When our lives are filled with a lot of excitement we can easily forget about God. We lose our hunger and thirst for God. In his lengthy discourse on the prayer, “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me,” John Cassian points out that the “poverty" of this phrase will keep us in close contact with God. In other words, we do not need a lot of diversity in our prayer. We do not need a lot of information in our reading. Instead, what may seem like a few poor words can form our hearts in the ways of prayer—“the poverty of the phrase." Such poverty keeps our minds sharp and hungry for more. It is a fasting of the mind, not the stomach.
BRENDAN FREEMAN, OCSO Come and See: The Monastic Way for Today
