THE GODDESSNESS PRAYER by Annie Finch

A SACRED FEMININE VERSION OF THE LORD’S PRAYER BASED ON A TRANSLATION FROM THE ORIGINAL ARAMAIC

Genevieve Vaughan recently posted, on a Maternal Gift Economy group, a link to a new translation of the Lord’s Prayer directly from the original Aramaic. The translation is by Nabu who describes himself by saying he “decodes the hidden knowledge they buried inside religion, history and science.” Nabu recognizes Neil Douglas-Klotz as the foundational scholar of his own translations as well as adding his own notes. Click here for the link to Nabu’s site.  I was excited to find the Divine Feminine playing such an important role in this translation.

When I assembled the restored versions of each line together, the resulting poem was not very well-written or easy to say, let alone to memorize. So I translated the translation into a more succinct and concrete version.  I hope it will be useful.

Here is the compilation and my own version below, followed by a few notes on reasons for my translation choices.

Nabu’s Translation from Aramaic

O breathing life of all existence, you who dwell in the dimension of light and vibration from which all things emerge.

May the sacred vibration through which you organize reality be recognized and honored in everything we do.

May the sacred queendom — the divine feminine creative principle — fully express itself in earthly reality as it does in the dimension of light.

May your loving desire for the full expression of divine consciousness be realized in earthly reality as fully as it is in the dimension of light.

Provide us today with the nourishment — physical, emotional, and spiritual — that we genuinely need for our full flourishing.

Release us from the energetic knots we have accumulated as we release others from the grip of our resentment toward them.

Do not let us become lost in the illusion of separation from you, but free us from the immature consciousness that arises from that forgetting.

For the divine feminine creative principle, the power of life, and the radiance of all existence belong to you through all cycles of time. So be it — grounded in me, expressed through me, made real in the world through my conscious participation.

The Goddessness Prayer

(Poem by Annie Finch, based on Nabu’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer from Aramaic).

O breath of dancing being, you in whom dark and light emerge,
Vibrate in us and all our deeds with your own loving truth.
May Goddessness arise throughout our world as it does in you.
May the love you love be found throughout our world as it is in you.
May we take what we need from you that we need to be yours;
May we be freed from what’s not ours, and free others as well.
May we stay at home within you, may we remember where we belong,
Because Goddessness and life and joy come true, always, in you.
So may it be, in and through me.

A FEW NOTES

1. The word “dancing” is I think my most creative addition to the translation, which otherwise aims to stay as close to the original as possible throughout. I use this word to open the prayer on a note of delight and beauty; to avoid repeating the word “vibrations” twice; and because the word “dancing” is sometimes used in English in a physical, non-metaphorical way to describe vibration-like movement.

2. I have been using the term “Goddessness” in much of my writing lately. I developed it because I wanted an embodied term, closer to my experience of loving Goddesses than an abstraction such as “Divine Feminine or “Sacred Feminine.” But I didn’t want to use singular “Goddess” because, as my beloved mentor and friend Patricia Monaghan was fond of pointing out, where there is one Goddess, there are always other Goddesses near her. Hence “Goddessness,” which feels to me concrete enough to convey the intimacy of “Goddess” while leaving room for the reality of either single or multiple Goddesses.

3. As a lover of Goddessness, which embraces and encompasses dark and light, I do not privilege light over dark in my version.

4. I use “may we take” rather than “give us” to express my sense, and that of many other lovers of the Sacred Feminine, of being a loving, mutually trusting co-creator with Goddessness, rather than a subordinate “worshipper.”