Pray Without Ceasing

AM Psalm 1, 2, 3 • PM Psalm 4, 7
Dan. 1:1-21 • 1 John 1:1-10 • John 17:1-11

1 Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers (Psalm 1: 1-3).

When I was in high school, I learned about the work of JD Salinger and read his novel Franny and Zooey over and over again. I was drawn to the depiction of a family full of quirky, brilliant writers, especially the earnest, troubled Franny, who has secretly begun saying the Jesus Prayer to cope with a stressful secret she’s keeping, among other things. It goes: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” and is repeated over and over again throughout the day. This kind of dependence on and continual connection to the Creator was something that, even as a teenager, I understood. I grew up Catholic, and repeating prayers by saying novenas and decades of the Rosary was a routine part of life. A very comforting routine.

I was encouraged to “pray without ceasing” by the folks around me who helped shaped my spiritual point of view at that time: my mother, the teachers at the Catholic high school I attended, a couple of close friends. Here is a passage from scripture I remember learning and thinking about a lot back then, a passage that I think about often now: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). Prayer was built in to my school day, but I had already digested a good deal of wrong information about how I should be approaching G_d. In summary, I will say that I believed that my relationship with G_d would be mostly transactional: if I was good and put in the spiritual “work” of going to Mass, receiving the sacraments and spending time in prayer, G_d would provide for and protect me until my body stopped living. Then, I would get to go to heaven. An anxious child, I got to work on that “work” right away. These ideas shaped my prayer life for so many years, and made it feel, at times, obligatory and rote.

The upside of that part of my spiritual development was the idea that maintaining sustained, daily, day-long contact with G_d is possible and it can feel natural. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of moments when my prayers are full of fears, worries, requests, needs, and when I’m really off-center spiritually, demands (sorry, G_d! Sometimes I am a jerk). G_d already knows what we need and what our hearts desire, and even in writing those words, I am reminded of how easy it is to lose sight of that.

There are a few brief prayers at the heart of my practice, and I think of them as keys to the door of a sacred, quiet space where I am alone in the presence of G_d. There are no requests attached to these prayers, no real “purpose,” I suppose, except to increase the intimacy between me and them – to stay connected.

Written by Jane V. Blunschi

Jane is a writer and teacher living in Fayetteville, Arkansas.