The [Lord's] prayer itself is a guide, a teaching story, a finely crafted sequence of instructions on how to pray. If we listen carefully, every word, every phrase, reveals some potent teaching about prayer. The ever-present gift of the prayer lies deeper than the lines we know so well. The words are not the prayer; they are precise doorways into a lifetime of practice.

Within these few words, we can discover all we will ever need to learn about how to pray. Every line is an astonishing gift of wisdom, a subtle teaching that is hidden, as in a Chinese puzzle-box, and gently and gradually uncovered and understood through a lifetime of prayerfulness.

Wayne Muller, Learning to Pray