition where this holy Father’s will is realised perfectly. And so we pray that the kingdom may come among us through His will being fulfilled perfectly not only in Heaven, but here on Earth as well: “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

But these aspirations may seem all too vague. What can it mean in practice to fulfil God’s will among us, in our world, our society and culture? Instead of an answer, we seem to change tack. For next we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” But the shift is more apparent than real. The bread we seek is not a daily square meal, vital as that may be. Beyond ordinary food we are asking for something more profound: to be sustained in our service of the kingdom. We are praying: “Give us what we need this day and every day to make the kingdom come, to be its true servants.” Some of us, of course, would see that sustenance realised in a particular way in the Eucharist. That is the daily food that sustains many of us for service. But not everyone.

All the same, the question returns. What does it mean, in fact, to make the kingdom come among us, to fulfil the divine will day by day? At the very core of gospel service is forgiveness. Refreshed by daily bread, whatever that may be for each of us, we ask for our sins to be forgiven: “Forgive us our trespasses.” We want to be reconciled to the Father. And we want to extend that reconciliation to others. Linked to our plea for forgiveness is the pledge to forgive others who may have injured us. Although we may have been victims, we too forgive “those who trespass against us”.

And we end with two further petitions: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” They are connected. First, in our service of the kingdom, we ask not to be assailed from within, not to be put under pressure by our own restless, still imperfect hearts, which may so easily give way and sin again, damaging the reconciliation we have received. When we pray not to be led into temptation we are not imagining that God is testing us perversely. We are asking to be protected from our own perversity. Then, besides the temptation that may strike from within, we ask also to be protected from the evil that attacks us from outside, the evil external to us; we beg to be delivered from that, too.

The Lord’s Prayer asks the Father to heal us within so that we may bring healing to others. The divine kingdom we desire to make real among us is not esoteric. It encourages us to forgive and work for reconciliation internationally and nationally, in our homes and in our hearts. The challenge is plain.

Monsignor Roderick Strange is the Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome