Get the appUnlearning PrayerSample
THE LITURGY OF BREATH
KEY VERSE
"He breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" John 20:22
We have been taught to treat prayer as a head game. A matter of concentration, vocabulary, the right theological framing. But Christianity is an incarnational faith, and you have a body. Your body gets tired. Your body gets restless. Your body breathes. And breath, it turns out, is one of the oldest prayer technologies we have.
The Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — was designed to be synced with the breath and the heartbeat, until it became as natural and uninterrupted as breathing itself. Rowan Williams calls prayer a rhythm we enter, like a tide, rather than a mountain we climb. Start with the breath.
THE PRACTICE
Use the Jesus Prayer in rhythm with your breath. Ten repetitions whenever you feel anxious:
Inhale: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…”
Exhale: “…have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Scripture
About this Plan
Prayer is strange territory. Some of us arrive here with decades of practice and still aren’t sure we’re doing it right. Some of us arrive carrying a long silence; years where prayer felt hollow, or pointless, or just absent. And some of us arrive simply curious. Drawing on the gritty wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and on the profound theological insight of Rowan Williams, these six devotions are about one thing: experimenting. Letting go of the habits, expectations, and performance anxieties and embracing some new ways and allowing space for a new openness to God to grow.
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We would like to thank Ashburton Baptist Church for providing this plan. For more information, please visit: https://www.ashburtonbaptist.org.au/
