Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said

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Does the body matter in prayer, or is it only the thing that carries you to the chair? A great deal of modern devotional advice quietly assumes the soul can arrive on its own. Sit anywhere, in any state, at whatever speed the morning is already moving, and get on with it. The body is treated as transport. It carries a person to the chair and is then asked to keep still and stop interrupting.

The older writers did not think this way, and they said so in print.

It is worth being exact about the claim, because this territory attracts overstatement. Nobody in the historic devotional tradition taught breathing techniques. None of them offered a method for regulating the nervous system, and any modern book that says they did is selling something. The honest claim is smaller and much better documented: when these writers gave instructions for prayer, the instructions were frequently physical. A place. A shut door. A posture. A pause. Unhurried time. They assumed that the person praying had knees, lungs, and a tired back, and they wrote accordingly.

Does the body matter in prayer? E.M. Bounds answers plainly

E.M. Bounds is the plainest of them. He makes the point directly in Essentials of Prayer, and he does not hedge:

Soul, spirit and body are to unite in all things pertaining to life and godliness.

— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer

That is a doctrinal sentence, not a devotional flourish. And when he turns from general godliness to the act of prayer itself, he keeps the order:

The body, first of all, engages in prayer, since it assumes the praying attitude in prayer.

— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer

First of all. Not the soul first, with the body accommodated afterwards if there is time. The body goes first because the body is what actually does something at the beginning: it stops moving, it lowers itself, it turns toward. Bounds then draws a conclusion carefully limited:

The body, that far, joins the soul in praying.

— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer

That far is carrying real weight. He is not saying the body prays. He is saying it joins.

Prayer postures the old writers actually prescribed: kneeling, bowing, a shut door

Once the pattern is noticed, it is difficult to stop noticing it. Spurgeon, who was not a man for elaborate spiritual method, gives an instruction to the limbs:

Bend that stiff knee; yes, bend that stiffer neck, and cry out for God, for the living God.

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook

The wry part is that he expects the neck to be the harder of the two.

Lancelot Andrewes, compiling prayers for ordinary mornings and evenings, includes the psalm that gives the same instruction:

O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker.

— Lancelot Andrewes, Morning and Evening Prayers for All Days of the Week

Francis de Sales belongs in the same company. His Introduction to the Devout Life is a practical manual for beginners, and like the rest of this tradition it takes the kneeling body and the set hour as the ordinary starting conditions of the exercise rather than as its climax.

Why do we close our eyes to pray?

Closing the eyes is nowhere commanded in this tradition, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than letting a habit pass for a rule. It belongs to the same family of instructions as the shut door Christ describes in the Sermon on the Mount: a small, deliberate narrowing of the world so that attention has somewhere to go. Sight is simply the nearest competitor for attention, and shutting it is the cheapest way to reduce the traffic — which is why the older writers spent far more words on the closed door and the set hour than on the eyelids. A prayer prayed with open eyes is not a lesser prayer. It is only a prayer with more in the room.

Taking time to pray: why hurry is a bodily problem

The tradition also treats duration as a bodily matter, which is where most modern readers actually fail. Andrew Murray gives the instruction as an instruction, not an aspiration:

Take time to present yourself reverently and in quietness before God.

— Andrew Murray, The Prayer Life

And again, for intercession specifically:

Each time you intercede, be quiet first and worship God in his glory.

— Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession

Be quiet first. The sequence is the whole point, and it is the part that gets deleted when a person is in a hurry. Readers who want to follow this thread further through Murray’s own books can start with the complete reader’s guide to Andrew Murray; those habits were formed in a working parish at the Cape, which is its own small argument that devotion happens in places. P.T. Forsyth is equally concrete about what to do with the hands and the page:

Read a passage of Scripture and then sit down and turn it into prayer, written or spoken.

— P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer

Sit down. Write or speak it. Jean-Pierre de Caussade adds the pace:

Do not make a number of acts during prayer, but make a few very quietly, with the greatest repose of mind and heart, and in the greatest tranquillity possible.

— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence

None of this is technique. It is closer to the conditions a gardener gives a seed. Soil, water, and the absence of traffic do not make anything grow, but nothing grows without them.

Can the body get in the way of prayer? Wesley’s objection

It would be dishonest to present the tradition as agreeing with itself here, because it does not.

John Wesley returned again and again to the older conviction that a decaying body presses the soul down, hinders its operations, and serves it imperfectly at best. He meant it. For Wesley the body is not neutral equipment; it is a real drag on attention, and he did not pretend otherwise. Any account of this subject that quietly omits him is not describing the tradition, it is curating it.

Yet the same Wesley, arguing elsewhere, puts the opposite case as a question he expects to be unanswerable:

Knowest thou not that “thy body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, which thou hast of God”?

— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions

Both things are held. The body hinders, and the body is holy ground. Wesley does not resolve the tension, and neither should anyone quoting him.

Bounds supplies the other guardrail, and he supplies it against himself. Having argued that the attitude of the body counts, he warns in the same breath that knees can be bent while the heart is haughty and the mind is somewhere else entirely — that a great deal of knee-bending and talking can be got through with no prayer in it at all. Posture is not prayer. It never was. The claim is only that posture is where prayer usually starts.

What does the Bible say about the body in worship?

Underneath the practical instructions sits a conviction that the body is not the enemy of devotion. The Book of Common Prayer puts the apostle’s words in the middle of ordinary worship:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

— The Book of Common Prayer

Murray, characteristically, records it as something he is late to understand:

I have too little understood that my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, that there is nothing in it that can be matter of indifference, that its every state and function is to be holiness to the Lord.

— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ

Johann Arndt states the ground of it in a single sentence:

For God took not less care of the soul, than he did of the body.

— Johann Arndt, True Christianity

That is why the physical instructions are not fussiness. If God takes the body seriously, then a person’s tiredness, hurry, and clenched shoulders are not irrelevant to prayer. They are part of what is being brought.

Which leaves the reader roughly where Murray leaves them, with permission to begin badly:

Quietly tell your Lord Jesus of your feebleness; believe that the Holy Spirit is in you to teach you to pray, and be assured that if you begin, God will help you.

— Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession

This is the reason a Stilling Waves day begins with one short pause before the reading rather than with the reading itself. It is not a technique and it is not borrowed from anywhere fashionable. It is the oldest instruction in the tradition, reduced to the smallest form a busy morning can hold: stop first, then read. The journal simply prints the pause where it has always belonged, so that it is harder to skip.

The rest of this series

Eleven companion pieces, each following one thread through the old devotional writers:

• Why Do I Cry When I Pray? Tears, Sighs and Groans as Prayer
• How to Quiet Your Mind to Pray: What Recollection Meant
• Prayer Postures in the Bible: What the Old Writers Said
• Does God Care About My Body? What the Old Books Say
• Elijah Broom Tree Rest: When God Tends the Body First
• Andrew Murray’s Inner Chamber: What to Do Before You Pray
• How Long Should You Pray? What the Old Writers Actually Said
• How to Make a Prayer Closet: A Place, a Door, and an Hour
• E.M. Bounds on Prayer: What He Meant by the Whole Man
• The Andrew Murray Prayer Life: A Room, a Door, an Hour
• How to Be Still in God — and the Old Warning About Stillness