Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
“Paul not only encourages unceasing prayer, but also practices it. “We continually thank God for you” (1 Thessalonians 2:13), he says to his community in Greece. “We also pray continually that our God will make you worthy of his call” (2 Thessalonians 1:11). To the Romans, he writes: “I continually mention you in my prayers” (Romans 1:9), and he comforts his friend Timothy with the words: “I remember you in my prayers constantly, night and day” (2 Timothy 1:3).
The two Greek terms that appear repeatedly in Paul’s letters are pantote and adialeiptos, which mean “always” and “without interruption.” These words make it clear that for Paul, prayer is not a part of living, but all of life, not a part of his thought, but all of his thought, not a part of his emotions and feelings, but all of them. Paul’s fervor allows no place for partial commitments, piecemeal giving, or hesitant generosity. He gives all and asks all.
This radicalism obviously raises some difficult questions. What does it mean to pray without ceasing? How can we live life, with its many demands and obligations, as an uninterrupted prayer? What about the endless row of distractions that intrude day after day? Moreover, how can sleep, needed moments of diversion, and the few hours in which we try to escape from the tensions and conflicts of life be lifted up into unceasing prayer? These questions are real and have puzzled many Christians who want to take seriously Paul’s exhortation to pray without ceasing.
One of the best-known examples of the desire for unceasing prayer is the nineteenth-century Russian peasant who wanted so much to be obedient to Paul’s call for uninterrupted prayer that he went from staretz to staretz (hermit to hermit) looking for an answer until he finally found a holy man who taught him the Jesus Prayer. He told the peasant to say thousands of times each day, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” In this way, the Jesus Prayer slowly became united with his breathing and heartbeat so that he could travel through Russia carrying his knapsack with the Bible, the Philokalia (an anthology of Eastern Christian mystical writings), and some bread and salt, living a life of unceasing prayer.
Although we are not nineteenth-century Russian peasants or pilgrims, we share the quest of the simple pilgrim: “How to pray without ceasing?” I want to answer this question not in the context of the wide, silent Russian prairies of a century ago but in the context of the restlessness of our contemporary Western society. I suggest that the practice of unceasing prayer is a threefold process: we first cry out to God with all our needs and requests. Then we turn our unceasing thoughts into continual conversation with God. Finally, we learn to listen to God in our hearts through a daily discipline of meditation and contemplative practice.
Henri Nouwen in Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith (New York: Harper One, 2006) excerpt from chapter 5.
My GTP work is going well with the delegation from Chile.
In my early morning reading in my room at the retreat I read a chapter, and this sentence in particular struck me: “Paul’s fervor allows no place for partial commitments, piecemeal giving, or hesitant generosity. He gives all and asks all.”
So, how do we come to a place of giving all and asking all?
We practice unceasing prayer. It starts with crying out, it leads us to conversation with God, and concludes with contemplation, reflecting on what God is teaching us. In plain terms, we acknowledge our weakness, He meets us there, and we go away transformed.
God desires that we abandon partial commitments, piecemeal giving, and hesitant generosity.
But the only way for us to do that is to acknowledge our weakness, to meet with Him to discover His all sufficiency, and then to consider what steps we must take to live and act on what is true. It’s a journey.
We only figure it out as we live it out that the path leads to life, freedom, and rich generosity.