On Unceasing Prayer

The invitation to unceasing prayer in the New Testament is emphatic and constantly repeated in various expressions. Paul invites the community to pray “without interruption” (a⁠-⁠dial⁠-⁠leiptōs) (1 Thess. 5:17). “At every opportunity (en panti kairōi) pray in the Spirit, using prayers and petitions of every sort. Pray constantly and attentively for all in the holy company. Pray for me…” (Eph. 6:18⁠-⁠19). Repeatedly he uses expressions meaning “persevere, persist, be constant” in reference to prayer: “Pray perseveringly (pros⁠-⁠kartereite) (Col. 4:2), … persevere (proskarterountes) in prayer” (Rom. 12:12). Paul himself prays “fervently (hyper⁠-⁠ek⁠-⁠perissou) night and day that we may see you face to face and remedy any shortcomings in your faith” (1 Thess. 3:10); he prays “for you always (pantote) that our God may make you worthy of his call, and fulfill by his power every honest intention and work of faith” (2 Thess. 1:11). Here Paul is only the echo of Christ, who tells the parable about the widow’s plea to the unjust judge: “He told them a parable on the necessity of praying always and not losing heart” (Luke 18:1). While in Luke’s Gospel we see Jesus praying on the great occasions of his life (his baptism, selection of disciples, transfiguration, agony in the garden, crucifixion), John shows him to us in an unceasing dialogue of prayer with the Father: “Always” he looks to the Father in order to do what the Father does and shows him in love (John 5:19⁠-⁠20); he “always” does what pleases the Father (John 8:29); he knows that the Father “always” hears him (John 11:42), which presupposes that also an unceasing Word of Prayer is sounding from the Son to the Father. Even the Cross will not interrupt this dialogue (John 16:32). Tradition could not ignore this example and these invitations: from the beginning it has taken them up and tried to explain them continually anew. And every age must have the directive stated for itself anew and consider anew its observance.

1. The world, enveloped and stamped by the Word

Jesus' statement, “The heavens and the earth will pass away but my words will not pass” (Matt. 24:35), indicates his awareness that his life “encompasses” (as Guardini says) everything subject to time and transitoriness. This means not only that the world is enveloped by his words as in a protective cover, but that it is permeated, supported by them from within as though they were its very principle. If, on the other hand, this statement seems to refer and surely does refer to the spoken words of Jesus, these words are so much an expression of his nature, activity, and mind, so much incarnate speech, that this principle is he himself in his indissoluble wholeness. Both aspects lead us to Johannine Christology: on the one hand, the world as a whole is created in the Word, who was “in the beginning,” and on the other hand this Word-Principle is also incarnate, most profoundly immanent in world nature and history in his world existence, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The teaching of the Prologue to John’s Gospel did not fall from heaven; it is the flower of a bud closed in pre-Biblical divination but opening in the Old Testament. For the ancient peoples of Egypt and the Near to Far East the phenomenal world is also the revelation of a meaning, sound, or word immanent in the world and resounding from the inscrutable depths together with it. These expressions have the same basic meaning, as shown by the Indo-European root bha-, which can be interpreted as meaning both “to shine, to appear” (Greek phaō, as in Epiphany; phaos, “light”; Sanskrit bha⁠-⁠tis, “splendor”) and “to speak” (Latin fateor, “to reveal”; fas, “divine utterance”; fatum, “what the Divine has spoken to man”). For Heraclitus the rhythm of the eternal Logos resounds through the martial din of things, similarly for Lao-tse and for the Pythagoreans this order of meaning becomes audible in the harmony of the spheres: poets have always attempted to hear the “song” dormant in all things (Eichendorff), and Hans Kayser¹ devoted his life’s work to hearing this “song.” What do things want to “say”? Beyond articulated, “categorial” languages can their transcendental ground, the primal language of the world, be perceived? Certainly not by mere formalizing abstractions, as modern linguistic logic in its flight from the truth of things attempts to do it, but by a new sense of hearing—as described by fairy tales in their naïveté—that hears the language not only of birds, of animals, but also of plants and stones, of light and night.

The threshold from pre-Biblical to Biblical is crossed in wondrous Psalm 19, which begins by including in Revelation the Assyro-Babylonian concept of silent celestial writing inscribed in the stars and decipherable to the wise man:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day pours out the word to day,
and night to night imparts knowledge;
Not a word nor a discourse whose voice is not heard;
Through all the earth their voice resounds,
and to the ends of the world, their message.

