The Christian tradition of prayer begins with Jesus. We are told his disciples once approached him with the request: “Lord, teach us how to pray, as John the Baptist taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1).

This led Jesus to enunciate the Our Father, which remains in the Christian tradition a complete expression of vocal prayer. But vocal prayer is not the only way to pray.

From earliest times vocal prayer was linked with meditation. Both were regarded as essential, and both referred to interchangeably, though the former meant articulation in words, while the latter was more reflective and internal. The Gospels record that Jesus frequently went off into the mountains to pray by himself, and one can certainly imagine him on those occasions praying in both senses.

In the wider Biblical tradition, that is, going back to the Hebrew Scriptures, meditation was not unknown. Scripture readers are in fact directed to meditate. In Joshua 1:8, God commands his people to meditate on his word day and night to instill obedience. The psalmist says that "his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night" Psalm 1:2. 

Later tradition would make a further distinction between meditation and contemplation. Meditation would refer, as I have said, to prayer which is more internally reflective. Contemplation would designate prayer free of all deliberate mental activity. It would mean having “a quiet mind,” as the Desert Fathers put it, or as Gregory the Great summed it up at the end of the sixth century, the state of “resting” in God.

The rise of monasticism was the first major development in the tradition of contemplative prayer. I will review this development from two points of view: the practice of lectio divina, and the contribution of the desert fathers.

I. Lectio Divina

Christian meditation formally began with the early monastic practice of reading the Bible slowly. Monks would carefully consider the deeper meaning of each verse as they read it.

This slow and thoughtful reading of the Scriptures, and the ensuing pondering of its meaning, was called lectio divina or divine reading. It was a practice of listening to God at deeper and deeper levels of inward attention, and – we should note - it was a method recommended to lay people and monks alike. 

Lectio had four basic steps, namely, lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. Reading the text, i.e. looking at its form, content, words, images, and context, was lectio.

Pondering upon it was meditatio (meditation). The movement of the heart in response to pondering was oratio (prayer). And prayer itself would give way to quiet or the state of resting in God: contemplatio.

These four moments – reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation - might all take place during the same period of prayer. They were interwoven one into the other. Like the angels ascending and descending on Jacob's ladder – Lectio was in fact called The Ladder of Monks  - one went up and down the ladder of prayer.

Sometimes one would praise the Lord with one's lips, sometimes with one's thoughts, sometimes with acts of will, and sometimes with loving attention. Contemplation was thus not a distinct category of prayer, set apart as the special calling of any person or group of persons. It was regarded as the normal development of listening to the word of God.

Lectio Divina never disappeared from the tradition, and has undergone a strong contemporary revival, in large part through the work of the retired archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, SJ. In the Caribbean (as in Ireland and Canada) the revival of lectio is associated with Fr Michel de Verteuil, CSSp, who spent more than twenty years in its teaching and dissemination.

II. The Desert Fathers

The desert fathers take us to the origins of monasticism itself. Monasticism was born in an extraordinary flowering of spirituality in the deserts of North Africa, Syria, and Palestine in the late third and early fourth century.

Many explanations have been offered for its emergence. Certain key texts from Scripture, especially those having to do with renunciation and detachment, are said to have been primary sources of inspiration.

It is also true that with late Roman society in a state of cultural decay, men and women were preoccupied – in a way we can scarcely fathom - with saving themselves. The desert was a logical place to flee to. From time immemorial it was the place of regeneration and renewal.

The desert fathers were one of two varieties of monks. The others were cenobites, living in communities, under the pedagogy of the rule. Lectio Divina originated with this group the former were essentially solitaries coming together for a communal liturgy, but basically striving for perfection, under the charismatic authority of the Spirit, and under the inspiration of elders (Abbas) revered for their holiness.

The characteristic spirituality of the fathers was biblical. The monks appropriated Scripture so thoroughly they came to be seen by their contemporaries as living “bearers of the word.” They also transmitted their wisdom through “words” exchanged between an Abba and a novice.

A novice would approach an Abba for a word (of advice or clarification), and the latter would reply with a recommendation rooted in experience and filtered through a lifetime of striving to re-direct every aspect life to God.

The “words” are always concrete, and their brevity is refreshing. As Thomas Merton remarked: “There is more light and satisfaction in these laconic sayings than in many a long ascetic treatise full of details about ascending from one ‘degree’ to another in the spiritual life.”

The fathers contributed to the tradition of contemplation mainly through clarifying its pre-conditions. What kind of person makes a good contemplative? To that question they replied unanimously. Not a special person in any sense. Anyone would do.

What one needed to do was to seek was one’s true self, a self only partially known, fundamentally hidden with Christ in God. Seeking that self required not only humility but a detachment from oneself that was truly phenomenal. One had to die to the values of the false, transient self – which began with the clean break made by the monk when he entered the desert.

Thence the monk embarked on a life of solitude and work, poverty and fasting, charity and prayer, which enabled the old superficial self to be purged away and permitted the gradual emergence of the true self, where the believer and Christ were “one Spirit.”

The end of all this striving was “purity of heart,” a clear, unobstructed vision of the true state of things, an intuitive grasp of one’s inner reality as lost with Christ in God. And the fruit of this was “rest”, not rest of the body or even of the spirit. As Merton put it, rest was “a kind of simple no-whereness and no-mindedness that had lost all preoccupation with a false or limited ‘self’.”

The fathers emphasised their lack of special status by reminding novices over and over again that while they had abandoned society for the desert, they had brought themselves with themselves into the desert. Temptations therefore never left them. Many of their “words” are rueful reminders that for all their striving, they still remained inexorably “in the flesh.”

It was from the fathers that the list of deadly sins developed. Years of striving and struggle had allowed them to see the pitfalls of all striving for spiritual excellence. 

Revelation, in revealing a height (to which they strove) by that very fact also revealed a depth (to which they could fall) – and they were acutely sensitive to the many ways in which striving, well-motivated and in earnest, could be derailed.

The value they prized above all was silence. Apart from being the quickest way to cut off slander and gossip, silence was the root of powerful “words”.  Silence also maintained the balance between the heart and the tongue. It allowed the monk to “teach your mouth to say what you have in your heart,” and to “teach your heart to guard what your tongue teaches.”

Words of integrity and authority came only from someone who learned how to keep this balance.

  In this connection, a novice, we are told, came to Abba Sisoes to ask him how to “guard the heart”. Sisoes directed him not to the heart’s intricate workings, but to his mouth. “How,” he asked, “can we keep watch over our hearts when our mouth…is open?”

By leaving the gate of the mouth carelessly ajar, Sisoes implied, all one’s efforts to realise purity of heart could be dissipated.