When Jesus is talking about prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, He is talking about prayer in the same way that the early Christian monks spoke about it. When they spoke about prayer, they spoke about the essence of prayer. Or pure prayer as they called it. It doesn’t deny the many expressions and dimensions of prayer. I am not being a Puritan about meditation, that it excludes other forms of prayer. Of course, it doesn’t. For me as a monk, it enriches all the other forms of prayer – scripture, the Eucharist.
( Christian Life in the Light of Christian Meditation 3, Laurence Freeman )
