by Ottavio De Bertolis

We now want to consider the second word of the Lord's Prayer: not only have we invoked God as Father, but we also add "our". It is not an insignificant addition: prayer in fact does not place us in a sort of individualism, but opens us to relationships with others. Nobody prays for himself, one might say, but every prayer, even that addressed to the most personal needs, is always a prayer in the Church and for the Church.
It is born in a community context, and results for the good of all: just like the liturgical prayers, those of the Mass so to speak, are never formulated in the first person singular, with an initial "I", but always with the "we", precisely because they are aimed at the good of all. Thus, even if the priest celebrated Mass alone, he should always say "let's pray" before each prayer.

Therefore one does not pray alone, nor ever for oneself alone, but always with the whole Church and for the whole Church. But the meaning of "our" is not all there. The key point is that if He is our Father, we are children, and therefore brothers.
Fraternity is therefore born from the consideration that none of us has loved God, that is, from the fact that all of us, due to sin, are strangers to each other, which means that we only love those who love us, our relatives (if okay…) or people close to us for other reasons.
With these words we therefore discover ourselves far from God, but, at the same time, we discover that He has become close to all of us, without anyone having asked for it or even deserved it: which means that we discover ourselves forgiven, welcomed, received in his fidelity. It follows that, if He has welcomed us, we too must welcome ourselves, in the same gratuitousness, in the same generosity. “We love, because He loved us first,” says the evangelist John. Saying "our" therefore means remembering his "yes" every day not only to me, but also to all the others; in other words, it means remembering his forgiveness.
The words of a parable well known to all come to mind: “A man had two servants. One owed him ten thousand talents, one a hundred denarii. Since they had nothing to pay, he forgave them both."
This is therefore the root of our brotherhood: we are not born brothers, on the contrary we are born divided and estranged from each other for many reasons, and divided from Him, due to that reality that we call sin, that distance that we ourselves put between ourselves and Him. But He surpasses it, making himself close to us. “Shouldn't you also have forgiven your brother, as I forgave you?”.
We could say that if the word "father" takes us upwards, in a vertical movement, in the contemplation of the gratuitousness of love signified by that term, when we say "our" this movement instead becomes horizontal, because it leads us to the consideration of this gratuitousness poured out on all of us, as the sun makes its rays shine on the just and the wicked.
With the first word we ascend to God, with the second we look, so to speak, at our relationships with others as filtered by this light. I cannot therefore sincerely say "our father" if I do not forgive, as I myself have been forgiven. But we could also say that, in order to be able to say "our father", that is, to be able to forgive when this is humanly difficult for us, we must first say "father", that is, look to the One who first loved us.
Ultimately, saying "our father" is a kind of challenge: God challenges us to look at that person who is next to me, and who perhaps has hurt me, or is foreign to me for many good reasons, not as an enemy, but as someone who, despite not having been chosen by me, I find myself close to, loved by God undeservedly as I am with the same gratuitousness: in other words, like a brother. In fact, brotherhood is not a relationship between two, me and the other: if we remained here, we could see nothing other than our mutual diversity. Fraternity is instead a three-way relationship: me, the other, and the One who placed us next to each other, recipients of the same love.