To be candid, while it is undoubtedly my favorite liturgical season, it can become a bit redundant to hear homily after homily every Advent about how the season is meant to inspire us to prepare for the coming of the Lord. How can we make straight the highway for our God in the rugged terrain of our interior lives, when he seems so long-delayed in returning? If a thousand years in the Lord’s sight is like one night’s watch (psalm 90:4), then the church has been anticipating Jesus’s return for at least a few of these nocturnal patrols. And it is now left to our generation to continue the vigil.
But what exactly does this long-suffering preparation look like, especially if it is steeped in daily prayer?
In a sort of miniature retreat in this season when a lot of my normal family and professional traditions have been cancelled, I have been trying to meditate each evening on the writings of Pedro Arrupe, Pope Francis and especially Karl Rahner. The latter’s little books “Encounters With Silence” and “On Prayer” open a window into the peaks and valleys of our ongoing conversations with God over the course of our lives.
Rahner says that daily prayer is necessary because of two complementary but imperative demands it places upon us. “We are to pray in everyday life, and we are to make everyday life our prayer.”
In terms of the first, he is honest in his appraisal that sincere Christians can find it exceedingly difficult to prevent authentic prayer from devolving into “a superficial, mechanical, slipshod lip-service, the performance of an external task to be got through as quickly as possible in order to get back to more pleasant things.”
Who has not found themselves reciting rote formulas instead of speaking colloquially and passionately to God, as one heart to another? Is our prayer life merely time we grudgingly concede to the Almighty, lest we get on the wrong side of his eternal ledger if we were to omit it? Human beings often “suffer from the heart’s refusal to enter into the lofty words of adoration, praise, thanks, petition, awe or contrition, which are the subject and expression of prayer.”
And yet if we discipline ourselves to daily prayer, even when it seems that we are going through the motions, we can recognize it as both the prerequisite and result of graced moments of true spiritual exaltation. “Only when we make the effort, however hard it may be, to keep our heart open, our mind awake, and our attention alert, can we be in readiness to avail of these great and rare moments of grace.” When God meets us anew in moments of longing, temptation, joy or suffering, we must be able to tap into the resources accumulated through everyday prayer.
And perhaps even more important is the second demand. Everyday prayer makes it obligatory and possible to sanctify our entire lives as one long prayer offered aloft with the trembling hands of our very selves, for “God must be sought and found in the things of our world. By regarding our daily duties as something performed for the honor and glory of God, we can convert what was hitherto soul-crushing monotony to a living worship of God in all our actions.”
In this way, we can come to find the divine, “slowly but certainly,” in the blessings God showers upon us in daily life: in the long repetitive hours of work, in the sacrifices of each day, in the weariness of old age or the restless impetuosity of youth, in the friction of a hundred thousand tiny or colossal trials — and we all know we have faced a few of them this year. “If we succeed in this effort, the love thus engendered will suffuse all the things of this world with the infinity of God, through a holy desire to exalt all the humdrum activities of daily life into a hymn of praise of the glory of God. … Thus, through love, fidelity, faith, preparedness, and surrender to God, our everyday actions are transformed into lived prayer.”
The Gospel of Mark tells us that the Son of Man is likened to one who has gone on a long journey and commanded those at the gates of his empty estate to keep watch (Mk 13:34). Let us not abandon our post and its daily duty, lest he find us asleep upon his return.
We must be prepared to recognize the Master wherever he knocks, even if it is unrecognizably at the postern gates during the rhythms of daily life.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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