A spiritual life cannot be a second life we add on to our daily, "regular" life. Rather, a spiritual life is one life led in conformity with the grace of God. We cannot accomplish this unity by our efforts alone. Christianity rejects the notion that we are beings who have the means for perfection within ourselves or in the world around us. The message of Christianity is that only God can complete us. We are offered God's self so that our lives will expand and deepen. If we do not allow God to make us more than we are, we can only become less than we are. Since it is our nature to be completed by God, there is no natural life we can lead alone. by ourselves, we can only become subnatural. We lead a truly spiritual life only when we allow God to make us more human than we already are.

It is a principle based on experience as well as on sound theology that God builds up our spirituality most effectively when we set aside a significant period of time, cut off from the day's activity, when we do nothing at all but give God a chance to do this work. This principle makes it all the more important to bear in mind the unity of our lives. It is very easy to think of the "prayer life" as a life separate from everything else we do.

There is an interrelationship between prayer and activity, but we should not blur the distinction between them. Busy people are tempted to say, "to work is to pray," but it isn't. There are times when charity toward our neighbor calls us to give up some time we would spend on prayer, but fulfilling such a call means we are giving up prayer for a specific need.

By virtue of vocation, we are called to certain types of activities, and they may be time consuming. But no activity, no matter how deeply motivated by charity, takes the place of prayer. If we think we are too busy, we should think again about how busy we really have to be in fulfilling our vocation. It is important not to think of prayer and activity as complementing one another at a distance. The likely pitfall here is to think that a time pf prayer will leaven our activity with spirituality. There is some truth in this idea, but we must be cautious. The leavening could work the other way. Perhaps activity and its cares will infect prayer, so that there is no prayer.

How can prayer and work reinforce each other to their mutual benefit? I believe the common denominator is attention. Work directs our attention outside ourselves to what we are doing. We don't work well by praying so hard that we forget what we are doing. (We don't prayer very well that way either.) Rather, if we learn in our work to become attentive people, we find we can better attend to God in prayer. In prayer we attend to the Divine Persons who are other than ourselves and learn to become alert to their presence in our lives. Perhaps the reason cares distract us from prayer is that we aren't concentrating on them when we should be. We don't become attentive to God except through developing attention to the world, and we don't become attentive to the world except through our attention to God.

The possibility of becoming so entrapped in sensual living that one loses a sense of developing higher human faculties is such an obvious pitfall that I need to say no more about it. A less obvious pitfall is the belief that by ignoring "the world," we will become spiritual. Here, we forget that it is not the things of the world and people who really distract us from God. We need only reflect on how much we fail to see in the material world on account of discordant emotions. Really paying attention to what is before us inevitably gives us some detachment and is some help in quieting our feelings. This is not a suppression of feeling; rather, our feelings are free to grow deeper through our becoming aware of what there is in things and persons to arouse our sensitivity. Also, taking care in simple actions helps develop the attention which purifies the emotions. We find that slamming doors absent-mindedly or stomping through the house do not really calm us down. But if we watch such gestures and make an effort to close doors softly and walk carefully, then our actions can calm us. Whatever interior noise we have because we think we're unloved or unappreciated has nothing to feed on when we are paying attention to what we are going and watching the way we handle things.

Disciplining our actions can go a long way in helping us come to prayer in a frame of mind attentive to God. This discipline also makes it easier for our prayer to overflow into our daily tasks. (The vicious circle is being reversed so that it goes in the right direction.) As our attention to God in prayer develops, we become more deeply aware of God's absolute goodness as the source of all good things, and a detachment from things develops, not as a puritanical repression, but as a response of joy in the Lord. In short, the spiritual journey leads us to see reality as it really is: the world and ourselves in it as God's creation.

