“They is” makes me wince. Incomplete sentences raise my hackles. And yes, the Oxford comma is the hill I will die on. I know belonging to the Grammar Police makes me a social pariah, and I recognize the deep-seated inequities built into every level of our syntax. I would very much like to be a pure descriptivist who sees past the form to the substance beneath. Yet here I am, consciously holding down my Thanksgiving pie as the football commentators consistently say “that” when they mean “which.” Do I understand them? Yes. So does it matter? Well...maybe.

I see today’s readings as the grammarian’s manifesto. The gospel gives us rules to pray by, and like all rules, it gives us a way to live—in prayer—together. In this sense, the Lord’s Prayer is a formula for the Church. Each time we gather to say these words, we are enacting our intentions as a community in Christ, and in so doing, we make earth a little more as it is in heaven. We are doing things with our words, making them fertile and fruitful as our Lord has taught us, by harnessing the power of convention. J. L. Austin called it a speech act. Hilary Mantel called it a spell. I call it a miracle.

The danger is in letting the formula become formulaic. It’s 10:25pm and you’re squeezing Mass in before bed. You dazed off somewhere in the Psalm, and while you (simultaneously) check email, knit a sweater, plan tomorrow’s dinner, and memorize a poem or two, something deep inside hears the priest intone “we dare to say….” Next thing you know, you’ve said the Our Father, purled a row, and responded to your professor without missing a beat. And yet, somehow, you missed everything.

Rules and rituals make meaning, but routines can destroy it. When I feel the significance of my words slipping away, I anchor myself to the text before me. Every comma is a pause for reflection. Every “thy” is a reminder of our close, personal relationship to a God who eschews the hierarchical for the familiar second-person pronoun. “Give us this day our daily bread”—is that a plea or a command? And when we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive” are we setting Him an example (à la Genesis 18:16-33), proposing a tit-for-tat policy, or something else entirely?

Such hermeneutic gymnastics may seem silly, irreverent, or just plain nauseating, but to me they’re proof that every little thing matters. Every well-placed modifier, every complete sentence, every clear antecedent is a valentine reading: “I love you, and because I love you, I want you to understand.” And when that meaning comes through, a miracle happens: our words become deeds, our intentions become actions, and our world shifts a little closer to the kingdom that is to come. To quote Margaret Edson’s W;t, “It is very simple really….Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.”