29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
L.J. shares the following reflection on Sunday's reading from the Gospel according to Luke:

Prayer is more than saying a few words to God at night or even in church. Prayer is a whole way of life. It means being wholly caught up in God all through the day.

A busy corporate lawyer complained to a hermit that he was too busy to pray for even five minutes. The hermit sat in silence for a while. The lawyer started to get impatient, and then downright angry that the hermit wasn’t replying. He had a meeting scheduled in a few minutes. Time is money, after all! With deep patience and gentleness, the hermit eventually said, “Then you should pray for three hours every single day.” This is typical wisdom from mystics and contemplatives. Prayer and contemplation are all the more necessary, and needed in greater lengths of time, for busy people.

Jesus frequently spends whole nights in prayer. He tells us to do the same: “Pray always without becoming weary.” Jesus wants us to spend a great deal of time in prayer. The amount of time we spend in prayer can point to how much we see it as a priority in our lives. It also allows for greater transformation of our lives. Most of all, though, more time in prayer means more time to know God. When the inevitable complaints come about busy-ness, no time, and the defeatist attitude of “I just can’t,” we have to ask ourselves some questions. What is taking up so much of my time? What are my priorities? What am I doing in the course of a day? Why am I resisting prayer? I know how I can take much more time for prayer in my own life. I can cut down my time watching TV and surfing the net. All too often, I find the problem is that I don’t want to pray.

James Finley writes in The Palace of Nowhere: “Prayer as described here never touches us as long as it remains on the surface of our lives, as long as it is nothing but one more of the thousand things that must be done. It is only when prayer becomes ‘the one thing necessary’ that real prayer begins. Prayer begins to take on its full dimensions only when we begin to intuit that the subtle nothingness of prayer is everything.” To love as God loves, to put on the mind of Christ, to be one with the Mystery of God we need prayer in great quantities. It is more vital than food or water.

There are numerous saints who spent a great deal of time in prayer. Many of them prayed all through the night. St. Dominic would stay up and pray all night before preaching all day. St. Francis of Assisi would take prolonged periods of solitude and silence in make-shift hermitages all over the Umbrian countryside to sit in contemplation for stretches of time. St. Angela of Foligno used to devote long hours to contemplative prayer in front of a crucifix. St. Catherine of Siena, at the beginning of her conversion, spent three years in her own room praying intensely in silence and solitude.

Praying for a long period of time also positively affects the world around us. In 1993 a group of researchers studied the effects of long-term meditation on the city of Washington, DC. Over the course of six weeks, 800 – 4,000 people came to DC to meditate for two and a half to four hours each day. They meditated all over the city. They meditated for long periods of time. At the conclusion of the study, the researchers found that violent crime dropped by nearly 24% in the first four weeks. This is astonishing since they meditated in June, which historically has the highest crime rate of the year. Being in prayer for extensive periods of time brings divine healing and peace into our world.

Therefore, we have to spend significant time in prayer. Here are three reasons to do so. First, we need a lot of time away from all the images saturating our brains on a near-constant basis. Our culture bombards us with an excess of images through television, the internet, and advertisements plastered all over our neighborhoods. Second, we return to our ego selves all too quickly. It is so easy for us to forget about God and fall back into self-preoccupied thinking. Finally, spending a long time in prayer is the real, everyday work of staying in relationship with God. It is the same with any of our primary relationships. Being intimate means spending a lot of time with those we love.

In the Gospel of John Jesus says, “Remain in me as I remain in you.” Remaining in the holy presence of God as much as we can all day long is the real secret to growing in holiness. There is no divine intimacy without taking time for real deep prayer. Everyone can make this time for prayer. Jesus and the saints provide us with some good practical advice: prayer can occupy our nights. It is a natural time for silence and for slowing down. Praying at night – whether before bed or early in the morning – can be a good way to give God more of our time and allow prayer to become ‘the one thing necessary.’