A Few Thoughts on Praying Always

[[Sister Laurel, what does it mean to pray always? Are hermits supposed to be a model of this? If so, how can every person be called to pray always? Thank you!]]

Great questions and ones I have not written much about, unfortunately. Thanks for asking them!! I actually believe that the essence of the eremitical vocation is to pray always, and even more, to become a person who represents God's own prayer in our world. This, of course, does not mean saying prayers always, but rather being focused on, and actively allowing God to be God at every moment, especially within us. I have written here many times that we are constituted as dialogical beings, meaning, by our very nature, we are related and responsive to God who is a constitutive part of us. St Catherine of Genoa said it this way, "My deepest me is God".

Regular prayer is part of learning to pray always; the essence of prayer is allowing God to work within us and, by extension, in our world. We choose to spend dedicated portions of our day in focused prayer, but in this and in other ways, the essence of prayer is about the pervasiveness of God in our lives and our response to that. Brother David Steindl-Rast identifies gratitude as the heart of prayer. There is a wonderful Desert Abba story about praying always. It involves two different very approaches to this reality with the second provided by Abba Lucius as a "word" of wisdom to the "Euchite" monks who seek him out. It goes as follows: 

“Some of the monks who are called Euchites went to Enaton to see Abba Lucius. The old man asked them, ‘What is your manual work?’ They said, ‘We do not touch manual work, but as the Apostle says, we pray without ceasing.’ The old man asked them if they did not eat, and they replied they did. So he said to them, ‘When you are eating, who prays for you then?’ Again, he asked them if they did not sleep and they replied they did. And he said to them, ‘When you are asleep, who prays for you then?’ They could not find any answer to give him.

He said to them, ‘Forgive me, but you do not act as you speak. I will show you how, while doing my manual work, I pray without interruption. I sit down with God, soaking my reeds and plaiting my ropes, and I say, “God, have mercy on me; according to your great goodness and according to the multitude of your mercies, save me from my sins.” ‘So he asked them if this was not prayer ,and they replied it was. Then he said to them, ‘So when I have spent the whole day working and praying, making thirteen pieces of money more or less, I put two pieces of money outside the door and I pay for my food with the rest of the money. He who takes the two pieces of money prays for me when I am eating and when I am sleeping; so, by the grace of God, I fulfil the precept to pray without ceasing.’

The Euchites were a group whose approach to "praying always" and to spiritual life itself was literalist and dualistic. What this means in the present context is that they took Jesus' admonition to pray always not just seriously but narrowly, simplistically, and in a way that caused them to exclude supposed "non-spiritual" activities like work (though not eating or sleeping!) from being the medium of prayer. In other words, only some aspects of their daily living could be considered spiritual or be transformed into prayer, the place where God was active in their lives. What Lucius pointed out was that this approach to "praying always" led to failure and even hypocrisy because what was considered prayer (or the truly spiritual) only involved limited aspects of the human person's life. He at least provided for others so that prayer continued for him while he ate and slept! What was true of the Euchite monks was that all they did, apart from necessary eating and sleeping, was pray, but this was not at all what Christianity means by praying always. 

What was also true about Abba Lucius' lesson was that praying always meant finding ways to allow God's activity to pervade one's life, and also to draw others into that prayer with our generosity and trust. Even when Abba Lucius treats prayer in terms of saying literal prayers, he opens prayer to the larger world around him, creating a community of persons who commend one another to God. God's presence and activity are allowed to pervade Lucius' world, and thus, he prays always. There is a similarly challenging story in John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent (26th step). He writes: It can happen when we are at prayer, some brothers come to see us. Then we have to choose either to interrupt our prayer or to sadden our brother by refusing to answer him. But to love is greater than prayer. Prayer is one virtue amongst others, whereas love contains them all. It is important to understand, I think, that the Desert Abbas and Ammas regarded relationships as particularly important. At the same time, their emphasis on the priority of love allows them to develop a theology of prayer that is less narrow than that of the Euchites.

Prayer meant being open to God's presence and activity. Formal prayer periods are not the only times the Desert Abbas and Ammas did that.  They were present to God, yes, and they were present for others, both in the desert and also in the Church for which they lived such austerity and solitude. Saints throughout the ages have observed that the essence of prayer involves loving well and living one's life in gratitude. To pray always then, is not about constantly saying prayers, treating some things as sacred and other things as profane, or artifically divvying our lives up into the religious and the secular. To pray always is about recognizing God's presence and action in everything and living as those who are grateful for that presence. When we do that, we become persons in and through whom God is allowed to be at work in every way possible for the sake of God's Kingdom (reign or sovereignty). It is not too much to say that as we grow in this dynamic process, we become God's own prayer in this world. 

Absolutely, I believe hermits are called on to be paradigms of the journey toward Union with the God we know best as Emmanuel, God with us. However,  as I have written recently, I also believe every person is called to some form of this specific journey as the very goal and nature of what it means to be genuinely human. The way the journey unfolds and appears, the vocational paths it takes, for example, will differ from person to person, but it remains a universal vocation to which everyone is called.