Did you know that a couch potato is defined as someone who sits for six hours or more each day, irrespective of how active they are the rest of the time? This is one of the intriguing facts I’ve just gleaned from Bill Bryson’s most recent best-seller, The Body: A Guide for Occupants (p. 213). I’ve been reading it a chapter a day for the past three weeks, and I’ve finally discovered how to work my way through all those books I’ve been meaning to read for the past decade or so. A chapter a day of four very different books takes me about an hour and a half, and since they’re all so varied, I don’t get bogged down and bored. Had I worked my way around the human body in one go, with all its vagaries and ailments – and all the hair-raising stories and statistics that Bryson uses to spice up his account – I think I would quickly have reached information overload. As it is, I am happily putting together a list of what good reads to move on to next.

Many years ago, when we all lived in bedsits, a friend of mine used to have four ‘reading corners’ in his room, each with a different sort of seat, a different source of light, and a different book. During the day he would spend some time in each corner of the room, enjoying the different environment, the different view, and the different themes of his corners – detective novels in a comfy armchair after lunch, mathematics textbooks sitting at his desk until the wee small hours. Why did I not learn from him then? I could have saved myself so much restless fidgeting!

Another of my daily reads at present is Neil MacGregor’s Living with the Gods, again an ideal candidate for the chapter-a-day method, since it was originally conceived as a 15-minute weekday radio programme on Radio 4. Like MacGregor’s other books (most famously, A History of the World in 100 Objects) each chapter starts with a single artefact and teases out its implications and its place in a broader pattern. Living with the Gods examines human spirituality through the lens of items to be found in the British Museum, where MacGregor was Director between 2002 and 2015. Some of these are ancient and beyond price: the first piece in the book, for example, is the ‘Lion Man of Ulm’, made from mammoth ivory 40,000 years ago, which MacGregor calls ‘the earliest-known representation of something beyond human experience’. Others have no particular monetary value, but provide telling detail: a Rastafari badge from the Notting Hill Carnival in the 1980s, showing how the myth of Haile Selassie was exported from Ethiopia to Jamaica, and finally to the heart of British imperialism.

Chapter 9 is entitled ‘Let Us Pray’, and teases out the common features of prayer in various religious traditions. In this first week of Lent, when some of us may be making more of an effort than usual to pray, I thought it might be interesting to share some of MacGregor’s insights. Using the Angelus bell and the Muslim call to prayer as his starting point, he comments on the way set prayer times can help us to feel part of a wider praying community – and indeed, how set prayers can help us to cross the divide between the distractions of everyday life and the focus of the interior life.

There are various ways in which the would-be-prayerful individual can make this transition. Ritual gesture reminds us that we pray as embodied beings (Muslim prayer is structured by a sequence of standing, bowing, prostration etc, and there are versions of the Lord’s Prayer that use different physical stances for the different petitions. At the very least we might make the sign of the cross). Or perhaps kneeling or sitting in a way that helps us to remain both relaxed and focussed, able to concentrate on the act of breathing itself. A prayer stool will adjust your weight so that your feet don’t get pins and needles when kneeling, but a cushion between your bottom and your heels will do almost as well.

And then there is the idea of a prayer space, not dissimilar to my old friend’s ‘reading stations’: a helpful way of marking out a spiritual space. Whilst the church/mosque/synagogue is the most obvious location ‘to kneel where prayer has been valid’ (T.S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’), MacGregor points out how the Islamic prayer mat, for example, can create a sacred space, and quotes Dr Afifi Al-Akiti of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, who says ‘It’s a bit like Aladdin, going on to the magic carpet. You are the pilot going through all the instruments to make sure you have done all the pre-flight checks. And once you are ready, then you can take off into prayer.’

There is no reason why this can’t be translated into a Christian context: a particular place in your house, perhaps, one which you occupy only to pray. Or maybe, indeed, a special rug? MacGregor also talks about the importance of ritual objects – a lamp or candle, prayer beads, for the Buddhist a prayer wheel, for the Christian perhaps a cross. Or a prayer mantra or repeated phrase - anything which draws the attention and leads it gently in the direction of prayer. Just as today you can get a Qibla app on your phone to tell you the direction of Mecca, so you can get various Christian prayer apps which will structure a prayer time for you if you find this helpful.

None of these things are prerequisites. You can pray perfectly well without them; you can pray in your car, you can pray while you clean the bathroom. Sometimes prayer flows out of us like a stream in spate. But at times when it’s hard to even start, these things can help. By ranging freely between the different religious traditions, MacGregor’s reflections show how the habits of prayer can offer a treasure trove of shared wisdom across the centuries.

Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Penguin Books 2020

Neil MacGregor, Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples, Penguin Books 2019

(Supplementary remarks my own!)