By Saint Augustine 

“The desire of one’s heart constitutes one’s prayer. There is a hidden anguish which is inaudible to us…. If your desire lies open to the one who is your God and who sees your secret, God will answer you. For the desire of your heart is itself your prayer. And if the desire is constant, so is your prayer.  

“The Apostle Paul had purpose in saying: ‘Pray without ceasing.’ Are we then ceaselessly to bend our knees, to lie prostrate, or to lift up our hands? Even if we admit that we pray in this fashion, I do not believe that we can do so all the time.

 Yet there is another, interior kind of prayer without ceasing, namely, the desire of the heart. 

“Whatever else you may be doing, if you but fix your desire on God’s Sabbath rest, your prayer will be ceaseless. Therefore, if you wish to pray without ceasing, do not cease to desire. The constancy of your desire will itself be the ceaseless voice of your prayer…. If your love is without ceasing, you are crying out always; if you always cry out, you are always desiring; and if you desire, you are calling to mind your eternal rest in the Lord…. If the desire is there, then the groaning is there as well. Even if people fail to hear it, it never ceases to sound in the hearing of God.  “

 

Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa (died 430 AD).