Prayer

St Benedict said: ‘Laborare est orare.’ (‘To work is to pray.’) Let us take that in this sense: we work in silence praying. We drink from silence praying the Prayer, the Jesus Prayer.

To be able to deepen the Jesus Prayer, we must turn to God. That is why it is so important to experience illness. So important to experience poverty. Deprivation. Hunger. Thirst. Such things make us turn to Jesus in the Jesus Prayer, to God the Father in the Our Father, to the Holy Spirit; and to depend on them for our very existential salvation. Only thus can we move beyond being buffeted by the winds of everyday life so as to base ourselves on the Rock in faith. And it is standing on the Rock that we pray.

And it is standing on the Rock that we can remain silent and pray, drinking from the silence while we work with our hands, our mind repeating in our heart the words of the Prayer in love of Jesus Christ, the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit. May God be with us.