Third Wednesday in Lent
Keep It Short and Simple
Continuing with the spiritual disciplines from the Ash Wednesday Gospel, Matthew 6, we come to

• Prayer

7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9"This, then, is how you should pray:

" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
11Give us today our daily bread.
12Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.

14For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

What strikes me about this is that it appears that Jesus is telling us that prayer is a lifestyle and not a set of words. It has to do with keeping in touch with God, keeping your prayers to the point (not because God doesn't want to hear us, I have a hunch, but because we need to stop and listen and not get so self-centered as to ask for everything we can think of.) We live in contact with God and when we do that we live a life of grace. In the end, prayer is simply about being with God as you would be with a friend.

Contemporary Sufi writer Kabir Helmisnski brings this to mind in the following quote that helps bring this week's discipline into focus.

Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise, is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist � an outer world and the mystery of the inner world — but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet, as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.
Source: The Knowing Heart