Ceaseless Prayer

1 Thessalonians 5:17

How do you pray without ceasing? How do you use every waking hour as prayer? Is Paul making an absurd demand? Being hyperbolic just to get our attention?

The key seems to be wherein Paul makes this statement--he places it in the midst of reminding this congregation that service to Christ, the practice of faith, is first and foremost joy. 

Joy is not simple happiness, but rather engaged hopefulness that is expectant of a good outcome. Thich Nhat Hanh describes the difference between joy and happiness thusly--a traveler in the desert sees an oasis, feeling joy; as the traveler takes a refreshing drink of water, they feel happiness. Joy, then, is the awareness of a certainty that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, even if you do not yet tangibly experience that wellness. 

So what Paul is saying is that as we serve Christ, we find the assurance that all things can be well and that all things can be turned to good, no matter what those things might be. It is a stance of imperturbable hope. Ceaseless prayer then flows from this deep knowledge that God is present in all things, making all things possible and ensuring that whatever outcome arrives, nothing can thwart God’s ultimate will for us--that we be fully with God and with one another in love. 

Somehow, I fear, this understanding will leave many of us still sure that Paul is setting an impossible standard. Such hope seems utterly naive in our world and context. Our very real world seems rather devoid of oases in the midst of its chaos, violence, self-centeredness, and the subsequent failure to alleviate much if any suffering. The sick are sick, the poor are poor, and the despairing continue to remain the abyss. Many of us fall silent in prayer because we see no reason to keep up an empty practice. The desert remains as arid as Mars--no water is there, nor has been for millions, if not, billions of years. That sort of dryness makes any sort of life impossible.

So how do we find our way back into Paul’s pray for us as followers of Christ?

Begin here--the total aridity is the mirage, not the oasis.

Christ came with life-quenching water that so slakes our existential thirst that we will never be thirsty again (cf. John 4:1-26). This promise is not a tall tale or pipe dream. It is present in the story of Christ’s life and interaction with a very real, very dry, and very thirsty world. Christ shared this promise with a woman who was lost in the desert. She fell outside “good” society, collecting her well water when no one else was there because no one else would welcome her had she joined them. She is lost in a tangled web of broken relationships and loves twisted into all sorts of gratifications other than the deepest of twined souls. In other words, she exists in isolation, the surest way to break the human spirit that is created for interconnection and interdependence. Christ meets her as she is. Christ welcomes her. Christ loves her. In so doing, he reconnects her to her humanity. He sends back into the fold of community where there is hope for reclamation as she transforms and transcends who she is, reclaiming her existential identity as a child of God. 

That was quite a ten minute conversation!

It reveals the pattern of God with us, though. God is ever-present. There is no moment when God is not. There is no context God is not within. The problem is that mirage of the world as it is blinds us to that presence. We see only the endless stretch of desert. 

Awake, my soul!

If we breathe, God breathes through us. God is here in every breath. The oasis is present.

Recognizing the eternal presence of God, we find reason for joy as we defined it--if God is present, then so, too, is God’s creative power that can order chaos into life and love. There is reason for hope. Christ assures us that God is always present for us, waiting for us to awaken to that gracious presence. We can exist in hope, for if God is present, then God’s power is present to overcome that would dry us out, dessicate us, and leave us as good as dead. God will refresh us, our mind, heart, and body. God will saturate us with God’s love. 

In this state we can then enter ceaseless prayer. 

First, such prayer is not as literal as reciting the Lord’s Prayer 10000 times between waking and falling asleep. We may say it a few times, but what Paul advocates is not so base. Rather, ceaseless prayer is striving to stay awake to God’s presence as we are awake. 

Second, that awareness comes as actually see the world before us in any given moment. The wonders of God’s life and love all always present. The beauty of the earth--the turning leaves, the dance of clouds across the sky, the subtle shifts in temperature from season into season, the glory of sunrise and sunset--all speaks to the creator. That includes the presence and reality of other human beings, for they remind us that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made, so we acknowledge that wonder as we encounter one another, never falling to apathetic dismissal of another person, but rather in every meet noting it is a meeting of souls. As we listen to the world, to hum of humanity, and to the whispers in the wind, we can know the presence of God, acknowledging that presence--praying that presence with no words at all, just our own presence with God. 

Finally, we find that hope and prayer continually feed one another. As we meet the world in hope, we find reason to pray; as we pray, we find reason for hope. As we allow this interaction to deepen and to claim us, we find that we never really leave the oasis. The mirage of the world fades away, just as for a weary and worn desert traveler, the mirage of the oasis fades as each drink of water refreshes, restores, and renews them. 

So, Paul is not be unreasonable. Paul is not making demands no human being could ever possibly meet. Paul has found God with him. Paul hears the voice of Christ in his own heart and the depth of his being. He drinks deeply of it. He has joy.

Now it is our turn to drink deeply of the living water of Christ.

All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.