St Basil the Great, with St Gregory one of the Cappadocian Fathers, wrote: ‘We should not express our prayer merely in syllables, but the power of prayer should be expressed in the moral attitude of our soul and in the virtuous actions that extend throughout our life…  This is how you pray continually — not by offering prayer in words, but by joining yourself to God through your whole way of life, so that your life becomes one continuous and uninterrupted prayer’.

At the start of this new year and decade, let us renew our intention to become ‘living prayer’ – wholly surrendered to God’s creative action, as St Elizabeth of the Trinity expressed it.

May God bless you this day.