St John Climacus gives us a simple way of learning to concentrate. He says: choose a prayer, be it the Lord’s Prayer or any other, take your stand before God, become aware of where you are and what you are doing, and pronounce the words of the prayer attentively. After a certain time you will discover that your thoughts have wandered; then restart the prayer on the words or the sentence which was the last you pronounced attentively. You may have to do that ten times, twenty times or fifty times; you may, in the time appointed for your prayer, be able to pronounce only three sentences, three petitions and go no farther; but in this struggle you will have been able to concentrate on the words, so that you bring to God, seriously, soberly, respectfully, words of prayer which you are conscious of, and not an offering that is not yours, because you were not aware of it.
John Climacus also advises us to read the prayer of our choice without haste, in a monotonous way, slowly enough to have time to pay attention to the words, but not so slowly as to make the exercise dull; and to do it without trying to experience anything emotionally, because what we aim at is a relationship with God. We should never try to squeeze out of the heart any sort of feeling when we come to God; a prayer is a statement, the rest depends on God.
In this way of training a given amount of time is set apart for prayer, and if prayer is attentive, it does not matter what this length of time is. If you were meant to read three pages in your rule of prayer and saw that after half an hour you were still reading the first twelve words, of course it would raise a feeling of discouragement; therefore, the best way is to have a definite time and keep to it. You know the time fixed and you have the prayer material to make use of; if you struggle earnestly, quite soon you will discover that your attention becomes docile, because the attention is much more subject to the will than we imagine, and when one is absolutely sure that however one tries to escape, it must be twenty minutes and not a quarter of an hour, one just perseveres. St John Climacus trained dozens of monks by this simple device – a time limit, then merciless attention, and that is all.
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