The ensuing epiphany of the sun recalls an Egyptian theme, but suddenly, abruptly the glory of Yahweh’s Torah—“clear, enlightening the eye; pure, true” (Psalm 19:9⁠-⁠10)—replaces the sun. Here the secret primal language (about which Herder even in his time was so enthusiastic) has made itself clearly intelligible, and as the Torah is here described, it is impossible to say whether it is articulated (categorial) or transcendental language of the world. Jewish speculation also approximated the Torah more and more to the World Principle: finally it is identified with the “Wisdom” created at the beginning of God’s rule (Prov. 8:22), “in” which be founded the earth and the heavens (Prov. 3:19). Light-Sound-Language: with this concept we are already on the threshold of the Prologue to John’s Gospel, for the “Logos,” the light of men (John 1:4), has also “interpreted” the God who has never been seen in the mode of language (John 1:18).

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But the Johannine “Word” with its two sides is described for us more clearly than the Word of the Old Testament. Of course, already Wisdom is “God’s delight day by day, playing before him always,” and she herself, on the other hand, is “delighted with men,” she is even the “attendant” at God’s throne and the Word by which he has made all things (Wisdom 9:1,4). But now the Word is “in the Father’s bosom” (more accurately, “turned to the Father’s bosom”) (John 1:18), he is “present to God in the beginning” (John 1:2). Not as First Word proceeding already from God as principle of his creation, but language, expression in turning and turning back to the Father, Light, Sound, and Word first here, in an eternal Dialogue, which John more and more profoundly will reveal as the primal Dialogue of Love. Not intended for the world, but in the mutual knowledge between God and his Word self⁠-⁠contented, and then, in this free, permanent self⁠-⁠contentedness, Principle of the World. As Light-Sound-Dialogue already Revelation, but a Revelation so free that it must again reveal itself to be understood. Nothing speaks of this more exactly than the Johannine aerolith in both great Synoptics: “No one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son-and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27; cf. Luke 10:22).

Thus the hieroglyph of the world, which all world wisdom tries to decipher, becomes in the New Testament more luminous, more profoundly revelatory—and more concealed, because it is dependent on the Son’s freedom for its interpretation. For the last time we will use the perilous pair of concepts (transcendental - categorial) to reject it ultimately as misleading, and say: in that the Word becomes flesh, transcendental language becomes categorially clarified, therefore removed from the whispering of runes, and seemingly limited, but because the Word becomes flesh and precisely in this way (suffering, dying) proclaims the Father’s love, the transcendent significance of the divine dialogue is evident in this “categorial”—in the category of total human existence—in such a way that never again will it be possible to abstract from this language of existence. But just as freely as the incarnation of the Word of God occurred, the Son remains equally free to reveal the Dialogue between himself and the Father to whomever he wishes: “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have concealed this from the wise and clever”—astrologers, psychoanalysts, and technicians of mysticism—“but revealed it to children.” Later we will see why. And in that he freely grants access, he gives also freedom of access: faith, which is never compelled by God, which can only be given freely to God, and which precisely in this free giving of man to the free Word fulfills the meaning of the Incarnation: to initiate man into the Light-Sound-Word of the Primal Language—God’s Love. The Word wants an Answer, Language wants Correspondence, so that the Dialogue in heaven will now become a Dialogue between heaven and earth.

The full meaning of the concept of Dialogue here has to be held in suspense, for the Word, whose life envelops the world, is out of God’s bosom and to this bosom, but therein the Word is himself God (John 1:1). But the encounter of God with God is beyond the dialogue of two natures. It must be said, therefore, that as long as the God who freely reveals himself to men is encountered absolutely as the Other Nature, the “Word in the beginning” has not yet ultimately been spoken to them.

