By Laurence Freeman

Fr Laurence invites us to go deeper in prayer. To pray deeply, he says, we need to discover what prayer really is. For prayer to be Christian it obviously has to correspond to the teaching of Jesus on prayer. With his insight and clarity, Fr Laurence draws on the Sermon on the Mount to identify seven essential elements of Jesus’ teaching on prayer: silence, interiority, humility, simplicity, trust, attention, transcendence. He then shows how meditation responds to these teachings. In saying the mantra we go beyond the ego to a place of deep trust: we pray with the mind in the heart, in the silence of God’s presence.