We come to that most well known, beloved, and (in our minds today) conventional prayer of all, the Lord’s Prayer, only not in the elegant “King Jamesified” version we recite in our churches today, but in its shockingly short and raw original form as first given by Jesus.
It doesn’t come in until the end, though, of this play that explores the different types of prayer there are (and the different attitudes people have to it) as well as the practice and perils of extemporaneous public prayer. (Something that those of you in heavily liturgical traditions might not have experienced much of, but which I know well from my childhood in a non-denominational Bible church.) And then at the end, when Jesus is asked, not merely for a prayer to pray, but “how to pray”, this is the prayer he gives.
It’s not the prayer I would have expected, or the one I would have given had I been in his place.
But then I’m not Jesus.