In Constant Prayer
I have a friend named Bettie who lives in Alabama. I pray for Bettie by name a lot of days, not because I think that she needs my prayers, but because I want to be sure God remembers that I am a friend of Bettie’s.
A priest told me once that he did not think God had favorites. But, he told me, with a twinkle in his eye, he is pretty sure God has special friends. If that is true, then Bettie may well be one of them.
If I could pray like Bettie, I would not likely be writing this book about these things.
This is a book about the most ancient practice of Christian prayer, a way of prayer known as the daily office. It is known by other names as well—the liturgy of the hours, fixed-hour prayer, the divine office, the canonical hours, the divine hours, daily prayer. Its roots are firmly planted in the early Church, and it has become, in recent years, the focus of a great deal of interest among people who grew up in Christian traditions in which such a way of prayer was not a part of their ongoing prayer life.
That was certainly true for me. I stumbled into the daily office when I was almost forty years old. And I have never quite recovered.
I spent two years as part of a community of sixty-five people known as the Academy for Spiritual Formation. Our Academy met for a week each quarter. We spent our days learning about the history and traditions of Christian prayer and how to transpose some of that wisdom and practice into the busy and noisy lives of us modern folks.
I finished the Academy some fifteen years ago now. The world of prayer and contemplation to which the Academy introduced me still draws me deeply, and I am still fooling with all of this, still convinced that there are deep truths buried here if I can just be smart enough or patient enough or devout enough to dig them out.
I am not much holier than I was before I began, but I am still trying nonetheless.
Bettie was a part of the same community. At the end of each day, we would meet in small groups to process the day’s information and to encourage one another in the new bits and pieces of our spiritual journey. Then we would share prayer requests and pray around the circle.
Bettie would say something like, “Jesus, help Alan’s back to feel better in the morning,” and in the morning Alan’s back would feel better.
Or she’d say, “Jesus, help Robert not to worry,” and the next day I would not be so anxious.
One day, after six days of torrential rain, she said, “Jesus, we need good weather tomorrow for traveling home,” and the rain stopped before any of us had time to say amen. I swear it did, and I have witnesses.
Over the years, whenever something untoward or difficult would happen to one of us in the group, someone would call Bettie to tell her so she could pray for us. Invariably, she always knew about it before anyone called her. It was among the most powerful things I have ever seen. It was also a little scary sometimes.
I grew up in a church crowd where the Bettie way of talking with God was expected of all of us all of the time. Even those of us who were not like Bettie at all.
So I would pray like Bettie, and nobody’s back ever got better, and the rain did not stop. The problems never got solved, the fears never went away, and the healing I prayed for so fervently never came. I began to believe that prayer would not make any difference, or it would not make any difference if I was the one doing the praying. For a while I believed that I just needed to pray louder or shed more tears. Later I began to believe that it was because God would not listen.
I have finally come to believe that it was because I was trying to say Bettie’s prayers, not the ones I could say.
I am coming to believe that this way of prayer may not be for the Betties of the world, those who are numbered among God’s special friends, the ones with whom God seems to converse in an astonishing way. Except for those times when, like Bettie, their journey crosses paths with ours, and they are given to us as gifts to be beside us for a time.
I also have come to believe that this ancient way of prayer is not just for the contemplatives of the world, either, the particular and peculiar few who are called to live in monastic communities or to wear habits or collars or some such thing. It is not just for those of us who do not make small talk because we cannot make small talk, who would rather be alone than in a crowd, and who are even more alone when we are in a crowd. We are drawn to such prayer more easily, perhaps, but it is not just for us.
The prayer of the office is not for everyone. But that is not to say that it is only for a minority of us. The prayer of the office is not just for God’s chosen few, and it is not only for God’s special friends. It is prayer for the rest of us.
It always has been. For thousands of years, the daily office has been a primary way to hold ourselves in closer communion with the One who made us. It is a way to sanctify our days and our hours, our work and our love, our very life itself.
It is for any of the rest of us who need to find a way to pray. It is for those of us, and this includes most of us, who cannot pray Bettie’s prayers and yet must find a way to respond to our calling to pray without ceasing.
I have written about some of these things before, in bits and pieces in other books. There is a sense in which I have been writing this book for more than fifteen years. Not long enough to know everything about this great mystery, and not long enough to become much more than I was when I started—a pilgrim who wants to learn how to live a life that is shaped by and around and for prayer, a life that becomes a prayer that is prayed without ceasing. I have to tell you that the whole business still astonishes and terrifies me; it still lifts me up and manages somehow to pull me forward, or if not forward, then maybe even higher or closer or nearer to the One who made us and to whom we pray.
I have been at it long enough to know at least this: of all the things I have ever written about or will ever write about, this is the one true thing that has come to matter to me the most.
Excerpted from In Constant Prayer by Robert Benson
(Thomas Nelson Publishers, copyright 2008, ISBN 0849901138)
