LEDYARD - The Southern Cayuga Wider Parish, a multi-denominational community of churches, has been holding a series of light suppers and discussions during Lent. Known as “Aspects of Spiritual Growth,” the five meetings have been held at different churches each Sunday evening with a different guest speaker addressing a different topic.

The March 2 meeting was held at the Ledyard Methodist Church with Dr. Robert Godbout as the speaker. He spoke about prayer and practicing the presence of God. Godbout is the pastor of the King Ferry Presbyterian Church and a lecturer in psychology at Wells College in Aurora.

In the social room of the Ledyard church, the participants, who represented the 13 different churches of the parish, enjoyed a light dinner of homemade soup and a period of fellowship and getting acquainted with each other. Before the discussion started, the more than 50 men and women in attendance read a responsorial prayer prepared by Godbout that summarized the tone of the series of meetings.

“May this sacred season renew our desire to live fully the promises of our baptism and to love you with a whole heart. Through more frequent prayer and acts of charity, may we remember that loving you and one another is the most important thing we can do.”

“The main theme of tonight will be the Lord's prayer and its roots in Aramaic, which was Jesus' native language,” Godbout said, “and also the nature of prayer.” Godbout handed out an informational packet that listed several definitions of prayer and included a multi-page analysis of the Aramaic origins of Lord's prayer, based on the book, “Prayers of the Cosmos,” by Neil Douglas-Klotz.

Godbout asked everyone to read the definitions of prayer to see how they compared with their own definitions. As part of the discussion, words such as “powerful,” “transforming,” “dialog with God” and even “helplessness” were used to describe prayer.

“Prayer is multi-dimensional,” Godbout said, “and there are also dilemmas with prayer.”

When he began his discussion on the Lord's prayer, Godbout asked the people to think about the assumptions they have about the opening of the prayer, “Our father.” The word “our” implied a community or group, as opposed to a single person, yet the prayer also allowed for a personal conversation with God.

The word “father” implied a loving parent to most of the people in the room, but Godbout said when he conducted a similar discussion with inmates at area prisons, the term “father” had a negative connotation to them. To many of them, they had been abandoned, abused or unwanted by their own fathers, and did not want a God like that. Godbout described this is one of the dilemmas about prayer he mentioned.

In the Aramaic language, the sounds and meanings of words can be interpreted from three different perspectives, the intellectual or literal, the metaphorical or symbolic and the cosmic, which refers to the bond between God and the person praying.

The phrase “Our father, who art in heaven” in Aramaic is “Abwoon d'bwashmaya.” The word Abwoon means the source of all life, which later became the word Abba, meaning father. The sound “A” means absolute or oneness, and is also the root of the Aramaic word for God, Alaha, and also the Arabic word for God, Allah. “Bw” means to be born from the oneness. “Oo” is the word for spirit or breath, and “n” adds a meditative, chant-like ending to the word, emphasizing its spiritual meaning.

“If we're going to pray with any understanding,” Godbout said, “we need to think about the meanings of the words we use to pray.”

The next meeting is scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m. Sunday, March 9, at the United Church of Genoa, with the theme of “Repentance” by the Rev. Russell Riddell, and the final meeting will be at the Poplar Ridge Friends Meeting House with the theme, “Forgiveness.”