The primacy of prayer
Prayer has primacy in the life of Christian discipleship first of all in the sense of priority: it comes first and constitutes the foundation on which all other elements of Christian life are built.
It has primacy also in the sense of being, ultimately, the most important activity in Christian life. Of course Christians must give concrete expression to their love of neighbour and their commitment to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. But we also have to take to heart Jesus’ important teaching during his visit to his friends Martha and Mary (Lk 10:38-42).
While Martha made agitated efforts to serve Jesus, Mary sat quietly and conversed with him and listened to him.
Christian tradition has always interpreted Jesus’ remarks on this occasion as affirming the greater necessity of contemplation over activity. Attentiveness to God, adoration of God and listening to God have to come first, before acts of practical love and service of God and neighbour. Jesus taught Martha this lesson by reprimanding her gently, suggesting that in her state of fuss and distraction she was neglecting ‘the one needful thing’. Mary, by contrast, had chosen ‘the good portion’.
In modern society there’s no shortage of practical charitable activity, but this takes place amid a profound forgetfulness of God, a kind of exaltation of humanity alone, without need of God, and a denial of the ultimate direction of all human life and effort: ‘Martha-ism’ taken to its utmost extreme, we might say.
Christians easily fall into the same mentality, anxious to demonstrate their up-to-date humanitarian credentials and the practical usefulness of Christian faith.
The example of Jesus
But Jesus’ own life, as well as his teaching, illustrates for us the primacy of prayer and the right balance to strike between contemplation and action. Like many modern people, during the hectic years of his public ministry, Jesus had a ‘busy lifestyle’. But unlike modern people, including many Christians, Jesus didn’t allow his busyness to cause him to abandon prayer.
The opposite was true. Jesus made sure that he raised his mind and heart to God regularly and frequently. He sought the Father’s guidance at every stage of his mission. He would escape from the crowds of people, who came looking for him for exorcisms and miraculous healings, in order to pray, often in the still of the night or early morning, and in quiet, solitary places where he could concentrate on God without being distracted.
Jesus’ habit of prayer had
two notable features, which we should commit ourselves to imitating.
First, as previously remarked, he turned to God at every significant moment of his life, from his baptism by John in the river Jordan to his dying words on the cross, when he prayed for the forgiveness of his executors and commended himself into the hands of God.
And second, by far the largest part of Jesus’ prayer consisted of praise and thanksgiving to God rather than petition and intercession.
Prayer the foundation of penance and good works
One important element was absent from Jesus’ prayer, of course: sorrow for sin and the request for pardon, although he did pray to be strengthened against temptation, in the desert at the beginning of his public ministry, and at the end of his life, in the garden of Gethsemane.
In our own case, prayer has to precede all efforts of mortification, penance or Christian ‘good works’. As a young man in the first rush of enthusiasm that accompanied his conversion Saint Bernard of Clairvaux undertook a programme of severe fasting which undermined his health for the rest of his life. It was only later that he realised that a better way of practising his devotion to God would have been to found all his active efforts on prayer.
‘To try mortifying oneself without first laying foundations of prayer,’ writes Dom Hubert Van Zeller, ‘is to delay a right understanding of both penance and prayer’.[8] Perseverance in faith, progress in love and holiness, come from listening in prayer to what God might want us to do rather than from sacrifices and mortifications which are actually expressions of what we’re choosing to do, even when we intend our choices to reflect our dedication to God. Dom Hubert continues:
‘...when the soul has been handed over to Christ in the serious desire to follow up the implications of interior prayer, the light is there to show what God wants next. Each man gets his own light, his own grace to meet his special need. But he must start with the generosity to pray, rather than with the generosity to take up the hairshirt and the discipline’.[9]
This also applies to the desire to rush into Christian activism. If we don’t lay down a bedrock of prayer first, and continue to rely on prayer, we’re drawing mainly on our own energies. The likely result is weariness, evaporation of initial enthusiasm and burn-out.
Our person-to-person relationship with God
Finally, prayer must take priority in our life in the sense that it’s mainly through the communication of prayer that we establish our own unique person-to-person relationship with God. Without prayer faith can degenerate into an ideology, a set of ideas or a system of ethical principles - however worthy - rather than a personal relationship by which God transmits his life to us and makes us holy.
There are some contemporary atheists who profess admiration for the legacy of Christian faith and even describe themselves as ‘cultural Christians’. They respect the Christian moral virtues, say, the concept of Christian marriage, opposition to abortion or compassion towards the poor and weak. One day hopefully God will lead them to the ‘one needful thing’: a real relationship with God in prayer.
But true faith in God and any good that Christian faith might impart to society can’t survive on the capital of a merely cultural Christianity. It requires a community of individuals each engaged in a real, personal encounter with God and a surrender to the transforming power of his grace.
Here again our model is Jesus himself, in his incarnate humanity. All his great works of teaching, healing and exorcism proceeded not from philosophical or ethical commitments but from his close personal union with God the Father, a union he was scrupulously careful to protect and nourish by constant prayer.
[9] Van Zeller, p.x.
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