Pray Without Ceasing

 

                                                  My latest sketch

I’m really bad at prayer. Years ago our church community would hold prayer vigils where you signed up for slots that went all through the night. 

I tried. I signed up for the middle of the night slots. I signed up for morning slots, afternoon slots, evening slots. They were all equally coma-inducing in their boredom. Perhaps it’s a matter of focus. Perhaps a matter of being easily bored. Don’t know, but I really disliked it—I was going to say I hated it, but my mother drilled in me that words matter and we should reserve the word “hate” for Satan and Hitler. Hate being too big of a word for mundane things like praying for a solid hour or two..

The people who seemed really good at prayer vigils and maintaining daily prayer habits  made lists of needy people and situations. For me, disembodied names written in the blank pages at the back my Bible were just that, names on paper. I did and do care about the people, but mumbling supplications for them over and over seemed particularly tiresome and useless. 

I gave up trying to produce a sincere mindset and wandered unfettered: what’s for dinner, can I find a sustainable position where my knees weren’t killing me, running through stories I was reading, conversations I had overheard, daydreams. Anything to take me away for a few minutes. I don’t think I have ever experienced Einsteins’s theory of relativity as vividly as I did as seconds slo-mo’d into minutes, and minutes into hours. 

I’m still no good at it. I wouldn’t even try such a thing nowadays. Yet, people still ask me to pray for them as we pass in the hallways or chat on our phones.  I have asked people to pray for Vic as he has faced so many physical crisis in the last two years. And I get comfort from the idea of prayers shooting across the sky with his name on it. I love that imagery (one I first encountered listening to Gert Behanna as she asked people to direct their prayers for her son: “ to Bill in California”—like airmail missives)  and I believe in a spiritual world, so I believe that there are connections that we cannot see. 

I believe in evil and I want protection from it. I believe in the power of love and want it to surround me and mine. So, I send up the names of those I been asked to pray for and for those I love, hoping for an intervention from harm. We all know that won’t keep us from illness, violence, accidents, etc. But what it does do is remind me that I am not alone. That people have my back and I have theirs should the unspeakable happen. 

There is no place safe from heartache anywhere in this universe, but there a place to remember that we have Jesus and we have each other. 

Paul the Apostle, who I look very forward to going toe-to-toe with on a number of issues, told the people in Thessalonika to “pray without ceasing.”  Is this a reasonable or even desirable goal Kathleen Norris asks? Not in the traditional sense of praying, I don’t think. But Henri Nouwen wrote that the verb for prayer in that verse is the word for coming to rest. 

I can get behind that. For myself and for those I love and for all the hurting people spread across the world. Come to rest. Find your people. Have their backs, Let them have yours. 

It’s an awful lot like saying, “Care without ceasing.”