What is prayer? To some people, this may sound like a silly question. It’s obviously just “asking God for stuff.” Please make Aunt Betsey better; help me pass my math test; get me out of this terrible job and find me another one; make sure my family has enough to eat. It’s asking God for the things we want and need to keep our lives and the lives of those we love going.
To others, this question is not only not silly but indeed is almost always daunting and sometimes even totally baffling. “I have no idea what prayer is, nor the slightest clue about how to do it.” I knew a woman once who told me that she had worked really hard to clear out a corner in her house that she was dedicating as her prayer spot. She put flowers there and candles and icons and a chair and a kneeler and a Bible. But then, once it was finished, she found she had the hardest time bringing herself to sit in that space and pray. She had no idea what she would actually say and do there; it was too intimidating; and deep down she probably felt like it would just be a waste of time. To some, prayer is simple; to others, prayer is baffling.
The secret: they’re both right. Prayer is indeed as simple as that first set thinks: it is asking God for stuff. You’ll remember that the disciples asked the Lord to teach them to pray. He gave them the Lord’s Prayer. What do we pray for in this prayer? “Give us this day our daily bread.” That means give us the material sustenance we need to go on with our lives. Of course, that’s not all we ask for.
We also say, “forgive us our trespasses.” That means cleanse our souls from the ways we have damaged them and damaged others and offended you. “Deliver us from evil”: save us from the tumultuous wickedness that is all around us, and in our souls. And first, “thy kingdom come”: let your reign be revealed to every heart, so that the whole world may be healed. We’re inclined to ask first for bread (and God knows we need it); but God wants us to ask first for holiness and righteousness (because he knows we need that more). The point: people who say “prayer is simple” are right.
But the people who say that prayer is baffling and daunting are also right. Prayer should seem daunting, because it’s first and foremost about God, the One who infinitely transcends any feeble grasp we may have of him; the depth of whose mercy overwhelms us; the fire of whose love ignites us and melts our frozen hearts. There’s a reason that the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t start with a petition, but rather with a statement, an affirmation of the transcendent holiness of God: “Our Father, who art in heaven [i.e., beyond any space or time we can imagine], hallowed be thy name.” The first thing to say about prayer is that it is an encounter with the Living God, the God who is holiness itself.
I’m sure you’ve met many people who are especially charismatic, whose personality effortlessly draws people in, who know intuitively how to capture and hold people’s attention. There’s a “weightiness” to these people that commands loyalty, sometimes even a kind of devotion. The way the Bible talks about holiness is exactly as this kind of weightiness—the word for “glory” is also the word for “weight”—and the supreme instance of this weightiness is the one who is holiness itself. God is the magnetic pull at the center of all things that binds all things together. This means that every desire we experience in ourselves and which we see around us in the world is fundamentally a desire for God.
Whether it’s my desire for a turkey sandwich, your desire for your spouse, a flower’s desire for the sun, or a rock’s desire to fall to the ground when it leaves your hand—every desire you can imagine is implicitly, at its root, a desire for God. Our desires can become disordered—we can want the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way. But the point is that desire, the very fact that there is this motive inside of things to pull them to something else, is what God uses to draw the world to himself. In our mathematical modern world, we call this desire gravity (an impersonal force); but really it is Love (the Love that moves the Sun and stars). Love is what makes everything move. Love is what holds the world together. But what does all of this have to do with Martha and Mary?
There’s a traditional distinction in the Church between the active life and the contemplative life. We can see the origins of this distinction in Jesus’ life. Sometimes there were hours of active mercy, forgiveness, healing, preaching, and feeding in Galilee. Other times he withdrew to a “lonely place,” often early in the morning, to pray. In the history of the Church, religious orders have often identified as one or the other.
