That's meant to be provocative, and I haven't done exactly that, or done it altogether. What I have done, though, is to stop the particular set of prayers that form almost the entirety of my formal prayer life outside of the Liturgy and an hour of adoration every week. I say these prayers on the way to work and on the way home, and they occupy about half the time–twenty minutes or so–of the commute. They're almost all petitions, and include a rosary. And they're pretty much rote. Some of the petitions have been constant for many years, such as prayers for my children's salvation–and some shift slowly over time, as particular situations come and go.
I will admit straight out that I find them a bit of a chore. No one who reads this blog will be surprised to learn that I'd rather be listening to music while I'm driving, and after twenty years this lengthy commute has finally become a bit tiresome. I do allow myself to listen to music after my prayers are finished, which, you will immediately see, creates an incentive for me to rush through them. I try not to do that, but am not entirely successful.
Even apart from the desire to get the praying out of the way so I can do what I want to do, the self-imposed requirement that I say this specific set of prayers every day (or at least every work day) unavoidably becomes in my mind another in the long list of things I'm obliged to do. I think I'm a fairly typical man of the contemporary industrialized world in that respect. Perhaps it's not so much the number of things that need our attention as their heterogeneity. T.S. Eliot noted, nearly a hundred years ago, that our civilization contains great variety and complexity; he was using that as a justification for the complexity of his poetry. Little did he know that we would habitually refer to his as "a simpler time." We all have a great number of disconnected things competing for attention, and many of them are in themselves pretty complex. Perhaps I'm more sensitive to this than some people, since I work in information technology where the variety and complexity are literally beyond comprehension by any one person. Then I come home to confront, for instance, the utterly unrelated, but also complex, problem of why most of the the grass in my lawn died last summer, and what do do about it, both of which require knowledge and time. But most of us have complicated jobs, and raising families and keeping our houses and cars and finances in order are also complicated.
Anyway: by nature I have great difficulty concentrating, and generally go about in a very distracted condition. And every Lent I feel that my greatest need is recollection, in the Catholic sense. To that end I generally give up listening to music in the car, and sometimes altogether, which I've done this year. And I've removed a couple of other occasions of distraction from my life.
Yet I noticed, after the first day or two of Lent this year, that nothing seemed to change in my state of mind on the drive to work. And I realized that the requirement to say a specific set of prayers during that time, while certainly a good thing, is in itself a distraction of sorts, in that it focuses my mind on what I am asking of God and not what God asks of me: it's all talking and no listening. So I decided to end those petitionary prayers for at least the first half of Lent, and simply to be silent (no talk radio as methadone for the heroin addict) for the most part, to speak to God and then listen.
One of the first questions that came to mind was "Who are you? Who am I praying to?" It occurred to me that after thirty years as a Catholic, and many years before that as a Protestant who was taught the doctrine of the Trinity, I did not really know most of the time whether I was praying to the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit or to the three in one.
This led me pretty quickly to a very specific focus on Christ, which I'll discuss in another post, perhaps not until next weekend. Right now I have a bunch of other stuff to do.
Light On Dark Water 
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