Amen!
By: Andrea Lingle
Amen is only an ending the way December is. A soft punctuation leading to the next utterance or season. When Jesus taught us how to pray, he punctuated it with a word of accord: a sign of alignment with what had been said and an implied commitment to live in the spirit of the prayer.
Said after the line, “for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” Amen becomes a commitment to a posture of embracing openness. The kingdom is something to participate in not to be owned. God’s community precedes and proceeds us—to be a person of the Lord’s Prayer is to acknowledge that Amen is a statement of participation in the work of the beingness of love. To add an Amen to the Lord’s Prayer is to affirm the ongoing work of Spirit in our world. It is to recognize how humans are enmeshed in a holy creation.
Amen is choosing to quiet the roiling agenda of the soul and live from a stance of attentive openness. In the words of Simone Weil,
Attention consists in suspending one’s thought, in leaving it available, empty and penetrable to the object, in holding within oneself, in proximity to thought, but at a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse acquired knowledge that one is forced to employ. Thought should be, to all particular and already-formed thoughts, like a man on a mountain who, looking ahead, simultaneously discerns below him, though without looking at them, many forests and plains. And above all thought should be empty, waiting, seeking nothing, yet being ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. (Weil, Reflections on the good use of school studies with a view to the love of God)
To live into the Amen of the Lord’s Prayer is to take up the way of living a corporate, gentle, trusting, open-handed life. It is to refuse the grasp of the kingdom of force, and insist on living into the deeply Eucharistic life modeled in the life of Jesus.