2. God the Other and the One

From the moment on, when the runic lore of the world gives way to the free revelation of God to man, when God calls Abraham, informs Moses of his Name and commission in the thorn-bush, chooses the people on Sinai and gives them instruction, he is at first the overwhelmingly Other. The idea and concept of the “Covenant” corresponds to this; it presupposes the encounter of two freedoms, even when the one proceeds on its own initiative and sovereignly, while the other appreciates the freedom of partnership from its own point of view. This experience of the freedom and speech of God is necessary for man, since without it all living knowledge of the encompassing Logos is extinguished. The knowledge becomes obscure either in speculation on “meaning,” which becomes ever more indistinct (Plotinus’s “One” beyond reason is unknowable, only the object of surrounding longing), or in a form of magic—as gnosis or astrology or as a system of ethics that can be absorbed into world law; as a result man takes possession of the encompassing world law, deciphers it, lives it and therefore unconsciously transforms it into his own law and nature. He projects himself into the cosmos, he becomes the measure of all things. In the epochal transformation from listening to producing man, from homo contemplans to homo faber, the Word whose life permeates and encompasses the world falls silent. Man manipulates a malleable matter. Nature speaks of the divine, civilization and technology tell man only of man. Illness, injustice, death stimulate him to reflect on how he can get rid of such nuisances. He becomes master of the things that—as “evolution”—are his foundation, to which he need not be “indebted” for himself, since he is above it and can use the first stages as a quarry for his world-transforming, “humanizing” activity. “Set, beautiful sun, they esteem you hardly at all, they do not know you, sacred one”: Holderlin’s gods are irretrievable. Man encounters nothing more than himself, the “sound effects” of the radio constantly playing in the background while he cooks, reads, even speaks, have fundamentally destroyed the music of the spheres: noise instead of sound, background instead of listening through. Where a “rumor of angels” could become audible, power resorts to “occult forces” to make them serve political ends.²

And yet this liberation of man, who sets out to conquer his environment, originated at that point in world history when God revealed himself as the free Other, and thus spoke to man in reference to his freedom: in the area of the Bible. And to show himself as this Free One, to eliminate every suspicion of man’s self⁠-⁠projection on the screen of the cosmos, he drastically carried men—individuals as well as the whole people—“off against your will” (John 21:18). And so it came that his Freedom was experienced as tyranny, his Law as alienation, his Covenant as burdensome obligation, and Paul was proven right: “At first I lived without law. Then the commandment came; with it sin came to life, and I died. The commandment that should have led to life brought me death” (Romans 7:9⁠-⁠10). The stage in which God appears as the free Other can only be a transitory phase, which, absolutely speaking, must lead to misunderstandings and false developments: the Law par⁠-⁠eiselthen (“came in alongside”) (Romans 5:20); para actually indicates a deviation from the way.

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Only radicalism, as used by Paul in his letter to the Galatians, can lead—forward!—out of this epochal tragedy, which began on Sinai and in whose fifth act modern technological civilization is living or rather dying. The God who revealed himself to the people as the free Other previously, laying the foundation for all that would follow, had appeared to Abraham as the One Who Promises. Effusive—like the stars of the heavens and the sand at the seashore, the blessing for all nations—is the view of God for the self⁠-⁠giving of faith. And yet this promise does not dissolve into the quantitative: “There were promises spoken to Abraham and to his ‘descendant.’ Scripture does not say ‘and to your descendants,’ as if it applied to many, but as if it applied only to one, ‘and to your descendant’; that is, to Christ” (Gal. 3:16). Moses, Paul shows further, was a mediator between two: the one, Israel, and the Other, God. But that was only “education” (Gal. 3:24), an introduction to the Freedom of God, who wanted to be something entirely different from our Other. How is that possible without our falling into either pantheism or atheism? Paul’s idea can be followed only with trembling—it is so vulnerable and capable of being misunderstood. God’s promise is Christ, or “God with us.” But God is only One (Gal. 3:20). For God “is all in all” (Sirach 43:28). Therefore the “new and everlasting covenant” will be the abolition of all Otherness in the unity of Christ, who is God’s Word and God: “There does not exist among you Jew or Greek, slave or freeman, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Hence we are drawn into the absolute, encompassing Freedom of God, who in eternal love cherishes his Child, his Word in his bosom: he releases the Child into himself and again embraces the Child turned back to him. This Child, the incarnate Word, is the fulfilled Covenant, the encounter in one Person of God and man, who contains the alien Opposite in an innerdivine intimacy categorially no longer expressible. “You are no longer a slave but a son. And the fact that you are a son makes you an heir, by God’s design” (Gal. 4:7).

