Roman Catholics, with their fatal habit of turning the spiritual into
material, think that they obey that commandment when they set a priest
or a nun on the steps of the altar to repeat _Ave Marias_ day and night.
That is a way of praying without ceasing which we can all see to be
mechanical and unworthy. But have we ever realised what this commandment
necessarily reveals to us, as to what real prayer is? For if we are told
to do a thing uninterruptedly, it must be something that can run
unbroken through all the varieties of our legitimate duties and
necessary occupations and absorptions with the things seen and temporal.
Is that your notion of prayer? Or do you fancy that it simply means
dropping down on your knees, and asking God to give you some things that
you very much want? Petition is an element in prayer, and that it shall
be crystallised into words is necessary sometimes; but there are prayers
that never get themselves uttered, and I suppose that the deepest and
truest communion with God is voiceless and wordless. 'Things which it
was not possible for a man to utter,' was Paul's description of what he
saw and felt, when he was most completely absorbed in, and saturated
with, the divine glory. The more we understand what prayer is, the less
we shall feel that it depends upon utterance. For the essence of it is
to have heart and mind filled with the consciousness of God's presence,
and to have the habit of referring everything to Him, in the moment when
we are doing it, or when it meets us. That, as I take it, is prayer. The
old mystics had a phrase, quaint, and in some sense unfortunate, but
very striking, when they spoke about 'the practice of the presence of
God.' God is here always, you will say; yes, He is, and to open the
shutters, and to let the light always in, into every corner of my heart,
and every detail of my life--that is what Paul means by 'Praying
without ceasing.' Petitions? Yes; but something higher than
petitions--the consciousness of being in touch with the Father, feeling
that He is all round us. It was said about one mystical thinker that he
was a 'God-intoxicated man.' It is an ugly word, but it expresses a very
deep thing; but let us rather say a _God-filled_ man. He who is such
'prays always.'
But how may we maintain that state of continual devotion, even amidst
the various and necessary occupations of our daily lives? As I said, we
need not trouble ourselves about the possibility of complete attainment
of that ideal. We know that we can each of us pray a great deal more
than we do, and if there are regions in our lives into which we feel
that God will not come, habits that we have dropped into which we feel
to be a film between us and Him, the sooner we get rid of them the
better. But into all our daily duties, dear friends, however absorbing,
however secular, however small, however irritating they may be, however
monotonous, into all our daily duties it is possible to bring Him.
'A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine,
Who sweeps a room, as by Thy laws,
Makes that and the calling fine.'
But if that is our aim, our conscious aim, our honest aim, we shall
recognise that a help to it is _words of_ prayer. I do not believe in
silent adoration, if there is nothing but silent; and I do not believe
in a man going through life with the conscious presence of God with him,
unless, often, in the midst of the stress of daily life, he shoots
little arrows of two-worded prayers up into the heavens, 'Lord! be with
me.' 'Lord! help me.' 'Lord! stand by me now'; and the like. 'They
cried unto God in the battle,' when some people would have thought they
would have been better occupied in trying to keep their heads with their
swords. It was not a time for very elaborate supplications when the
foemen's arrows were whizzing round them, but 'they cried unto the Lord,
and He was entreated of them.' 'Pray without ceasing.'
Further, if we honestly try to obey this precept we shall more and more
find out, the more earnestly we do so, that set seasons of prayer are
indispensable to realising it. I said that I do not believe in silent
adoration unless it sometimes finds its tongue, nor do I believe in a
diffused worship that does not flow from seasons of prayer. There must
be, away up amongst the hills, a dam cast across the valley that the
water may be gathered behind it, if the great city is to be supplied
with the pure fluid. What would become of Manchester if it were not for
the reservoirs at Woodhead away among the hills? Your pipes would be
empty. And that is what will become of you Christian professors in
regard to your habitual consciousness of God's presence, if you do not
take care to have your hours of devotion sacred, never to be interfered
with, be they long or short, as may have to be determined by family
circumstances, domestic duties, daily avocations, and a thousand other
causes. But, unless we pray at set seasons, there is little likelihood
of our praying without ceasing.