The Desert Fathers and Mothers: Afternoon Session

This afternoon we’ll continue our exploration of how early Christians prayed and what it can teach us. As I was saying this morning people went out to the deserts of Egypt to live a simple life of prayer, seeking the silence that would enable them to encounter God. The sayings that emerge from the desert reveal a form of prayer that integrated mind, body and spirit. Prayer was neither just a form of words nor an emotional experience but something much deeper, emerging from the heart of a person, that place beneath our everyday selves where we find an inner unity and a sense of God’s presence.

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, the same era as the Desert Fathers & Mothers, 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 in a few week’s time, 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. As I was saying this morning, 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.

As we cultivate the soil of our hearts by practising 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, which you will have seen on the back of your timetable:

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’.

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. He draws deeply on the tradition handed down to him through monastic practices that came originally from the deserts of Egypt, although he was probably unaware of their origin. I am drawn to him because he is an Englishman writing in middle English who brings these practices into our own culture.

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 God and 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.

This sense of offering all that we are can also be summed up physically by prostrating ourselves. I like to do this after crossing myself at the start of my times of prayer… [demonstrate – half-prostrate then go out flat, back into a squat].

In prostrating ourselves we acknowledge our sinfulness, our littleness before God. I find it an opportunity to let go of anything I am clinging to, whatever might get in the way of prayer. Then as we rise up again we embrace the resurrection life, standing before God as a much-loved child of God.

Nilus of Ancyra, an Egyptian ascetic writing in the 5th Century says:

On the Lord’s day we pray standing, [thereby] expressing the steadfast quality of the age to come. On other days, though, we bend the knee, indicating thereby the fall of the human race through sin. When we rise from bending the knee, indeed, we make clear the resurrection that has been granted to us all through Christ and which is celebrated on the Lord’s day.

Bending the knee can mean simply kneeling but also encompasses putting your face to the ground as you kneel, and perhaps taking that into a full prostration.

If you go to an Eastern Orthodox for spiritual direction you might find yourself being prescribed 100 prostrations per day as a way to enliven your prayer! Gabriel Bunge, a Benedictine hermit whose writing I am drawing on today, believes that much of the dryness that we westerners experience in prayer is because of our lack of physical engagement. Our prayer is something of the mind or psychological experience. My own experience of entering into the bodily expression of prayer certainly bears this out.

Sadly we don’t have space for all of us to prostrate ourselves here but I encourage you to explore these movements, or any others that might express the offering of yourself to God.

To return to this afternoon’s practice, after starting standing up we will sit for an extended time of silence. Although the early Christians usually prayed standing, they also accepted that by reason of infirmity you might pray sitting or even lying down. But sitting has gradually become a common practice whether we are infirm or not and it has its place too.

Certainly by the 14th Century some monks of the Eastern Church who were inheritors of the Desert traditions were advocating praying the Jesus Prayer whilst seated on a low stool – and interesting that this is the same era as our anonymous author of the ‘The Cloud’. Maybe he prayed seated too but he doesn’t say. I wonder whether sitting down to pray goes with a greater sense of individual interiority that had developed over the centuries. Certainly I find this interiority is most easily contacted when seated. I sense a research project here for which I sadly do not have time! Or if any of you know of writings on this I’d be delighted to hear.

During our time of prayer we will use the phrase ‘I Am’ as our anchor, 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 body awareness exercise as in the first session 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.

[see handout Prayer Practice: "I AM"]



At the end:

To finish let us hear again from the Desert Fathers:

Abba Lot visited Abba Joseph and said to him: “Abba, according to my strength, I recite my little office and carry out my little fasts, prayer, meditation, seclusion and according to my strength I purify myself of my thoughts. What else must I do?” Then the elder stood up, spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten burning lamps. And he said to him: “If you will, become totally like fire.”

Amen

Mother Anne Clarke, Abbess OSB, Malling Abbey

© The Benedictine Community at Malling Abbey 2026