And that brings us back to the Our Father. The Lord’s Prayer is one unified, compact, model prayer consisting of seven petitions, divisible into two parts: the first “God-ward,” the second “us-ward.” No work of poetic art was ever more perfectly crafted. If we had more time, we could consider how the prayer’s sevenfold pattern is reflected in the seven parables of Matthew 13, in the seven woes of Matthew 23, and in the Beatitudes.1 But such a discussion would turn this book into a scholarly monograph