On prayer, mindfulness and contemplation

A lot of people seem to mean a lot of different things by ‘prayer’.

I once went to what was advertised as an Augustinian prayer day. That sounded eminently attractive, I thought: I’m interested in Augustine, and I’m interested in prayer. What we were told to do, however, was to sit in silence, individually, for 30 minutes, concentrating on our breathing.

Well, that’s not prayer. That’s mindfulness, the Westernised and tamed version of Buddhist transcendental meditation. (In fact, we were even told to use a phrase such as ‘Our Father’ to repeat if we found it hard to concentrate; that sounds very similar to a mantra.)