"Pray without ceasing", Session 1: What is Prayer?

Mother Anne Clarke, Abbess OSB, Malling Abbey

Today I want to explore what we can learn from the ways that early Christians prayed and how that set the scene for St Benedict’s Rule. Tomorrow we will focus specifically on the Rule and how we might draw inspiration from it for our own prayer.

Of course there is a huge distance in time, ways of living, thinking and being between us and the early Christians so we have to take care when we look at the ancient texts. I am no scholar of these texts – a PhD in Computer science is not very helpful in this regard! – although I have dipped into various commentaries and books by those who have studied them.

What I do bring to this topic is a desire to grow in my life of prayer and to bring my own experience into dialogue with the early Christian tradition. So my interest is practical rather than academic, and I hope my own experience may have something to say to you.

As you can see from the programme we have two sessions today, morning and afternoon. At the start of each session I plan to speak for about 20 minutes and then lead into a prayer exercise. I would be grateful if you could hold questions and comments till later but please do raise your hand if you are having difficulty hearing me, to remind me to speak up.

After this morning’s session there will be time for individual reflection in silence, leading up to the Middle hour. Please do wander outside or into the church, find a place to walk or sit as is helpful for you. I don’t know how familiar you are with holding silence in a group, but what I hope you will experience is a silence that is rich and nurturing, not cold and isolating. We create the silence together and by letting go of talking we make a gift of silence to one another.

Sr Raphael will ring a handbell at 11.50 as a signal for you to come into the church for the Middle hour. Please sit wherever you can find space, including the choir stalls. For those new to the rhythm of prayer here the ‘Middle hour’ is a short service of just a few minutes that marks the middle of the day – it does not last for an hour!

After the Middle Hour there is time for lunch and simply relaxing together here until 1.30pm, when we will gather for our afternoon session.

The afternoon session will start with a time for questions and discussion. To help focus this I would like you to write your questions down and leave them in the bowl over there. There are slips of paper there for you to use. Any that are there by lunch time I will take away to ponder before our next session but feel free to add more questions during the course of the day. There will be a further time for questions and discussion at the end of the day.

So, to our first session – the title I gave for today’s workshop was ‘Pray without ceasing’, something that St Paul asks of us in 1 Thess 5:17. This raised two questions for the early Christians, as it does for us too. ‘what is prayer?’ and ‘what does it mean to do it without ceasing?’

But to step back from that for a moment, I would first like to put to you the question Jesus put to those first two disciples who walked after him at the start of St John’s gospel – ‘What do you seek?’. I wonder what brought you here today and what your hopes are?

Let’s take a couple of minutes of silence to sit with that question and silently in our hearts to offer this day to God.

[2 mins silence]

O God, we offer ourselves to you this day and open our hearts to hear your word. Bless our time together and draw us deeper into your love.

Amen.

Well, what is prayer? We have come together to consider some of the ways Christians have prayed in the past and to find inspiration and guidance for ourselves. If someone were to ask you ‘what is prayer?’, what would you say? Let’s take a few minutes in twos or threes to try out our answers on one another…



There is really no one right answer, prayer is many different things and is shaped by our individuality and the culture in which we find ourselves. But at its core it is about our relationship with God.

Jesus, particularly in Luke’s gospel, is said to have gone out to wild places alone to pray and we assume that it was time that he spent in communion with his father God.

When he was asked to teach the disciples about prayer he gave them what we now call the ‘Lord’s prayer’, a simple expression of praise, of trust in God to meet our needs and a desire to live according to God’s commandments. It is not so much a technique of prayer as an expression of our relationship with God.

[Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4]

In Matthew’s gospel it follows on from Jesus saying we do not need to pray in many words, and that we should pray in secret, in our ‘inner room’, which has traditionally been interpreted to mean inwardly, in our hearts. It points to the importance of prayer as a personal practice, something that is an expression of our own particular relationship with God.

St Paul, who never met Jesus in his earthly life, clearly had an overwhelming experience of the risen Christ dwelling in his heart, ‘It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me’ [Gal 2v20]. His teaching in his letters has him wrestling with this experience and how to live it out in the life of the Christian community. He points to the way that prayer is not just personal, it has a corporate dimension that springs out of our being called together into the body of Christ, the church.

