“Let all your thoughts be with the Most High, and direct your humble prayers unceasingly to Christ.” Thomas a Kempis

Why rhythms of prayer?

People often find closing and packing their prayer room down at the end of a week of prayer really difficult. Something about the deeper communion with God has burrowed into their souls, and now they long for something more long-term than just a week. People begin to ask questions of themselves and of one another; ‘What next?’ ‘How do we take prayer out of the prayer room and make it part of the whole of our lives?’

In his wonderful book, ‘Finding Sanctuary’, Abbot Christopher Jamieson says: “Finding the sacred space begins with the recognition of the sacred in your daily living.”

And the Apostle Paul says something very similar. “Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life – and place it before God as an offering.” (Romans 12:1)

What is a rhythm of prayer?

In Reading, a small 24-7 community are learning to follow Jesus together. Among other things, this group of 15-or-so friends are developing a simple rhythm of prayer.

• they meet weekly on Tuesdays to be together, praying together using Celtic liturgy and eating together.
• they meet fortnightly on Saturday mornings for breakfast and prayer.
• they set their alarms daily at 12-noon to pray the Lord’s Prayer, alone or with whoever they find themselves.
• they hold quarterly weeks of 24-7 Prayer.
• they use email and the Internet to share news and resources, to communicate prayer requests and to stay in touch.

A rhythm of prayer sets punctuation marks into the sentences of our week. It’s like a heartbeat, the steady rhythm that confirms a body is alive… describing the flow of life-blood around the body. Establishing a rhythm of prayer affects all the stuff of our lives, it brings them into order, into some kind of shape and focus. You could say that it helps our prayers to become more whole, more 3-Dimensional.

Developing a rhythm of prayer isn’t a new idea. Benedictine monks and Franciscan friars have been doing this kind of thing for hundreds of years (and many still are). In Jesus’ day, the Jews submitted to a simple rhythm of prayer wrapped around the Synagogue. And the early church too, they would break up the day with regular prayer. In the book of Genesis, we find that the whole world was like an explosively creative 24-7 prayer room – open space where people met with their Maker. And then at dusk, “in the cool of the day“, we read that Adam and Eve walked and talked with God. (Genesis 3:8) It was regular, intentional time to be together, to talk and listen – to commune.

The goal is not to serve the rhythm; the goal is to conform to the likeness of Christ.

We all have rhythms of life, whether we recognise them or not. In ‘Finding Sanctuary’ Christopher Jamieson writes “When people claim to be obeying rules but break them, we call this hypocrisy, a charge frequently levelled at religious people. When people claim to be free but are in fact obeying unstated rules, we don’t have a word for it. There is no word for it because it’s a very modern occurrence and one that people are slow to recognise. This unnamed feature of modern life is dangerous because people do no know that they are in thrall to other people’s agendas and hence do not see the need to escape from them.”

Jamieson then explains that most of us bow the knee to consumerism and materialism every single day. We conform to the patterns of ‘wanting’ and ‘having’ without even realising it, and definitely without realising that these things are not benign – they affect us in powerful ways, shaping our thoughts and words and actions. The monastic tradition acknowledges that rhythms of life affect us all, and have simply chosen to conform to a rhythm, or a rule of life that will take them where they want to go – towards conforming to the image of Christ.

Rhythms of prayer and life help us to “remain in Christ” (John 17), they help us to keep Jesus at the centre of everything. They anchor us back into him, whatever season of life we are in. This anchor ensures that even in hard times, the journey towards Jesus is maintained.

“A person prays that he may be constructed” St Augustine

Rhythms of prayer rewire us. They change us from the inside out. ‘The Way of the Pilgrim’, tells the story of a Russian pilgrim and his journey, during which he discovered the ‘Jesus Prayer’. Reflecting on it, he realised that “each time he said the prayer it was pure joy filling him with both emotional and physical light“, so much so that “he began to feel love for everyone he met.”

Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ; but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Prayer changes us… at least it should do! It de- and re-constructs us, so we can be the body of Christ to a world that doesn’t know him anymore. It fills us with love so that we can love.

The space we make in our daily lives for prayer, is space for intimacy with Father God. During these times of intimacy, God breathes on and in us (and like in Ezekiel’s vision – Ezekiel 37 – as we receive God’s breath, we come alive again)… we become infected by, and infectious for, God’s kingdom. And then we breathe out, we exhale through involvement with friends and neighbours, in acts of kindness and mission, in loving enemies and serving the poor. Intimacy and involvement. Breathing in and breathing out. This is our basic rhythm of life. As we join in with God we become participators in God’s rescue plan. “Your kingdom come,” we pray, and then we find ourselves becoming part of the answer to our own prayers through the way we live with and love others.

“Pray on all occasions with all kinds of prayers” Ephesians 6:18

To pray day after day for a continued period of time naturally takes you through different seasons. Sometimes we experience different emotional seasons – times of joy and times of sadness. Sometimes we are filled with hope and then other times we find it is hard to keep faith. We go through times of noise and times of silence. All kinds of things affect the pace and pattern and shape and rhythm to our lives… singleness or marriage, having children or not, participation in a wider community/family or not, age, mobility, work or rest, the wider culture that we live in… all of these will have a strong bearing on our rhythms of life. And our rhythms of prayer must wrap in and through and adapt to them too.

To maintain the discipline and perseverance required to pray day after day may mean that we need to experiment with different styles and types of prayer… new models of prayer, ancient disciplines of prayer, silent prayer, liturgical prayer, open prayer, prophetic prayer, etc. Below are a few thoughts and ideas that we hope you will find useful as you navigate the next phase of your journey.

Getting Practical – what does this mean in practice ?

Here are a few suggestions for what you can do.

1. Organise a few 24-7 Prayer weeks. Prayer is a good place to begin. Find an ‘upper room’ (even if it’s in a basement) and wait on Holy Spirit awhile.
2. Gather with friends. Often, when one person feels they want to develop rhythms of prayer, there are others feeling the same things too. See if you can find some.
3. Pray together weekly. Seek out a simple rhythm that works for you and your group. Maybe one evening and one lunchtime a week? We find that ‘little and often’ is better than ‘long and far-apart’ gatherings.
4. Eat together. We’ve found that hospitality and shared-meals together are essential to developing good rhythms of life. Build a regular meal into your group rhythm. Invite some guests along too?
5. Find your focus. What are the key things God is calling you to pray for? Maybe you’ll have a specific time to pray for those who aren’t Christians? Maybe specific local or national issues? You might like to write some liturgy or use some existing liturgy. You might like to build a simple pattern of what you do when you meet.
6. Find a rhythm of life. What is the outworking of your prayers? Maybe there’s a simple pattern of life you’d like to adopt? Many use the ‘Boiler Room Rule’, which is designed to work in big venues and in small groups. If things are still progressing positively how about attempting to live out the Rule amongst your friends/community. Meet regularly to pray, practice hospitality, and serve the poor.
7. Continue to host prayer weeks. As a weekly rhythm of prayer develops, we have still found that focused weeks of 24-7 prayer are also important. Maybe you could host a week of prayer every 2 or 3 months? Within this framework we’ve found these weeks take on a new momentum.

Remember, 24-7 Prayer isn’t really about setting up prayer rooms, but about becoming a prayer room, a place where communion with Father takes place… all day, every day, every hour, every minute, every heart-beat, breathing… in, out, in, out…