Two things happen therefore at once: “when the designated time had come,” since the immense promise of the beginning had to be made real, “God sent forth his Son,” the Word whose life permeates and encompasses the world, “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal. 4:4). He sent him into the condition of human standing under the will of the free God, or, more concretely, into the condition of man who turns away from God, who is alienated from him. Nothing in this condition should remain alien to the Son, he should impregnate all therein with his Wordness, transform everything into an obediently-loving answer: Word as Answer and Answer as Word. And thus the second thing: whatever is alien and different between God and man he must transform into a “Word in God’s presence,” the hardship of everyday life and the contradiction of men, and failure and death: transmute everything into God’s language, which is the light and life of men. This confronts us with the frightening paradox that the more man (now child, no longer slave) lives from the absolute, that is, divine freedom, the freer he is. That God seemed to be the Other standing opposite was only a transitory phenomenon, which now is overcome for the sake of truth: eschatologically God is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), and this ultimate time has begun with the Son’s death and resurrection. For this reason the Church is not the “partner” of God or Jesus, but his fullness and his body; also his “bride” insofar as “the two shall be made into one flesh” (Eph. 5:31) or “one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:17).

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The one Spirit is the personal “We” between God the Father and his Word; in that this Spirit is given to us through God’s Word spoken and poured out to death, the two-sided partnership of the Old Testament is superseded: the Spirit, whom the Son gives us to “drink,” flows precisely thereby out of ourselves as a fountain (John 4:14, 7:38). The Law is (over-) fulfilled, what has been demanded is given to us “in advance” (Eph. 2:10) so that we fulfill it out of the gift. Our activity does not thereby become superfluous, rather it is proof that the overflowing of divine grace really has attained its goal. Christian life and action in accordance with God is therefore a “hastening” of the end, the Parousia.

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Since the Word has become flesh, all this is not idle dialectical speculation. Rather the purpose of Jesus’ life is to provide a living model for the divine attitude of the Word from the Father and to the Father in the simplicity and struggle of ordinary human life. What Jesus proclaims in the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20⁠-⁠23) he lives first himself: the transparency of being only the Father’s Word (in poverty, hunger, sorrow, non-violence, deprivation), of pure transmission of the Father’s doctrine (John 7:16; 14:10, 24) in pure turning to the Father. This divine transparency “has become flesh”; never did a human being speak more clearly, simply, forcefully, and to the heart. The song dormant in all things is awakened in talk originating in the things of nature and human life (the life of farmers and shepherds, knowledge of grain and flowers and vineyards, baking and buying, weeds and thievery, earning money, conducting lawsuits, punishment and reward, etc.), and all this becomes an expression of God’s inner mind and life. The most obvious remains inexhaustibly mysterious, not because the hieroglyphs of the world are mere “ciphers,” but because the mystery of the depths has come to the surface of everyday human life. But in this self⁠-⁠interpretation profundity and mystery are not lost, therefore hearing and seeing require faith, the opening of the heart to God, through God. It is not that further conclusions can be drawn from what is known to what is therein indicated, for what is known—the growth of crops, leaven in flour, etc.—must itself be interpreted as the language of mystery.

This becomes completely clear when a deed of Jesus becomes a “miracle,” even clearer when human vicarious suffering and dying become the language of God’s love that overcomes therein. Nowhere can it be presumed that the “essential” has already been understood. It is the hidden, unknown language of absolute love that here is revealed throughout all human failure. Nothing is so different for God, that he could not be therein the One.

3. Ability to hear

“God is Spirit” (John 4:24), everything in him is conscious life; we cannot have God’s life in us only “substantially,” as a purely objective “state of grace.” We must develop in us the sensorium for God’s mind, living faith, which Jesus demands of everyone on whom he wants to effect his salvation. “Who has ears to hear, let him hear!” Hear in its first basic stage: as listening, heeding. This can be described as active readiness to perceive that which emits a sound in such a way that whatever it “wants to say” is carried out and understood. We have to go a step farther. In order really to listen, I must hold myself open to everything that the thing emitting the sound could demand of me, so that I hear it really as it sounds.

If what comes is God’s Word, the readiness of acceptance in relation to him must be fundamentally unlimited. God, and God alone, has the right to demand all from man because his Word is salvation and demands only in order better to give. And to receive God’s salvation man must fundamentally renounce all, eliminate from himself everything that keeps out God’s life in him. The “poor in spirit” are those who have totally purged themselves and stripped themselves of everything useless so as to be ready to receive the coming Word hospitably. Jesus places the child in the midst of the disciples as an appropriate example. The child is open to all that comes to it, has no preformed concepts, no principles, it is not “accustomed to say,” does not claim any superior knowledge, has not committed itself to anything. Its natural poverty in all these respects gives it the wealth of its readiness to tolerate everything as it comes. “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening,” says the boy Samuel.

