Pray Without Ceasing

Jeremiah 31:27-34    Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.

Prayer is something with which we are all familiar.  We pray in church and at home. But what does Jesus mean - that we need to do it always? And what could cause us to lose heart? What exactly is prayer?

The Church has gone to the trouble of defining for us the various forms of prayer.  Adoration: Praising God.  Confession:  Asking for God’s forgiveness.  Petition:  Asking God for a favour.  Intercession:  Asking God for a favour for someone else. And Thanksgiving:  Showing God gratitude.  There’s even a suggested order for saying a prayer.  Begin with adoration, confess our unworthiness, petition God or intercede with God, and end with thanksgiving.  But that’s a pretty logical, almost mechanical breakdown of prayer – which doesn’t tell us a thing about the actual experience.

A few weeks ago, I watched a short video recorded by a young Roman Catholic Sister, a convert to Catholicism. The video was about a difficulty she was having with her prayer life. She had been raised in a devout Muslim family, where daily prayer and keeping the feasts, fasts, and festivals of the Muslin faith was observed.  Having had an active prayer life since her childhood, she was very anxious to deepen her prayer life as a Christian, but she was having trouble with one specific practice – the rosary.

Most Protestant denominations do no say the rosary, though it is said to some degree within the Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican churches. That aside, it is easy to see where the problem lay for this young, devout, Catholic Sister. The rosary is structured – along with a few other prayers, it consists of five decades of beads, with a single prayer, what we call the “Hail Mary”, said once on each bead. The problem in part is, how do you repeatedly recite this single prayer, over and over, while at the same time focusing your mind on a sacred mystery.

The young Sister had pondered this until she realized that what she wanted was not a grasp of the mechanics of praying. What she wanted, was a closer relationship with Jesus’ mother. In the end, she turned in prayer to our Lord, asking Him to help her grow closer to Mary.  As she explained it, she loved Him, and who would know better how to become close to God’s Mother than Jesus Himself? Her quest went from understanding how to operate the mechanics of prayer, to how to enter more closely into the intimacy of relationship.

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 

Thus Jeremiah, speaking for God, assures the Children of Isreal, who have broken their earlier covenant with the LORD, that there will be a new covenant, a deeper, closer one, a covenant written on their hearts.   Relationship with God will be, as it is for us now, something personal – not written on stone tablets, but on the hearts of the faithful. They will know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples, and us, that we need to pray always. The Church has given us guidelines for this.  We are called to pray first thing in the morning, at noon, at bedtime, and before all meals. We are also called to set aside time each day for what the Church calls Centering Prayer – a form of meditation.

It is a lot of praying, and if we follow it only because we “must”, it can turn into something of a chore. Like the young Sister who struggled with what she found so daunting, concentrating on the mechanics the rosary, praying because we must, does not draw us into a fulfilling prayer life. It’s easy to see how one can “lose heart” if this is their experience of prayer.

So - Jesus tells the disciples a parable about a persistent widow, who, though her early petitions are ignored, finally wears down the indifferent judge. Persevere, Jesus tells them. He is speaking to disciples who, like us, will have those dry periods when it seems their prayers are not being answered, and who will also experience times when their faith is sorely tested. Jesus is speaking to people for whom religion is central to their identity, and prayer is part of the rhythm of their daily lives.

Rhythm of their daily lives. This is not necessarily so for us.  In our modern, greedy, self-centered, secular society today – we have a problem.

And Jesus asks, “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

That is a scary question.

We need to pray always, and this means much more is expected of us than our Sunday worship and our daily prayers.  What it means is that we are called to not live in a closed universe, where our prayers are ours alone. Prayer, even when private, is meant to extend into our daily lives, into the world around us.  We are meant to live our prayer life.  How is that done?

Decades ago, when Mother Teresa was alive, visitors would come to Kolkata to visit her at the Home for the Dying.  The first thing she would do was send the visitors out into the various rooms which housed the dying people. She didn’t give the visitors any instructions, just sent them to work with those who were soon going home to God. And the experiences tended to be the same. After several hours working, the visitors would return to her – their faces wreathed in smiles, their eyes bright with joy.  “Mother,” they would tell her, “I have just met Jesus.”

And that is what prayer is all about – we live for Jesus.  We work for Jesus.  And in living and working for Jesus, we meet Him in others. This is how we are called to live.  This is praying without ceasing.

Learning how to pray is the work we are called to do, the work of a lifetime.  It is the way that leads to the holiness for which we are called to strive. It is not easy work.

In this day and age, when time has become a commodity and we view every moment of our lives as “our time”, establishing a daily prayer life can feel like something of a sacrifice. And yet, we are called to make sacrifices for our Lord.

Just ask yourself, how much time do you set aside each day for prayer? Is prayer, for you, a joyous occasion in which your heart responds to the greatest love it can ever know, or is prayer an obligation into which you enter grudgingly, with a sense of duty, but without any true desire to pray, without the longing to grow ever closer to Jesus? Perhaps you have good days and bad days – that would be very human – but as you grow in your prayer life, the joy will grow and then overtake any sense of obligation. After all, our covenant with our Lord is written on our hearts.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus Himself has reminded us we must persevere - and perseverance is made a lot easier when we remember that not only are we doing what we do for Him, we are doing what we do with Him and to Him. Our prayer life should lead us to the proper focus of our days – Jesus Christ in all things and in every person we meet.

If we are honest, we want things quickly, we want to ask and immediately receive, we seek for and are satisfied, however briefly, only with instant gratification.  It is not a world that encourages a faith that requires patience and hard work.  Yet, we are the people Jesus has called to persevere in the face of a faithless world, to seek only Him, to pray without ceasing.  We are the ones whose lives are meant to be the answer to His question.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

Let us pray:

Lord, we do not know not what we ought to ask of You; You alone know what we need; You love us better than we know how to love ourselves.  Lord Jesus!  Give to us what we do not know how to ask.  We present ourselves to You; and ask You to open our hearts to You.  We give ourselves to You.  May we have no other desire than to accomplish Your will.  Teach us to pray, Lord.  Pray Yourself in us.  Help us to pray without creasing.  We ask for Your love and mercy’s sake.   Amen