Now we can look at the work of prayer itself. it is important that we structure our prayer time to give it some regularity. If finding time for prayer means waking up earlier in the morning, it is easier to get out of bed if we have A definite purpose. Hazy resolutions are not very strong incentives for doing anything. The actual structure of a rule of prayer, and the amount of time devoted to prayer, must depend on the person and what is possible, given other necessary tasks. It is not the purpose of a rule of prayer to wear one out by imposing a heavy load of devotions. What I can do here is delineate the basic elements for a rule of prayer that each person will have to apply appropriately. Some experimentation and trial and error will be necessary. But we should not change our scheme too often. Plants do not grow well if they are transplanted frequently; and when they have been transplanted, time is needed for the plant to recover before we know whether the new planting was successful.

The first element in a rule of prayer is liturgy, participation in the prayer of the Church. Regular corporate worship is a basic element of Christian spirituality. However, it may not be possible to worship with the corporate body on a daily basis, so the Church's worship should be incorporated into our personal devotions. The Book of Common Prayer has four daily offices for those who wish to incorporate liturgical prayer into their lives daily--Morning Prayer, an Order of Service for Noonday, Evening Prayer and Compline. If one is not a member of a liturgically-oriented church, one may find it useful to put together one's own set of prayer. In this case, give the Psalter a prominent place, remembering that it is the heart of the office.

Praying either the divine office or other universal prayers of the Church such as the Psalter and the Lord's Prayer reminds us that we are members of the Body of Christ and that, important as individuality is, ours is a social religion. We are praying with a multitude of the faithful and, in doing so, we transcend time and place. We pray with Thomas Hooker, Evelyn Underhill, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and numerous parsons reading the office alone in their churches. Liturgical prayer is given to us, and that reminds us that all prayer is a gift from God. A liturgy may seem to be a mere stream of words, offering little for the interior spirit, but the liturgy flows on and carries us with its prayer on days when we can feel no sense of prayer inside ourselves. Also, liturgical prayer keeps us aware of religious experiences other than what we are experiencing at the moment. This is especially true of the Psalter, where every kind of feeling toward God is expressed--from adoration to anger, from joy to despair. We are never locked into what we are going through (interiorly) at any one time. Thus, liturgy is our link with our neighbors so that we really pray with them.

The second element of a rule of prayer is spiritual reading, which we in the Benedictine tradition call lectio divina. Here we are not reading to put so many facts into our heads but to feed ourselves on the Word of God. Holy Scripture is, of course, the best source for lectio, but one should do a meditative reading of devotional books as well. We should not aim to read a book as fast as possible, but to ingest6 the content deeply. In doing lectio, read slowly, stop, reflect, pray about what has been read. The worth of lectio is not merely conscious. While one reads in this way many insights sink into the subconscious where they continue to operate long after the actual content is forgotten. This seems to be particularly true of books other than the Bible. One reason may be that the Bible is full of memorable images and events. But we normally should read the Bible several times for each reading of, say, Julian of Norwich or Thomas Merton. The choice of non-biblical books for spiritual reading will vary with the individual. Some people may need books with a strong appeal to feeling. Others, as C.S. Lewis did, may find "devotional" books unhelpful while Thomas Aquinas is more congenial. It is important that a book for lectio be interesting and a real help in spurring us to interior prayer. There is no sense in reading a book we find dull.

The third element is silent prayer. Here, we are communicating with the Lord, but not in words. At least this is the goal. Silent prayer is the most difficult kind of prayer to describe because it is the simplest. While liturgical prayer is tightly structured, and lectio somewhat structured by the text, silent prayer moves away from structure to the freedom of the Holy Spirit. Silent prayer is simply spending time with God.

There have been many techniques for entering silent prayer, some more conducive than others. Some methods are actually highly structured and are called discursive meditation. This is really just a step removed from lectio. Here we decide to think about the Trinity or about our repentance or the like. Such a method may be useful but it should not be confused with silent prayer itself. The point of silent prayer is that we cease to think about anything so that we can simply be with God. Here is where we learn faith existentially. By giving up the security of our ideas about God and our thoughts on anything else at all, we are flung up against God, whom we must trust in the period of darkness once our own thoughts have fled. We must let ourselves go so that God can gently catch us and hold us.

