The petition asks that the name not be filled. Hollow and hallow are not the same word, and the body and the Tetragrammaton both keep the distinction the doctrine loses.
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TWO WORDS, ONE VOWEL APART
Hollow comes from Old English holh: cavity, den, emptiness. The space inside.
Hallow comes from Old English hālgian, to make sacred, from hāl, whole and hale, which is also the root of heal, health and whole.
Different words with different histories, and they are not homophones: one vowel separates them, and English speakers slide between them constantly in speech and in print.
The resemblance is worth naming and worth refusing to lean on. It is not evidence and should not be offered as any: two words that sound nearly alike do not thereby share a meaning, and the argument here does not rest on the accident. What the pair is useful for is naming a relation the doctrine has trouble holding, that what bears most does so by being empty. The etymology does not prove it. The body does.
[See THE HALLOWED HOLLOW]
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THE ANATOMY OF BEARING
The atlas, the first cervical vertebra, carries the entire weight of the head.
It does it by being a ring. Alone among the vertebrae it has no body: the space where a vertebral body would sit is occupied by the dens of the axis below it, and the ring is what permits the head to nod and to turn.
Fill the hollow and the function does not diminish, it ends: the bearing capacity and the rotation both depend on the cavity, so the emptiness is not what the structure tolerates but what it is made of.
The lungs bear by being hollow. The heart's chambers bear by being hollow. The skull is held up by a ring with nothing in the middle of it.
[See THE YIELDING · GELASSENHEIT]
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THE NAME THAT IS NOT SPOKEN
יהוה. Four consonants, no vowels, unpronounceable as written.
The practice that grew around it is not superstition. Encountering it in reading, one says Adonai or HaShem. The pronunciation was not lost by accident; it was let go, and the letting-go was the observance.
Speaking the name would fill it, and a filled name is a graven image: an object where an opening was, available to be carried, defended, and issued by whoever holds it.
Which settles what the petition asks. Hallowed be thy name is not a request that people speak of God respectfully. It is a request that the name stay unfilled: unspoken, unoccupied, uncaptured by tongue or institution or tribe.
[See THE GRAVEN IMAGE · DIRECT ENCOUNTER]
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WHAT FILLS IT
The filling does not arrive as blasphemy. It arrives as service.
The name is spoken on behalf of others, then administered, then licensed. A tongue that says it correctly becomes a credential, and a tongue that says it wrongly becomes a fault, and between the two there is now a position from which the difference is ruled on.
Every mediation of the name begins as help with a difficulty that is real, and none of them can end, because the position only exists while the difficulty does.
[See MEDIATION · THE TOLLBOOTH · THE OCCUPIED THIRD]
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Sanctification is not holiness added to an emptiness.
It is the recognition that the emptiness was the shape holiness takes, which is why the petition asks for nothing to be supplied and only for something to stop.
The atlas holds the head up by having nothing in the middle. The name holds by not being said.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
