The Lenten season calls us to pray. But prayer, Jesus teaches, is more than saying words. “Go into your room, and close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.”

Praying means entering the inner room of your heart, shutting the door to the noise, the trivialities, the cares that grab our attention. Put them aside.

I pray. But I’m not a lonely individual isolated in the dark. A gracious God is there with me, who loves me and knows my cares and needs. God, who “makes one tiny room an everywhere,” is in the room of my heart, giving me the gift to speak. “Lord, open my lips,” is my first prayer.

And God does. It may not be to speak a lot, words get in the way when multiplied. We believe that lent is a season of grace when God helps us to pray. He gives graces for praying  to those who have stopped praying. He stirs up desire in those who pray with little fervor.

Are we making a good lent? We are if we are praying again.

I pray from a human heart, made from the earth, tied to flesh and blood. The  human heart is meant to reach far.

I watched a wonderful PBS program last night on the monarch butterfly, which makes a spectacular  journey from the far reaches of Canada to a small breeding ground in Mexico. It’s an unlikely creature for such a journey–beautiful to look at but  poorly designed for flight, so frail that rain and winds can beat it to the ground. It doesn’t seem up to it at all.

Yet it makes the journey, no one knows how, in a world where mysteries abound.

For more on how to pray, see  “Lord, teach us to pray,” at http://www.cptryon.org