To center our attention, perhaps we can use the Lord's Prayer and ruminate on one phrase for five, then, fifteen minutes. Another technique is to imagine a gospel scene as vividly as possible. There is less interior talking here since we are trying to project ourselves into the event and become a part of it. Such techniques help focus concentration. Another time-honored method is the repetition of a short simple prayer such as the Jesus Prayer or the Hail Mary. Some of the desert fathers repeated to themselves the biblical phrase, "O God make speed to save us, O God make haste to help us." Each method is a bridge to silent prayer. To experience silent prayer fully we must get beyond every method of focusing our attention, to the place where our attention becomes riveted on God of its own accord, effortlessly. It is the Holy Spirit who does this, not us. Perhaps it is more realistic to call this third element of prayer the quest for silent prayer. We will not experience silent prayer automatically, and we will have ups and downs with it. There will be times when our attention becomes drawn to God so strongly that we need make no effort to keep our attention there. This experience may last a few seconds or a very long time, time we will lose track of. We will not be seeing God, but we will know, beyond any surety of our senses, that God is with us.

The obvious problem is distraction. The easiest and biggest mistake we can make is to fight these distractions directly. That only involves us with them all the more and makes us frustrated with ourselves for being distracted. The important thing to do is to keep on with our techniques for centering attention on God, much as we listen harder to someone speaking to us when there is other noise in the room. If the distraction is a flight of fancy, it will not disturb our prayer very much. If the distraction is intense, whether it involves good feelings or bad, creative thoughts or destructive ones, then they are too much a part of us for us to drive them away. In that case we must make them part of our prayer. If we are to make an offering of our whole selves in prayer, then we must offer these distractions as well. God will know what to do with them.

The categories of prayer are not as rigid as they may first appear. It is not a case of moving from square one to square two and so on. We need to use the basic structure, although the Holy Spirit will carry us beyond it. Lectio, for example, may be a useful bridge to silent prayer. All of us are going to put this recipe together in our won way. The amount of time that is normally available is one factor. Temperament is another. Some people are attracted to one form of prayer more than another. It is right to give the form most congenial preponderance in the rule of prayer, but it is essential not to give other elements short shrift. A person who easily experiences deep prayer in silence may find liturgical prayer stultifying, but without liturgy even a rich interior prayer is robbed of its guidance. Giving up liturgy is a big step toward becoming lost in our own interior world and not being able to find a way out. On the other hand, a person who resists the prayer of silence runs the risk of maintaining too shallow a level of prayer. Some people may find the less structured prayer frightening, but we are called to be brave enough to trust God. We cannot learn this trust as long as we keep a tight grip on ourselves. The three basic forms of prayer feed each other To cut off any one of them from the others is like cutting a limb off a tree and expecting the limb to grown on its own.

The most important thing for a rule of prayer is perseverance. In a burst of religious enthusiasm we may think there is no point in structuring our prayer; we will be moved to pray as the Spirit wills. Unfortunately, if we wait for the Spirit to make us feel like praying before doing any acts of prayer, our growth in prayer will be sporadic at best. The most discouraging thing about a rule of prayer is that sooner or later it becomes boring. When this happens, it is most important not to give it up on that account. Learning to pray takes time. Most of us can learn certain manual or mental skills quickly. Then we wonder why prayer takes so long, why it is not mastered as quickly as an abstruse theological text was. But prayer does not operate on the same level as our acquired skills. The only kind of superiority we can reach at this level is the humility that comes of being truly conformed to God. We may want to avoid the experience of boredom, but it is essential we not do so. Through the tedium in prayer we can be softened so that the Holy Spirit can enter our hearts. This boredom is the way to a love more beautiful than we can imagine. Let us embrace the dragon of boredom in the faith that just as the dragon seems sure to suffocate us, it will change into the vision of glory God has wanted for us all along.

Hard copy of this essay can be obtained from  Forward Movement Publications