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For the month of June, our spiritual practice is prayer. In many ways, prayer undergirds all of the spiritual practices we have explored thus far and it will continue to be so on our ongoing journey this year. But we are going to focus specifically on one type of prayer this month: Ceaseless Prayer.
When you think about prayer, what comes to mind for you? How and about what do you usually pray? When do you find yourself turning to God in prayer during a typical day?
When we talk about prayer, often we think of praying for needs for ourselves and others, for desires and deep longings, for guidance and direction. Lots of words tossed heavenward to address the situation in which we find ourselves. And this is certainly an aspect of prayer. God wants us to talk to him and bring our petitions before him. But prayer is actually much more broad than we often make it. Put simply, prayer is communing with God, often with words but always with presence. In prayer we seek to dwell in God’s presence, to position ourselves before the Lord our Maker and connect with him, being known by him and growing in our recognition of his voice and continual presence with us.
Prayer is our primary means of communicating with God. But it is not like picking up a phone or sending a text message. When I call or text a person, usually that person is not physically with me. But God is with us, always, at all times and in all places. We are never apart from him. However, we often live our lives as if this promise isn’t true. We go through our days forgetting that the God of the universe is with us doing life with us every step of the way. But is it even possible to be aware of his presence with us every moment? And if it is, how?
In 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul wraps up his letter to the church at Thessalonica with final words of exhortation, giving them instructions about how to treat their leaders and how to interact with one another. Then, he closes with several imperatives- be joyful, be thankful, don’t stifle the Holy Spirit, and hold on to what is good to name a few. But second on the list is verse 17- “Never stop praying.” No explanation. No further instructions on how. Just do it- pray ceaselessly.
The first time I remember hearing this verse was in third grade Sunday School. My grandfather was my teacher that year, and I remember making a bookmark with the words of this minuscule verse scrawled on the front in my down-sloping, beginner cursive- “Pray without ceasing.” And whether it was because my grandfather taught it to me or because it lodged somewhere deep in my soul or perhaps both, I declared 1 Thessalonians 5:17 as my favorite verse in the Bible, propelling me on a lifelong journey to understanding prayer, a journey that has taken me to unexpected places, a journey which I am still traveling.
As I grew and began to ponder this verse, it confounded me. Paul is literally telling the church to pray without stopping. But how can we even do this? Don’t we have to interact with this world? I have responsibilities. I can’t stay in my room and pray all the time.
Then, I met Thomas Kelly. Well, I didn’t meet him exactly because he is dead, but I encountered his writing on prayer while I was in seminary. And it helped me begin to wrap my mind around this idea of ceaseless prayer. Thomas Kelly writes in A Testament of Devotion: “There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.”1
Ceaseless prayer is consistent and rhythmic, seeking after connection to the Holy Spirit on a moment by waking moment basis. It is tuning our hearts to the frequency of the Holy Spirit and being aware of the presence of God with us.
Constant communion with God going on behind the scenes at all times with my heart continually bowed in worship and aware of God’s presence with me- this sounds lovely! But how do we even begin to attempt this? We are pulled in so many directions, and our minds are cluttered with thousands of distractions. This is where breath prayer comes in.
A prayer practice of the church for millennia, breath prayers are short, meaningful prayers said throughout the day, so called because they span the length of one breath- one deep inhale and slow exhale. Adele Calhoun describes breath prayer this way “Breathing is an unconscious thing. And breath prayer reminds us that just as we can’t live on one breath of air, we can’t live on one breath of God. God is the oxygen of our soul, and we need to breathe him in all day long. After all, it is in him that we ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). Breath prayer reminds us that each breath we are given is God’s gift and that God’s Spirit is nearer to us than our own breath.”2
Breath prayer puts a concrete practice to Paul’s call to “Never stop praying,” enabling us to live out this call to ceaseless prayer by training our minds and hearts to commune with God on a moment by moment basis scattered throughout the day. Breath prayers can be a short verse of Scripture, a line from a formal prayer, a phrase from a hymn, or something completely original and unique to you. Essentially, we breathe in deeply, repeating a name of God or the first part of the prayer, and then we exhale giving voice to a desire of our heart or the second part of the prayer.
The Practice: Praying the Jesus Prayer
An ancient breath prayer of the church is the Jesus Prayer. This prayer is a combination of the cry of the blind man, “Lord Jesus, Son of David have mercy on me” from Luke 18:39 and the tax collector, “have mercy on me, a sinner” from Jesus’ parable in Luke 18:13. Put all together, the prayer is simple: “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Inhale and pray: “Lord Jesus, Son of God.” Then, exhale and pray: “have mercy on me, a sinner.” Repeat at least two or three times each time you pray.
The goal is to pray this prayer as often as you are able through the course of each day to the point that it becomes as rhythmic and natural as breathing. You might find it helpful to connect breath prayer to something you do often during the day, such as washing your hands or picking up your phone as a way to remind yourself to do it. Do not be discouraged if your mind wanders, if the rhythm is difficult to establish, or you forget to pray entirely. Ceaseless prayer is the antithesis of our loud, frenetic, always going society, and society’s rhythms and patterns are hard to resist for each one of us. But our gracious God is still here ready to commune with us. So take a deep breath and begin anew.
May these moments of rhythmic praying scattered throughout the day awaken our hearts to God’s presence and work in our midst and attune our ears to his voice.
