The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on August 1, 2025 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Years ago, during one especially full season of life, I can remember stumbling across one-half of an hour of actual free time and suddenly realizing that I didn’t know what to do with the time and space. I had forgotten how to rest, to be at ease, to live in that in-between space of work and prayer that the Benedictine monastic tradition points to as leisure.
Then, it was the perspective of a break from work that pointed both to leisure and to my forgetfulness of how to rest. More recently, it was the perspective of prayer that pointed to rest. Like many of us, I am tempted to treat silent, quiet prayer like a chore to complete or a job to become good at. When this happens, I strive in the “doing” of prayer, overly focused on technique or comparing how “well” I prayed from one day to the next. On a particularly rough day, when it seemed that the most I could muster for prayer was to curl up in a fetal position and rest in my prayer space, it was especially life-giving to sense that this, too, “counted” as prayer. Prayer itself pointed to leisure and granted me permission to rest.
A third lens that points to rest in prayer is extended retreat. During retreat, the discipline of multiple prayer periods in the daily rhythms can make it seem that prayer is the work of the day. Prayer and work become like one, and that paradox points to the third thing, the deep rest that comes with having the luxury of being able to pray together multiple times a day, as if prayer and communion are what we were made for! The deep rest of prayer on retreat is more than a break from work or obligation; it is a remembering, a privileged paradox that points to the fullness of being human. Deep rest in prayer holds a Divine purpose-the human being fully alive!
