“Pray Always”

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By Sister Cecelia

The scriptural admonition to “Pray always” led me to the monastery so that I could learn how to pray always. After many years of even doubting that prayer was doing any of us any good, I have come to believe it does. How it does, takes a big leap of faith, which requires a huge change of heart and mind.

Jesus warned his disciples against hardening their hearts. A hardened heart cannot grow or expand. The Pharisees were consistently blinded to the gifts Jesus was bringing because they tried to fit him into the strict rules of who they understood God to be.

Getting a glimpse of the meaning of God’s unconditional love was the trigger to delve further into what I understood God to be. I knew, and know, that the Infinite God cannot be understood by our finite minds. Yet, God gave us many talents, and using our minds to understand life better is a challenge for all of us. If we divide our life into natural (profane) and supernatural (mystical), it is a little difficult to think that everything in my life is prayer. “Pray always” involves looking at all of life from the angle that everything we do is prayer—except saying “No” to God. That we refer to as sin.

God will always challenge us—through the voices of those we disagree with, through the words of the Gospel, through life’s changing circumstances—to see God as more than we imagined. Opening our minds and hearts as we follow the voice of God, we are called to live outside the bounds of what we imagined possible.

Though we have been commanded to love God above all and our neighbor as ourselves, what would enable any of us to love in this way? It seems we have to realize that we have not done anything to receive God’s unconditional love. We do not merit it. God loves us first, and when we see this, everything is transformed. Everything is marvelous, because nothing is ordinary or tedious or trivial or unworthy of notice or care because the most familiar things are shot through with the Divine Presence. All of creation is shot through with Divinity.

In Ecclesiasticus 3:4, the phrase states this: “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.” Is laughter, resounding laughter, the kind that brings tears to the eyes, proper for us? There really is a time for laughter because this time too is created by God. Such laughter must come from the heart. It can only exist in one who, like Christ, has love for each and all; the free, detached “sympathy” that can accept and see everything as it is. The comical and ridiculous should be laughed at, though only the person who is free from self can possess that mysterious sympathy with each one and everything. Only the person who loves can have this sympathy. Those who are unsympathetic cannot admit that not everything is momentous in their life. They want to feel important, and they worry that their dignity won’t be recognized; therefore they can’t laugh. Laughter is a praise of God because it lets a human be a selfless, loving being.

We find “Blessed are those who weep now, you shall  laugh” in Luke 6:21. Those who weep, who carry their crosses, who are hated and persecuted for the sake of the Son of Man shall laugh. It is a mystery of eternity that lies hidden, but real, in everyday life. Though we all will experience times of weeping and mourning, we know there are times of laughter too. Laughter is praise of God because it also foretells the eternal praise of God at the end of time. God gave us laughter.

We can admit this and laugh.

 

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