Here it suddenly becomes clear how much everything that in the required readiness smacks of technique is opposed to the Gospel’s grace of childlikeness. Whoever uses or exercises techniques to achieve “concentration,” “detachment,” “to find himself,” for expansion of his inner space—whether by “transcendental meditation,” yoga, Zen, or any other exercise, is not poor in spirit. Rather he is full of ability and capability, he belongs to the “rich” who do not pass through the eye of the needle, to the “wise and clever” from whom the Father has concealed it. He is ultimately a Pharisee who relies on his works instead of entrusting himself to God in faith, for technique is achievement, even if its goal is “attainment” of inner poverty. Precisely because one who meditates in Eastern fashion has nothing before him that actively imparts information out of itself about itself, he must attain passivity by his own efforts. In the Christian contemplative, on the other hand, that which reveals itself has already in advance accomplished a truth that is not alien to him, but his own most intimate truth, which he heeds only to recognize. That Mary is the handmaid of the Lord, on whom he can act as he sees fit, is expression of her “poverty,” “lowliness,” her humility, and not of an attained spiritual level; indeed she knows that God casts down the mighty from their thrones.

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This attitude is in no way reserved only for time of prayer, it is the constant attitude of the Christian. He does not claim to know more than either God or his neighbor. As with God’s Word, he lets his neighbor’s word tell him something, if necessary provoke him; he can “permit” things that seem impossible to others. “Give in for now,” says Jesus to the Baptizer, who hesitates out of fear to baptize him. He extends the thanksgiving and Eucharist in which he lives in relation to God to everyday living: “When we are insulted we respond with a blessing” (1 Cor. 4:12). Ignatius the Martyr agrees: “Pray without interruption for others too, for there is hope for their conversion… Oppose prayers to their slanders” (Eph. 10:1). According to all spiritual authorities, active readiness in relation to God requires “dispassionateness” (antiquity), “calmness” (Middle Ages), “indifference” (Renaissance, also Augustine), disengagement from disordered tendencies that could create a negative a priori for our answer to God: the attitude continues unchanged through our prayer and everyday living. Between listening prayer and listening to everyday living there is a lasting osmosis, so that listening in one area makes possible and promotes listening in the other in an essentially reciprocal way.

Whoever learns to listen in God’s direction, learns at the same time to listen to the constantly changing things that he encounters daily. They can speak only of God. We return on a refined level to the ancients’ ability to hear the music of the spheres, to float in the Tao’s equilibrium, “to find God in all things.” Whether nature or civilization, open or closed people, people disposed toward us or turned away from us confront us, is now profoundly the same. Jesus’ statement, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me,” we may expand without concern so that it reads: “Whatever you receive from any person, in a life situation, you receive from me.” Even if it were the blows and stripes that he himself received as the Father’s will. Since the cross God is transparent in both the light and darkness of the world, if only we know how to receive both with an unarmed heart. If one has comprehended and experienced in making faith real through prayer that all is grace, then the word “must” should disappear from the Christian’s vocabulary and be replaced by the words “be allowed to.” We are allowed to follow God’s directives, are allowed on Sundays or daily to participate in his Eucharistic Liturgy, are allowed to serve our brothers, who are members of his body. The reader will note that we have long since, without emphasizing it, entered the sphere of unceasing prayer.

“Pray always”

If we, like all things, are created “in” the Word, therefore also “for” the Word, in whom “all things came into being,” if on the other hand this Word has become flesh, nature, fellow man, then we make real only ourselves when we, awakening this essential Word in our innermost being, answer in the Word to God and to the world. But since the Word himself, as we saw, was begotten by God not for an extrinsic purpose in reference to creation, but from the beginning rests in the Father’s bosom and with him in the mutual Spirit is one Dialogue, then the place of creation and ours too can lie only within this Dialogue; for this place we are chosen “before the foundation of the world,” for its sake created and redeemed “in his blood” and endowed with the divine “We” of the Spirit; we need not work our way from outside to this location, we have always been there with the whole world. And in that we make real the grace of being in the Word and hence being in God, we have parrhēsia, direct, free, childlike access to the Father (the exact opposite of Kafka’s “castle”), we have only to recollect for a moment, in one step where we actually are to encounter the God who is in dialogue with us, indeed in whose Dialogue we are. “He is not really far from any one of us, ‘in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27).

