XX Our Father:

In the new translation of the Roman Missal, the Lord's Prayer is introduced with the words, "At the Saviour's command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say..."

The older text had a Latin word closer to courage rather than dare.  However, ‘courage’ and ‘daring’ are potentially quite different in meaning. ‘Courage’ does not necessarily invoke a feeling of humility, whereas ‘we dare to say’ inherently recognizes our insignificance before the Father. We use the word ‘courage’ to imply some talent or accomplishment on our part, for example, we can say that we have the courage to speak publicly. But when we use the words, ‘we dare to say’, we humbly admit that it has nothing to do with us, in fact, it admits that is not anything which we can ever hope to accomplish. The words convey a profound sense of unworthiness, we are in no position to make any claims or demands.

The adjective "Our" as used by us, does not express possession, but an entirely new relationship with God. We are a people bound together by the New Covenant that God has made with us through his Son in the Holy Spirit. While we are indeed individual persons, we are also persons in communion with each other because we have been baptized into communion with the Holy Trinity. We cannot pray 'our' without including every single person for whom Christ died. The Our Father erases all boundaries between us and them, between past and present. It calls us into the family circle, saints crossing elbows with sinners, rich with poor, criminal with law-abiding, powerful with victimized, living with dead. God's love has no bounds, neither should our prayer.

After the initial address, the Lord’s Prayer contains seven demands, or traditionally, seven petitions. The seven petitions can be found in both the Gospel of Matthew and our liturgical version of the prayer. It is interesting to note that the Gospel of Luke contains only five of those seven petitions. The number ‘seven’ always symbolized perfection, thus the Lord’s Prayer perfectly summarizes all that we need petition to the Lord in any form of prayer.  That is why St Thomas Aquinas calls it the ‘Perfect Prayer.’ Tertullian goes so far as to claim that the Lord’s Prayer is ‘summary of the whole gospel.’ Of seven demands in the Lord’s Prayer. The first three ‘draw us toward the glory of God’ and the last four ‘commend our wretchedness to his grace.’