NOTES ON THE LORD'S PRAYER

The Lord's Prayer -- that most universal of prayers and the basis for all other Christian prayers -- is the source for this moving meditation by Raissa Maritain. Death clamed Madame Maritain before she had the opportunity to prepare the notes she had written on the Our Father for publication. Now her husband, the well-known philosopher, Jacques Maritain, edits and annotates these notes to help men and women discover greater depths of meaning in the one absolutely essential prayer which ""The Charity of Christ has provided us."" Taking each of the seven petitions contained in the Lord's Prayer, the author examines it in the light of the teachings from Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the great Catholic philosophers, often adding her own insights. She then reates these petitions to the eatitudes and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Trappst author, Thomas Mrton, claims in a foreword that Notes On the Lord's Prayer is ""another phrase in the great hymn song by the Church to the glory of the Father."" Certainly new dimensions of the Lord's Prayer are probed here in a way that cannot help but give spiritual benefit to each person who makes use of its great meditative qualities.