KNEELING to say your prayers was one of the most characteristic postures of earlier generations of Christians. Many novels and memoirs speak of the courage of those who, in barracks or school dormitories, showed their faith by kneeling to pray. A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin famously kneels at the foot of the bed to say his prayers.

Kneeling, however, is not exactly in fashion in churches today. There may be a dazzling display of beautifully worked tapestry kneelers, a testimony to the talents of the congregation, but more often than not, even in cathedrals, the instruction will be “kneel or sit”, and most will sit.

At one level it seems trivial, but something has been lost here. We are bodily beings, and “body language” is something we all recognise. Newspapers carry articles analysing the nervous scratching of the nose, the twisting of a ring, the tugging at a cuff, to judge whether the politician or celebrity is at ease. We welcome close friends with an embrace. We do not convey our love and affection to another by sitting and telepathising intently at them. When Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, it was a deep undermining of the love, loyalty and affection that greeting with a kiss conveys.

Prayer, likewise — for it is at its heart about love — is not merely about screwing up the mind to think about God: it is expressed and indeed enabled by posture. There is a place for sitting — for the slow, meditative recitation of psalms, or attending to the reading of Scripture, holding ourselves in an attitude of uncompelling expectancy, open to the mystery of the love of God. Our hands can be held open to express that openness, and to hold those for whom we pray to that love. It is not for nothing that Albrecht Durer’s praying hands is one of the most popular images of prayer.

There is also a place for kneeling, and many of the words in the Bible that are translated as “worship” literally mean going down on our knees or even prostration. Kneeling is a posture of penitence, supplication and adoration. The notorious “Black Rubric” or “Declaration on kneeling” at the end of the Communion service in the 1662 Prayer Book said that receiving Communion kneeling was to signify “our humble and grateful acknowledgement of the benefits of Christ” given in the Sacrament.

Ritual disputes in the Church of England, whether at the Reformation or in the 19th century, were always less about the gestures than about the doctrine they signified. So Father Mackonochie of St Alban’s, Holborn, defended the ritual and gesture of his church services, as “the barest alphabet of reverence for so divine a mystery”.

This month I visited the ancient Syrian Christian communities of the Tur Abdin in southeast Turkey, where worship is in the language Jesus Himself spoke. Very early in the morning, young people who had learnt the ancient hymns and chants of daily prayer, came to worship. They stood and sang in haunting chants. They bowed, they knelt, they touched their heads to the ground in adoration and penitence. I remembered that it is likely that these ancient Oriental Christian traditions contributed to the moving pattern of corporate prayer in the mosque. In Islam there is no doubt that posture and prayer are closely related.

In both the Jewish and the Christian traditions standing to pray is also deeply rooted. In one of his parables about prayer Jesus tells how both the self- regarding Pharisee and the manipulative tax collector conscious of his sin both stood to pray. As Easter people Christians understood that standing and lifting hands up in prayer, depicted in many paintings in the Roman catacombs, as a sign of the life of the new creation brought about by the Lord’s Resurrection. St Jerome tells us that in Eastertide particularly “we do not kneel or bow to the earth, but risen with Christ we are in the heavens”.

Standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing down to the ground; our bodies express and enable our coming before God, the God who meets us with divine compassion, running to embrace us in love like the father in Jesus’s moving parable of the prodigal son. Posture can lead us into prayer, just as the savouring of familiar words of praise and penitence can enable us to “taste and see how gracious the Lord is.”

We are not simply minds that think, or disembodied spirits, the body language which expresses our praying, is what enables our openness to God, and leads us deeper into the discovery that prayer is indeed, as George Herbert put it, “the heart in pilgrimage”.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe