christianmystics.com

 

"He prays constantly who unites prayer with the deeds required and mixes deeds with prayer. For the only way we can accept the command of St. Paul to pray constantly as referring to a real possibility is by saying that the entire life of the saint taken as a whole is a single great prayer."

Origen

 

The Christian Mystics life is full of seemingly impossible tasks, contradictions and a sense that one's world has somehow been flipped on its head.

In just one example, here's Paul writing in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, telling us that we should "pray without ceasing." Many people are used to praying only in certain circumstances -- like before a pencil hits the paper in an exam you didn't study for, when you are hoping the stock market will go up 1 point instead of down 3 or, more seriously, when faced by a deep, shocking moment in which everything seems to have slipped beyond your control and all that you love teeters on the brink of absolute destruction.

Even those who practice contemplative prayer rather than petitionary prayer are stumped by Paul's suggestion. Are we to somehow sit in the presence of God 24 hours a day and never leave our chair?

Origen's answer is the key to solving this task which, as I said, appears to be beyond the realm of possibility. Notice what he says -- that a person should mix prayer with deeds and deeds with prayer just, as one mystic said, "smoke intermingles in a room."

This morning, I stood in line in a fast food restaurant needing to simply get a bite to eat and make it to an appointment. The person behind me was traveling light in this world -- he had a backpack in which he kept everything he owned, the street being his address. As we stood there waiting (proving that "fast" food is a misnomer) he started talking to me as if we'd been friends forever. I ordered my breakfast -- and then asked what he was having. I bought his meal and he thanked me.

Then, as I sat at the table with a newspaper, hoping to orient myself (a difficult task for me, especially in the morning) he came over and asked if he could join me. My first reaction, I admit, was to claim that I wouldn't be good company, that I wasn't awake, that the newspaper needed to be read, that I was running late. Hadn't I just bought him a meal? Part of me said, "You did your part." But I caught myself, stopped, and then asked him to sit down.

For the next 30 minutes, he poured out his story. He'd been off heroin for 23 years. He had stopped drinking, but smoked a joint now and then -- and invited me out into the parking lot to share one, which I politely refused. He talked about having come to town the day before and finding a small job that was difficult work for a few dollars a day.

As he talked, it dawned on me that there was nothing required of me but to listen, attentively, because here was a person normally socially invisible who was made visible to me, a person who needed more than a cup of coffee and a meal, -- he was asking simply to be authenticated as a person with a life and a history and a struggle.
There are so many times when I'm busy, when it's easy to fork over a few dollars to the asker as a salve for one's conscience and then to go about one's way. It's a quick fix for a do-gooder, a way to think that one has done something to meet some obligation.

But one of Jesus' favorite ways to describe the kingdom of heaven is as a great feast, a banquet. When we find Jesus amongst the more unfortunate ones in life, he is not preaching to them. He is not asking the disciples to collect a few coins for the downtrodden. Instead, he is eating and drinking with them. This was a sharing, an intimate community that transcended, in Jesus' time, class and ethnic distinctions and vividly showed the inclusive nature of God's love. All of this about feasts and eating in the New Testament, I believe, is the authentic layer of what we have come to know as the Lord's Supper, the ritual/eucharstic meaning of which was shaped by several of the gospel's writers into the story of the Last Supper. (Remembering, of course, that in John there is no Last Supper with broken bread and wine -- only dancing, another sign of joy.)

When we parted, the last thing the man said to me was, "God bless you." Sitting at that table, in the eyes of Origen, we were one whole being. How? Between the two of us there was prayer and action, action and prayer. It was my small sacrifice of time and attention, a form of action, mixed with his prayer for me, his hope that God might somehow continue to better my life with blessings.

And I almost missed that moment and would have if I'd have stopped with a simple donation of a few dollars or if I'd offered up some excuse about about being busy or poor company.

I am reminded that Christ in this world comes in many forms and shapes, in people and things and in emotions and feelings. The love relationship with the Cosmic Christ is an ebb and flow, a dance of giving and receiving that's staged in our soul and then spills out in the world. This, then, is Origen's explanation -- that prayer (communion of ourselves with God) is ongoing and constant, never resting, and that to pray ceaselessly is to see all things as being vehicles of the Divine encounter, for all of the world is ablaze with the same light that carries our hopes or words in prayer, word and deed straight to God's heart.