Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

What does Jesus teach us about prayer? We know from the Gospels that Jesus practiced a form of contemplative prayer. We’re not told exactly what kind, but we know that there was contemplative prayer in the Jewish tradition. Contemplative prayer, of course, is the prayer of internal silence; we seek to sit silently in the presence of God and oftentimes experience ourselves descending to a deep level of the self, where we open out into that sea of being that is God. The reason we know Jesus practiced contemplative prayer is because the Gospels refer several times to his praying for a few hours at a time or going to a solitary place and praying all night long. Unless we imagine that his prayer list had become enormously long, it’s impossible to imagine that he was doing verbal prayer all that time.