Prayer in the Rule of St Benedict, Session 2

Mother Anne Clarke, Abbess OSB, Malling Abbey

This morning we looked at the specific teachings about prayer that we find in the Rule of St Benedict and spent time with the Benedictine practice of lectio divina. I left you with some questions for reflection which I hope have begun to open up for you what the Rule might be saying to you about how you pray and how you live. This afternoon I would like to go more deeply into the principles we can find in Benedict’s teaching that can guide us in our Christian lives.

The first thing to say is that an important principle in the Rule is the adaptation to personal temperaments and abilities, ‘do it like this except…’. He wants the strong to have something to challenge them but does not want to overwhelm those who are less able by excessive demands. He takes account of how well someone might understand what is being asked and tailors his teaching appropriately.

So there is always a process of discernment about how we apply what we hear, and that is where it is very helpful to have a wise guide who can reflect with you on how you are shaping your prayer and your life. We are not always the best people to see what our own needs are – we can on the one hand be overly strict with ourselves and drop into despair when we fail or on the other avoid what would be a very helpful discipline and become lazy.

We must also remember that each one of us is on a journey and gradually our life of prayer will change, step by step. Practices that were appropriate at one time will drop away and new practices come into focus. Sometimes we will be challenged to drop something that we love greatly because it has come to the point where it is holding us back. We can be called into what feels like a desert where God can then draw us close – where God can ‘allure us’ to use the beautiful words of Hosea.

I find four helpful principles in the Rule that we can apply as we look at our lives and how we pray:

I’ll unpack these a bit in the light of my own experience.

1. The need to structure our time in a way that expresses our priorities is about how we live out Benedict’s saying ‘prefer nothing to Christ’. How much time do we spend, for example, in watching TV or surfing the internet as opposed to praying the scriptures? We might have to choose to set aside things that are not in themselves bad but which are filling time that we need for prayer.

Before I entered monastic life I was a BBC online news junkie, after all BBC news is serious and worthwhile, but it was so easy for me to spend far longer than I intended clicking around on interesting links. After an hour or more my mind was in a blur and I hadn’t really taken anything in. The idea of interceding for the situations I had encountered was far from my mind.

I now read the news in the printed weekly newspaper which gives me deeper and more considered coverage and lacks the tempting links that keep taking me elsewhere. I also read mission society intercession booklets which takes me to needy parts of the world that are never in the news.

During my three weeks here I have in fact been on a complete news fast, relying on others to tell me if something dramatic has happened that I should really know about. How much do we really need to know? We can’t know everything.

2. The need for discipline is something we know is important for anyone who wants to perform well at something, such as athletes or musicians as well as nuns and monks. The more we practice prayer the easier it becomes, and discipline is necessary to ensure that we do indeed ‘prefer nothing to Christ’.

Although prayer becomes easier the more we pray there are always times of difficulty too. The discipline keeps us at it through the tough times until we break through into a new place.

3. There is a need for balance in our lives and living at a human pace. A balance of prayer, work, study, rest. The Rule makes space for our bodily needs for sleep, food and physical activity and we need to consider how we balance those needs in our own lives. Modern life puts pressure on us 24/7 and we need to find ways to unplug from that. Can we set boundaries on our availability to others?

As monastics we have a ‘greater silence’ from Compline in the evening, before we go to bed, until after morning prayer the next day, a time when we stop work and refrain from communicating with other people unless it’s really necessary. That time is intended for us to rest and to take quiet time with God. At Malling Abbey that time lasts from 7.30 in the evening until 8.30 in the morning. I turn off the computer, put my phone away and turn to spiritual reading and silent prayer as well as sleep.

4. We need community, linking with the wider Body of Christ, so we know that we are not alone in our prayer. This may not be literally living in a community but praying some form of set prayer that is shared with others. This makes our prayer more objective and less dependent on our own moods. A structure of prayer that is ‘given’ can be very sustaining through tough times.

This could be using the church’s prayer book or that of a monastic community. Such prayers when repeated over time become part of us and provide a stable foundation for our lives. I have found it very helpful to be praying the familiar office from Malling Abbey here on the other side of the world. There is a sense of home-coming when we pray these words together.

These four principles can guide us as we look at how to shape our lives into lives of prayer.

It is also helpful to look more specifically at what prayer practices we adopt in the time we set aside to be with God. Although ultimately prayer is not about technique there are things we can do that help to place us where prayer happens, and teachers of prayer throughout Christian history have provided us with techniques to help us in our prayer.

