There’s lots of talk these days surrounding the world’s best diets – Weight Watchers, L.A. Weight Loss, Atkins, and so on ad nauseam. So, what’s your diet, dear ones? Or do you struggle with my favourite sin, gluttony? Could this dieting all be for naught, one might be tempted to enquire?
Why don’t we hear more about a real diet, a spiritual one that leads to a life of prayer, which is one that heals our soul and opens us to our Redeemer’s endless love? For it is the diet of a life saturated in prayer that will feed our souls with an unparalleled joie de vivre.
First, what is a life of prayer? Like fad diets, we hear a lot about being a ‘prayerful person’, but what really is it?
A bit of via negativa is in order. A life of prayer is not limited to what we do in a room with a high altar, divided chancel, and six candlesticks (Gothic revival I hope!). A life of prayer is not simply memorizing all the cardinal virtues, the works of mercy, etc. so that we can then pigeonhole others who are, shall we say, less enlightened (i.e., less Gnostic than us!). A life a prayer is not only about doing good works and following all the Millennium Development Goals all the time. A life of prayer is not, moreover, just about reeling from a spiritual high, nor is exclusively concerned with playing ‘nice’. I’m saying that prayer is not limited to what we might call ‘religious activity’.
A life a prayer is actually twofold: it’s totally profound and totally simple. Through the sacrament of holy baptism, where we are buried with Christ and risen anew to new life in the Holy Spirit, our souls are infused with a righteousness which enables us to delight in in a life of prayer. That is the profound part, and it’s the gift of new life in Christ in its thousands of manifestations.
Now, for the simple part: a life a prayer is the actualisation of a new worldview, one in which the living Christ is at the centre. These two facets are the basis of a life of prayer, a new cosmology, if you will.
It is from this ‘new attitude’ (thank you Patti Labelle) that everything – not just church time – becomes a prayer. Our whole lives, dear ones, are prayers.
St. Benedict, whose eponymous Rule I lift up for your devotional reading, instructed his followers to ‘regard all the vessels of the monastery and all its substance, as if they were sacred vessels of the altar’. What he means is that all of our work – everything – should be a prayer of sacrifice and thanksgiving, adoring God through it. Echoing St. Benedict, one of my beloved professors recently said, ‘Prayer is not about begging petitions, but being open to God’. F.P. Harton, former dean of Wells, England, puts it this way:
In prayer the soul comes to God, not to ‘say its prayers’, not to ‘make a meditation’, not to think or rest, nor to ask, but to find Him and be with Him.
I hope you see what kind of diet I’m encouraging us to enjoy. Above all, a Christian worldview, at its essence, is being found by Him and with Him. This, brothers and sisters, is our entire raison d'être. This is why we exist in the first place.
Don’t believe me? Taste and see! Almighty God has set all things anew in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Happy dieting!
CW
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