That lyric is reminiscent of something that author Anne Lamott (surely a literary soul sister to Simon if ever there was one) has said: The two best prayers are "Help me, help me, help me" and "thank you, thank you, thank you".
"It was the best Friday Prayer in 23 years," one man said, leaving a mosque in central Tunis.
The most morally complex story in "Redeployment," and perhaps the best, is "Prayer in the Furnace," about a Marine chaplain in Ramadi who begins to pick up signs that the infantrymen in his combat-weary battalion, led by a hyper-aggressive commander, are committing war crimes.
Sometimes the survival of the fittest goes to the person with the best telephone prayer chain.
Rather, in its best sense, prayer is joining into a stream of longing for a better world, for abundant life, for goodness, mercy and justice.
In its best known prayer, the Unetaneh Tokef, we are reminded that we are fleeting, that our lives are like the wind that blows, like the flower that fades, as a passing shadow.
Sermons were better short, he advised (an hour was quite enough), and the best form of prayer was a conversation between priest and congregation, rather than a monologue.
But given that things are as they are, his best hope and prayer is that Holy Spirit will guide the cardinals to an inspired choice like Pope John XXIII who was elevated in 1958, and managed during his short papacy to lay out a new vision for the church in the modern world.
The best times for prayer are the twilight times, dawn and dusk, because we have the consciousness of day and night.
