SAN ANTONIO -- Worshippers at a church here may not be ready to shun the subtitles for the film The Passion of the Christ, but the language used in Mel Gibson's new movie is no longer totally foreign to them.

The congregation at University Presbyterian Church has spent the Lenten season learning to sing the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, the ancient Middle Eastern language spoken by Jesus.

Some members say the experience has been enlightening. But it has at times been uncomfortable because the words don't carry the same meanings as they did in Bibles that were translated from Aramaic to Greek and later to English.

For instance, when translated directly from Aramaic, the familiar opening line "Our Father who art in heaven" is actually "Our Father in the universe."

"Most of us thought of God as being up in heaven and thought in terms of personifying the deity," said parishioner Larry Adamson. "But when I hear it in Aramaic, it's not `Father in heaven.' It's the sense of God being all around us."

Christian Carpenter, who sings in the church's choir, said he resisted the many subtle linguistic differences at first.

"The meaning of the words is an eye-opener -- it challenged my beliefs," he said. "At first, I was like, `Oh, come on ... ' but after five weeks of learning the words, it makes me want to learn more."

Frank Stribling, a retired San Antonio pastor who for decades used a Bible translated directly from Aramaic, said the notion of heaven is also different in Aramaic.

"To Christians it means a place ... that's where the God with the long white beard shows up," he said. "In Aramaic, it means harmony. It means a state of mind."

He also pointed to the English line "And lead us not into temptation," which from Aramaic would be translated as "And do not let us enter into worldliness," meaning physical lust. The difference in interpretation, he says, is an important one.

"It's a wonderful thing to know that the creator does not tempt man," said Stribling, who two years ago stepped down from the pulpit of his independent Christian church after 60 years. "To me, that's very enlightening."

Aramaic, which dates back about 3,000 years, is a Semitic sister tongue of both Hebrew and Arabic and was once the major language spoken from Egypt to Pakistan. Jesus' earliest disciples used it to spread Christianity throughout the region.

The language has come to prominence of late because Gibson used it extensively, with English subtitles, in his controversial film about Christ's crucifixion.

Elizabeth McGregor Simmons, pastor at University Presbyterian, said her inspiration to bring Aramaic to her congregation came not from Gibson's endeavor but rather from a recording of music from Christ's time by the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble.

Since late February, every Sunday at the church has been like a theatrical cast getting ready for its Easter performance: talk about the prayer, repeat the prayer, try to sing the prayer.

Simmons says the process of temporarily setting aside the familiar King James version of the Lord's Prayer has made for some discomfort.

"Some Sundays I was as nervous as I've ever been in 25 years of preaching," she said.

The ensemble, a seven-member group that focuses on historic music, got interested in Aramaic back in the 1970s and spent months learning enough for its recent CD Ancient Echoes.

"Even though we were working on this for a couple years, the release of the Mel Gibson movie seems to have notched up interest in Aramaic by like 1,000 percent," said group co-founder Covita Moroney, who has been helping University Presbyterian with the language project.

Moroney and her husband, Christopher, also her musical collaborator, have played at the church's services using Christ-era instruments like the ud, a precursor of the lute, and the doumbek, a drum played mostly with the fingertips.