Let us note this “We.” Only as sinners are we alone and isolated. As recipients of God’s grace, as persons talking With God we are always together in community—still another essential difference from all Eastern prayer technique. We always say “our Father,” “my” only insofar as we are all “one” in the Son. The prayer says “our” with double meaning: the Father is “in heaven,” and heaven is not only he in his community with the Son and the Spirit, but: “You have drawn near to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to myriads of angels, to a festal gathering, to the assembly of the first-born enrolled in heaven, … to the spirits of just men made perfect…” (Hebrews 12:22⁠-⁠23). Consider the curia caelestis in the Apocalypse to realize where we are headed when we say “our Father.” We find the world in God, the pre⁠-⁠chosen world, the one in the process of becoming real, and the already completed world. For this reason we cannot go to him even from the earth as isolated individuals, we are part of this “festal gathering” being made real, therefore we take along constitutively all who are under way with us. This being together in community with everyone in God does not imply anonymity of the individual in the crowd, for we are “all” only as “One,” the highly personal Word, who lets everyone participate in his uniqueness. For this reason we are directed to pray not in the crowd, but in our “little chamber,” namely in. the heart, where we are and may be this One whom God cherished and loved. As Jesus was the Lonely One before the Father and among men, so Is every person alone, not only in birth and death and judgment, but his life long among men, so that each can go to God and men with his incomparable self as his gift. He may not flee from this loneliness into the social sphere (as many do today, who can no longer pray personally and think it is easier in a group). But the heart’s “little chamber” has always been wide open in Jesus, he is in eternity the man with the pierced, poured-out heart. If even the physical purpose of the heart’s isolation is to pump blood through the whole circulatory system and the community of bodily parts, Christ’s heart is so dispossessed that it lets its blood—“shed for you and the many”—only as given-away, flood through the organism of the Church. And this Church, which is his body and bride, would be completely unable to receive his blood if her heart had not also always been pierced seven times, “so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare” (Luke 2:35). Christ and Church as “one” are in this common pouring forth the sacrament of the world, which teaches the world’s lingering malady to die and revive to God through the mystery of the daily Dying and Rising.

To pray always, therefore, means only to make real what is: in turning both to God and to the world. Of course it requires effort to turn to God expressly, daily, consciously, unselfishly (not for one’s own psychic hygiene), and reverently, to internalize and ponder Jesus’ words and deeds, in praise, thanksgiving, and petition. Without such articulated prayer we could never come to “pray always.” We must take time for this purpose, time in which we go before the Primal Word and Primal Image so that he himself has time to make a personal impression on us. So deep an impression, that we then remember him in the bustle of the world and see him sound and shine everywhere. If this happens in love, then the danger is not great that we would ever completely forget. Christ’s love persists like a pedal point over the flittering sixteenths (like the F and then the C in Bach’s Toccata in F); the pedal point of anamnesis that in everything there is the Eucharist, in which we commemorate and “praise the glorious favor he has bestowed on us in his beloved” (Eph. 1:6).

And this, again, not as technique and dexterity. Rather in Paul’s admission: “We do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26). At times the ability can be given to us, then for long periods we feel our dilettantism and failure. We do not find the way, like Thomas we would like to touch the wounds and were not present. Then “the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with sighs which cannot be expressed in speech.” Were we convinced of our technique of concentration, meditation, then this would not occur. But because everything is open and broken into fragments, out of the deeper depths of our heart divine prayer can penetrate through the gaps, the “incense of prayer” that penetrates all the way to God. God the Father, “who searches hearts, knows what the Spirit means, for the Spirit intercedes for the saints as God himself wills” (Romans 8:27). God intercedes with God for us. Is therefore unceasing prayer ultimately only a dialogue of God with God alone? Not at all. The heart of the Son and that of his Church are transfixed. Not partially, but completely. This means that the Incarnate Heart and Human Heart correspond. There is in the world the complete Word of Assent, “representing the entire human race,” for all its worldly, all-too-worldly situations, an innerworldly Word of Assent in whom God’s total Word of Assent to the world has become irrevocably flesh and “Amen” (2 Cor. 1:20). Our fragmentary prayer is included within this complete and incessant prayer.

Let us give the last word to Origen:

Whoever combines praying with his everyday works and prayer with deeds corresponding to prayer, prays without interruption, since right deeds, carrying out the Commandments also belong to the sphere of prayer. For only if we interpret the believer’s whole life as a single, great and connected prayer, can the directive “pray always” be considered feasible. What is usually called prayer is also a part of this great prayer (De Oratione 12⁠-⁠2).