We see this at the end of John’s gospel too where Jesus in Chapter 17 v 21 says ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us’ and v 23 ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.’ Prayer is indeed about our personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ but it is something that draws us into relationship with one another too.

This finds expression in corporate prayer and the practices of the early Christians grew out of that of the Jewish people. They prayed as God’s chosen people who shared a particular way of life and prayer in response to God’s calling. It came to be expressed especially in the prayer of the temple. By the time of Jesus there was the practice of praying three times per day. Jews who could not be in the temple prayed the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’ in the direction of the temple to unite themselves with the sacrifices being made at the three designated hours.

No doubt Jesus as a devout Jew would have observed these hours of prayer, although there is no mention of this in the Bible. But we do have mention in the Acts of the Apostles chapter 3 of Peter and John going up to the temple at the hour of prayer. Perhaps it was not often mentioned because it was taken for granted? Certainly we know that these hours of prayer became the foundation of the regular offices of the Christian church.

But these hours of prayer are held in tension with the teaching we find throughout the New Testament that we should pray at all times. Most notably it occurs in various forms in Paul’s letters, for example in 1Thess 5:16-18, which gives the title for this workshop – ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’

Christians explored various ways of fulfilling this injunction such as praying in relays so that prayer was being said continuously. I thought ‘how odd’ but then realised that we still like to do this, for example the watch through the night on Maundy Thursday is usually divided between numbers of people rather than everyone praying through the night. There are monastic communities that devote themselves to maintaining a constant watch before the blessed sacrament, shared between all the members of the community. You know you will always find someone praying when you go to the chapel. There is power in this but it is not the same as each one of us praying without ceasing, which is surely the meaning of Paul’s teaching.

In the early Christian centuries many women & men who were serious about following Christ went out into the deserts of Egypt to live simple lives devoted to prayer. Mostly they lived solitary lives, carrying out simple manual work such as weaving baskets to earn a living and reciting the psalms as they worked. This was their way of ‘praying without ceasing’.

They also spent time meditating upon scripture and in these ways they internalised the teaching of the Bible. The constant repetition of scriptural texts focussed their whole being on God.

Gradually the understanding developed of prayer not just being words that were said at particular times but rather something that flowed through the whole of a person’s life.

Origen, an Egyptian theologian writing in the 3rd century, was one of the first to articulate this in his treatise on prayer. He says:

‘Deeds of virtue or fulfilling the commandments are included as part of prayer… For the only way we can understand the command to ‘pray without ceasing’ as referring to a real possibility is by saying that the entire life of the Christian, taken as a whole, is a single great prayer, and what we normally call prayer is only a part of this.’

He seeks for unity in the interior life, in the heart, so that everything he does is infused with God’s presence. Jesus said in the Beatitudes ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’ [Matt 5 v8] and the pursuit of purity of heart became very important for the desert monks & nuns. Benedict’s Rule comes out of this tradition, providing a structure for a life that leads to purity of heart.

I’ll say more about that tomorrow, but at this point I need to say a bit about what is meant by ‘heart’ as it encompasses something very different from what we mean now. In the Bible and the early Christian tradition the heart means the centre of the whole person. It is not just the place of feelings or emotions as we tend to think of it now, but rather it is the place that integrates our whole self, our rational faculties as well as our emotional and spiritual life. It certainly isn’t about some kind of sentimental or frothy emotion, indeed such things were considered a distraction from the life of prayer.

Eastern Orthodox Christians still talk about finding ‘the place of the heart’, a place that is deep within us, beneath our everyday awareness, deeper than both thought & emotion. They say that prayer is standing before God with the mind in the heart, resting our awareness in that place deep within where God is found. It requires a regular discipline of silence and stillness. Because we are physical beings there is a bodily aspect to this, it is not just an idea in the head but something we experience with our whole bodily self.

As we become more able to rest our awareness in our hearts in a bodily way we become more able to reside in a state of prayer whatever we are doing. The stillness of our prayer infuses our whole life. ‘Praying without ceasing’ begins to become a real experience. This is what we will be exploring today in the prayer exercises that we will do together.

