By Chiara Lubich

We can make the whole of our lives an offering to God, so that love flows from us and all we do builds up unity. The way is ‘ceaseless prayer’.

Pray without ceasing. (1 Thess. 5:17)

This year the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity celebrates its centenary. The ‘Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity’ was first held in 1908 from 18th to 25th January. Then 60 years later in 1968, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was planned together by the Faith and Order Commission (World Council of Churches) and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (Roman Catholic Church). Since then, it has been the practice each year for Christians of various Churches to meet together and produce a booklet containing ideas for celebrating the week of prayer.

This Word of Life was the one chosen for the week by a large ecumenical group in America. It comes from the first letter of Paul to the Christians in the Greek city of Thessalonica. It was a small, young community and Paul felt that the unity between its members should grow always stronger. This is why he invited them to ‘live in peace’, to be patient with everyone, not to repay evil with evil but do good to each other and to everyone, and to ‘pray without ceasing’, as if to underline the fact that the life of unity in the Christian community is possible only through a life of prayer. Jesus himself prayed to the Father for the unity of his followers: ‘May they all be one’. (John 17: 21)

Pray without ceasing.

But why ‘pray without ceasing’? Because prayer is an essential part of being a human person. We have been created in God’s image, standing before him as the ‘you’ he speaks to intimately, able to have a relationship of communion with him. Being friends, in spontaneous, simple and real conversation with him (which is prayer) is, therefore, basic to our make-up and allows us to become genuine in the full dignity of God’s children.

Created as beings that God relates to personally, as God’s ‘you’, we can live in a constant relationship with him, with hearts filled with love by the Holy Spirit and with the trustful intimacy you have with one who is your Father: that trustful intimacy which draws us to talk to him often, to tell him about all that matters to us, our thoughts, our plans; that trustful intimacy which makes us long impatiently for the time given to prayer – set aside in the day from other commitments to work, to family – to be deeply in touch with the One we know loves us.

We need to ‘pray without ceasing’ not just for our own needs but also to help in building the Body of Christ and to help towards the full and visible communion of the Church of Christ. This is a mystery that we can begin to glimpse if we think of tubes of different shapes with liquid flowing between them, that is, of ‘communicating vessels’. If you add water to one tube, the level of liquid rises in all. The same thing happens when someone prays. Prayer is a lifting of the soul towards God in adoration and thanksgiving. Similarly when one person is lifted up, others are lifted up as well.

Pray without ceasing.

How can we ‘pray without ceasing’, especially in the whirl of daily life?

To pray without ceasing doesn’t mean multiplying our acts of prayer, but it means turning our souls and our lives towards God, to live in doing his will: studying, working, suffering, resting and even dying for him. So much so that we can no longer live our daily lives without being in agreement with him.

Our actions in this way are transformed into something sacred and the whole day becomes a prayer.

It can help us offer every action to God if we add the words: ‘For you, Jesus.’ Or if things are difficult we could say: ‘What really matters? Loving you matters!’ Like this we will transform everything into an act of love.
And our prayer will be ‘without ceasing’, because our love is without ceasing.

 

Next Month: All that he does, he does well; he even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak.’ (Mk 7:37)

Meditation: Anyone who keeps the law, and teaches others to do so, will rank high in the kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 5:19)

 

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