The Lord’s Prayer is inclusive. Acknowledgement of Country is not

‘Thy kingdom come’ is perhaps the key phrase for a meeting. What are we trying to do here? Conform our decisions as closely as possible to the highest ideals so that ‘thy will [will] be done on earth as it is in heaven’.

But not everything is about the ethereal. We have earthly needs, which we share, and where our access involves some degree of fortune and doesn’t just depend on our own efforts. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’

For those of a deeper Biblical frame of mind, this phrase will also conjure up the story of the exile in the desert where the Israelites, escaping from slavery in Egypt, were fed with manna from heaven, while they journeyed to the Promised Land, a short distance that took 40 years.

We are on a journey together, circumstances are hard, our arrival uncertain, but we still need to eat, and we have faith that somehow that will happen.

Then comes the instruction that combines the alignments – vertical to the highest values, and horizontally, to each other. ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ – which means, "forgive us our sins": we are not perfect, we will fail to meet the most exacting of standards.

And then the sting in the tail. Forgive us our trespasses ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’. If we can’t forgive, then neither should God forgive us. But if we do recognise and forgive each other’s mutual frailties, then all will be forgiven.

That is reconciliation and how different is it to the perpetual grievance embedded in the Acknowledgement? The Lord’s Prayer acknowledges wrong while supplying a mechanism for overcoming it, the Acknowledgement just hints at it and leaves it lying there.

A meeting conducted on the basis of mutual tolerance and forgiveness is going to be quite different from one that refuses to defuse grievance. Isn’t this something that we should hope for from all meetings, and a good thing to explicitly state as a goal.

Then ‘lead us not into temptation’. It would be better if there were no sins to forgive. And ‘deliver us from evil’. Evil can be something external, or internal. It can be consequence or chance.

Specific decisions may embody evil, or by lacking foresight or prudence, lead to it. Or evil may just happen. Having the shadow of it hanging over our meeting will hopefully make us more wise and careful in our deliberations and decisions.

That’s the prayer.

Generally it ends with a doxology, an expression of praise to God, but also a statement of humility – something most appropriate for a parliament filled by people, who, to be charitable, have at the least an extraordinary degree of self-confidence.