Until we have acquired genuine prayer, we are like people teaching children to begin to walk. Try to lift up, or rather, to enclose your thought within the words or your prayer, and if in its infant state it wearies and falls, lift it up again. …If you constantly train your mind never to wander, then it will be near you during meals too. But if it wanders unrestrained, then it will never stay beside you. A great practiser of high and perfect prayer says: ‘I wish to speak five words with my understanding,’ and so on. But such prayer is foreign to infant souls.
John Climacus
