Toward God ch. 5: The Gift Of Time

In a sense, this is Casey's most counter-cultural chapter, although it is short and concrete.

Time-poverty is such a powerful part of our culture. How many people have you heard say, "I have lots of time." Every gathering I attend includes endless discussions of how stressed and time-poor we all are. Few of us doubt the current dogma that "there are not enough hours in the day."

The problem with that, according to Casey, is that prayer takes time.

Prayer takes time, and taking time to pray does not insert a self-help activity into our day. In other words, we don't pray because it will improve our health or our relationships or our happiness or our inner peace. We pray because God is God and we are meant to be in ever-deepening relationship with God. This hits head-on the notion that "prayer achieves something" other than that basic relationship, whether prayer has other side benefits or not.

I too have heard the prayer-cry from the minaret in Islamic areas of the Philippines and I never ceased to be moved. For everything would stop--it was time for prayer.

But it is hard--there is so much that militates against cultivating a life of prayer. That powerful sense of time-poverty is one. Another is the fact that God is very subtle, and unless we become attuned to the movement of God within us and, when we are aware of such movement, honor it with stopping however briefly for prayer, then the moment can pass us by.

Funny how out here in the Northwest we'll get up before dawn to drive to the coast or go skiing or fishing, yet the thought of the Trappist monks in Lafayette getting up at 4:00 AM for the first common prayer of the day seems both extraordinary and at the same time slightly absurd.

Casey makes a quiet plea for regularity in prayer, another counter-cultural note. I think this jogs up against mainstrean American sensibility, because we jealously guard our sense of control over our personal time and because somehow the idea of "planning prayer" seems inauthentic to some. It must be spontaneous, otherwise it's "scripted" and "not real." But the truth is that most of us who work or go to school or, God help us, do both, have our days planned for us by schedule demands that we either choose or feel we need to do. And busy couples soon learn that they'd better schedule in romantic interludes, or else those interludes will soon become few if any!

I am no one's example of a faithful prayer life, but I do know that what prayer life I do enjoy would dry up and blow away entirely if I did not pray Morning and Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Funny how some think this is extraodinary, and I remember that when I first began years ago with just Evening Prayer it did seem like a big deal. But both Offices or prayer-exercises can be completed in an unhurried and reverent way in no more than 20 minutes each. That's not a lot compared to how much time we spend before a TV screen or on-line.

But it's still hard to make a beginning and it has taken me years to get to this pretty basic stage, just like now after 7 years of martial arts classes 100 stomach crunches is no big deal. When we first started it put us into agony. I believe that spiritual growth is similar--it is all up to God, but we co-operate with what the tradition calls the "stirrings of grace" and with time we are surprised at noting how not only our prayer and living relationship with God has changed, but so has our whole life. It is never too late to make a beginning, and we each begin again each day.