St Benedict at the end of his Rule points us to other writers, the ‘Fathers’, who write about prayer. Here we find teachings that focus on the use of a short phrase or word to express our intention to rest in God’s presence. For example ‘Lord have mercy’ or ‘Lord come to my assistance’. These teachings are similar to those we find in Eastern religions that talk about using a mantra to focus our minds.

For Christians these phrases arise from our praying of the psalms in the daily offices of the church and also from meditation on scripture through the practice of lectio divina, as we did this morning.

Benedict sets aside a large chunk of time each day for lectio and it is a practice we would do well to incorporate into our lives.

For early Christians Bible study and prayer were inseparable and theologians were people who prayed. There was no such thing as a purely intellectual approach to scripture. There was a natural cycle between reading God’s word and being drawn into prayer as we encounter God in the scriptures. God’s word was chewed on, pondered, allowed to seep into our very being.

As a visiting speaker once told our oblates at Malling, ‘nuns pickle themselves in the psalms’ – and we all need to pickle ourselves in God’s word through praying the psalms and through lectio divina.

A prayer word or phrase might be something that arises from your reading on a particular day or it might be something which you live with over the long term. The Jesus prayer is one ancient example of the latter: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, A sinner. Or simply praying the name of Jesus.

Such a phrase can be one that you repeat at moments throughout the day as well as during specific prayer times. Gradually it becomes automatic, the place to which your mind reverts when nothing else is going on. How much better than an advertising jingle!

And this points to an important work that we need to be doing, ensuring that the Oratory of our Heart is furnished with appropriate things, the word of God, rather than the things the world wishes to implant. As I said this morning – I believe that rooting our lives in prayerful reading of scripture is a powerful way to begin to put on the mind of Christ and resist all the messages that stimulate our greed and selfishness, the things that drive our current economic system that is destroying the world in which we live.

It is interesting that intercession for others doesn’t explicitly feature in the Rule, although perhaps the brief mention of offering our petitions in Chap 20 could include this. In modern times a community like ours sees intercession as a very important part of our work.

The Rule is more focused on seeking God for God’s sake, to purify our hearts to make space for God’s presence there. Our whole being comes to embody prayer. But I wonder if that is actually a deep form of intercession?

The words of the Benedictine Abbot André Louf sum up beautifully the nature of prayer – I printed them out for you so you may already have read them but I would like to read them now to wrap up this part of this afternoon’s session:

“That you have become a free human being, that your heart has begun to live and to sing, that the Word of God is able to reverberate freely and frankly in your inmost centre, is a source of light and power for anyone… For the deepest depth of your heart is also the deep ground of the world.
In this experience of prayer the world’s spatial limits are eliminated. Being far off or being close at hand no longer signifies. Being absent and being present have become one and the same thing. In your prayer all human beings are closely involved.
As one of the Fathers put it so emphatically: ‘The monk is the man separated from everyone and bound up with everyone.’ [Evagrius, De Oratione, 124] For by way of prayer you already inhabit the deep heart of the cosmos.”

[pause]

It’s now time for me to stop talking about prayer and for us to take some time again to pray together. I have decided to repeat the prayer exercise that we did yesterday afternoon as it is a practice that bears repeating. Holding the prayer ‘Lord have mercy’ in my heart and expressing it through my posture is one of my daily prayer practices. I pray in this way in the morning and the prayer flows into the rest of the day, deep in my body.

I will not go into detail today because I’ve been talking enough already, but for those who were not with us yesterday you will find the background in the handout ‘Pray without ceasing’.

In brief, the prayer ‘Lord have mercy’ has been part of Christian liturgy from the earliest times and has come down to us in Greek as ‘Kyrie Eleison’ even when the rest of the liturgy has been translated into other languages. You will have experienced that today in the Middle Hour. It was in fact the response to a litany of intercession rather than being penitential. It is asking for God’s mercy on all that is broken in the world, all people and situations that need God’s blessing.

It can be very helpful when we feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to pray. We can simply pray ‘Lord have mercy’.

Early Christians prayed standing and would stretch out their hands to pray Kyrie Eleison. I was inspired by this and now always pray this prayer whilst standing with my hands stretched out towards the altar or the tabernacle if I’m in church. We will pray this prayer together in the church as we did yesterday.

© The Benedictine Community at Malling Abbey 2025