Abba – (English Version)

In the Aramaic language he spoke, Jesus passed on the prayer we have been hearing since childhood.

This may sound as groundbreaking news for some of us, but he never said ‘Our Father’…
Jesus starts his prayer with ‘abba’, meaning ‘dad’.

The sheer simplicity, perfect non-attachment Jesus showed calling the Spirit ‘abba’ is a path for all of us.

Here, the self collapses, like the man falling down on his knees to lay down his burden of weariness.

The self appears as the difference between the adult trapped in his unsteady mental scaffolding and the child, calling his father in an unequaled surge of confidence.

The child is what is left, when the props, pillars and rigidities have vanished.

‘Abba’ is the path to bareness, a way to poverty.
‘Abba’ is literally disarming by its simplicity of perception, its immediacy.

For the child there is no possible way to doubt the continuity between the father and his son. And a father-daughter relationship is just as unquestionable from the parent’s point of view

Abba expresses the common nature of the root and the leaf.
The ‘abba’ Jesus pronounces does not take a capital letter.
Not because there is no respect to be paid, but rather because, in the heart of Jesus, there is simply no seed left for a thought of possible lack of respect.

abba, the sound of wonderful evidence, a eureka of tenderness.
‘Our Father’…why not…? But this is not abba.

It is not a matter of a difference in nature between abba and Our Father, but this latter carries the weight of centuries of noise and overacted pompous sermons or frightening omens. Therefore, it might reflect or water the germs of distance and artificial attitude.

Theses two features (a distant god, an artificial behavior), are both politically useful and spiritually damaging.