This mention of ‘prayer exercises’ takes us into paradoxical territory, because it is important to remember that prayer is always God’s gift to us, not something we can achieve ourselves. Yet from earliest times it was realised that we need to be disciplined, to adopt practices that makes us ready to receive that gift. It is like cultivating the soil for plants, the plants grow themselves but there are all sorts of things we can do to make it more likely that they will grow well.

As we cultivate the soil of our hearts by practicing silence and stillness we begin to bring forth the fruits of the spirit. Christ comes to birth in us and we begin to express the wisdom of God in our lives.

A previous abbess of Malling abbey expressed this beautifully in one of her poems:

be silent
still
aware
for there
in your own heart
the Spirit is at prayer
listen and learn
open and find
heart-wisdom
                        Christ

It is as we become more silent and still that our spiritual senses come alive and we ‘become prayer’.

What I want to share with you now is a practice that has developed for me whilst I have been at Malling Abbey and has helped me along on the journey of ‘becoming prayer’.

Each one of us is different and bring different experiences to this day, so what I share with you may not be appropriate for you but I hope that it will at least provide some inspiration for your practice of prayer. An important thing to remember is what Dom John Chapman, Abbot of Downside Abbey in England said: “pray as you can, not as you can’t.” Wise advice. But that has to be held together with the importance of allowing ourselves to be challenged and drawn out of our comfort zone, which is perhaps what a day like this can do. That said, please don’t feel pushed into doing things that don’t feel right for you.

Jesus said ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' Our whole being, our mind, body, and feelings needs to be engaged when we pray. In our prayer exercises I will lead you into ways of touching in to that holistic knowing. As we drop into a place of stillness of mind and body we touch into a deeper way of knowing where we are open to the divine presence. Our spiritual senses come alive. In that place we are less likely to fall prey to all the forces of our modern world that distract and seduce us into behaviour that is not necessarily that of God’s kingdom.

I’d like to fast-forward a thousand years to the anonymous 14th century author of the ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ – a book on contemplative prayer that you may know. A lesser-known work of his that was written later is ‘The Epistle of Privy Counsel’, and here I found something that spoke deeply to me. He says that ‘God is my being’ and encourages us to offer that simple sense of our being to God. We let go of any thoughts about our being, who or what we are, and simply stay with the sense of being. He encourages us to pray ‘O Lord, all that I am I offer to you for it is yourself’.

Like the early Christians our anonymous mystic teaches that encapsulating prayer in a simple phrase or even a single word is a helpful way into the stillness where God is encountered. I like to condense his prayer into the phrase ‘I AM’, said silently with my breathing. It has a double meaning, which we find when Moses encounters God in the burning bush. Moses says ‘Here I am’, and as we say ‘I am’ we are with Moses saying ‘I am here and I am listening’. Then when Moses asks for God’s name, God replies ‘I AM who I AM’, the God beyond all words and concepts, the God that cannot be named. I AM.

In this practice we will use that phrase as our anchor in an extended time of silence, not thinking about the meaning but rather letting it express our desire to be present to our own ‘I am’, our being, that at its depths is one with the great ‘I AM’. In saying ‘I am’ we offer the whole of ourselves to the God who is our being.

Any of you who already practice prayer in silence will know that as soon as you try to be silent your mind will start buzzing. All sorts of random thoughts come and go. This is just the way our minds are. During this time of prayer today, when you become aware that your mind has wandered simply repeat silently ‘I AM’ to detach yourself from whatever thoughts are bubbling up.

It can be helpful to let it float on your breath, to let the rhythm of your breathing carry your prayer. Be gentle with yourself, don’t feel stressed about your mind wandering. Each distraction is simply an invitation to renew your desire to attend to God alone.

We will start with a simple body awareness exercise that helps to awaken a whole-body awareness and then move into an extended time of silence, about 20 minutes, which I will bring to a close with a simple prayer. Try to avoid fidgeting but if you feel the need to move because you are becoming physically uncomfortable please do so quietly and gently. Our bodily stillness is an important part of this way of praying.

For Reflection

I offer these questions if you wish to use them to open up your reflections during this morning’s quiet time, there are no right or wrong answers!

© The Benedictine Community at Malling Abbey 2025