Franciscans, for example, are generally more active. They run homeless shelters, administer and teach at schools, build hospitals, and so forth. They do things that help people find their daily bread, and healing and training for their souls and their bodies. Benedictines are often strictly contemplative. Rather than having ministries directed to particular areas of suffering and lack in the world, their work is to pray. This often means eight hours a day of singing psalms, hearing Scripture read, and praying the prayers the Church gives them to pray. Most Christians have a mixture of these two in their lives. We work with our hands to sustain our lives and the lives of those around us; and we set aside particular times each day and each week to pray, to give thanks and to make petitions for all the other things we do.
To illustrate this distinction scripturally, the church has often looked to the story of Martha and Mary, for obvious reasons. Martha is actively engaged in the kitchen (getting the daily bread ready); Mary is sitting contemplatively at Jesus’ feet, lovingly attentive to his every word. It is very important to remember that this story is not saying that Martha is doing something bad and Mary is doing something good. Notice, after all, what Martha is doing: she is serving the Son of God and his closest friends, arranging a material place for them to abide (something Jesus could hardly ever count on).
Martha is just like Peter’s mother-in-law, who is another exemplar early in the Gospels of this quiet, practical service to the Lord. So, it’s not that Martha is bad and Mary is good. Rather, what Mary is attending to is the whole reason for what Martha is doing in the first place. The reason Martha’s work is good is that she is helping to arrange things so that people can listen to Jesus. That’s what they were made for.
The reason Martha gets chided is that she’s forgotten that this is what she was made for too. Her frenzied activity has shut down her attention to Jesus. Her careful service isn’t an end. It only matters because it leads to Jesus. And so, to learn this, Martha is directed to Mary, who is sitting in the presence of Jesus, lovingly and devotedly attentive to his words, enjoying the radiance of his face, relishing and savoring the signs of his love, and being drawn in by the magnetic pull of his glory. Mary is encountering holiness incarnate in the face of Christ. Mary is showing us the meaning of contemplation.
Contemplation is a word that can be even scarier and more daunting and baffling than the word prayer. But really, contemplation is nothing other than what Mary is doing: she is falling in love with Jesus. Contemplation means falling in love with Jesus, by seeing the signs of his love all around us—in our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all in Scripture and the liturgy, where we see and hear and taste and touch the redemption of the world by him, Jesus, our Lover. The reason Christian monks devote their lives to “contemplation” is that they want to open their eyes more and more every day to this Reality. They want to turn their gaze to Jesus, who whispers softly and sweetly to them through every created thing, so that they might bring their loving attention back to the One who made all those things.
I want you to think for a minute about all the different things that go through your mind on any given day: lists of duties and chores; frustration with coworkers; embarrassment and regret for mistakes you’ve made; anxiety about your obligations, your health, your family. These things can gnaw on us as we allow them to ruminate in our minds. But think about what happens when, in the midst of all those oppressive thoughts swirling around your mind, you get an unexpected message from someone who is dear to you—a card with flowers, a hidden note in your planner, a gratuitous favor that only they know you would enjoy—in other words, some sign of their affection for you, some assurance of their knowledge of you and their delight in you.
As you reflect for a moment on this pleasant surprise, you hold their face before you in your imagination, you savor the sweetness of this person’s friendship, their affection, the way they always make your heart leap and your soul laugh, the way their personality frees you from self-consciousness in their presence, and makes you glow with joy at their companionship. After a few moments of this, you tuck away the message, you take a deep breath, and you go back to work—facing the obligations, and the mistakes, and the frustrations. But now you do it with this new glow in your soul, the reminder of the One who loves and cherishes you.
That’s contemplation. That’s why we pray. You are God’s beloved, and he has put all around you the signs, the messages, the unexpected and gratuitous notes of his affection for you, his delight in you. Every time you open your Bible, every time you sing these hymns, every time you come to this altar, you are reminding yourself of this truth. This is the truth that Mary drank straight from its source. This is the truth that alone will enable Martha to perform her activities well. With this truth glowing in your heart, the distinction between action and contemplation starts to fall away, and your whole life can become one long prayer.
