Sacramental Living

I am challenged by this section on prayer in Pete Greig's Red Moon Rising (Relevant Books: Orlando, 2005), pp. 192-3.

Sacramental Living

"Whether we think of, or speak to God, whether we act or suffer for Him, all is prayer, when we have no other object than His love, and the desire of pleasing Him. All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God...In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer."--John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

What does it mean to pray 24-7? It means living out whole lives, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, in the grateful awareness of God's presence and with a desire to please Him always. Prayer is not just about the contemplative moments or the movements when I'm consciously firing words at God. The call to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17) is a call to remember Christ's presence continually in the subconscious as well as the conscious realms of my life. But how am I to do this? How do I keep Christ in my subconscious, in my reflex-reactions even where I'm sleeping or working or watching a movie? How am I to be Christian by default as well as determination?

The key is to maintain a rhythm, a heartbeat of disciplined prayer, in which I encounter Christ regularly, deliberately, subconsciously. The spinoff of these times, as you will see in the character of any older person who has spent a great deal of their lives contemplating Jesus, is that His presence thereby moves by a process of osmosis from the conscious to the subconscious mind. As we open the door, again and again, to Christ, He comes in day by day and eats with us, laughs with us, shares with us, until we acquire His mannerisms and know His very thoughts. A season of 24-7 prayer can be a useful tool for bringing Christ consciously back into the midst of our ongoing lives as individuals and communities. And prayer rooms are an interesting expression of God's intention, which has always been to walk in continual communion with His people.

But just as no person could or should spend every waking moment in a 24-7 prayer room, so we must understand that the prayer room is an expression of the continual communion between God and His people, but it is not the same thing. The ultimate 24-7 prayer room is the human heart fully surrendered to God and not a room full of coffee mugs and hand-drawn pictures!

What we want to do, in Wesley's words, is live lives of prayer as "souls filled with love and the desire to please God." So the place of prayer creates the moment of conscious disciplined prayer that then enables me to live prayerfully in front of my VDU screen, or while teaching a sixteen-year-old to drive, or working at a check-out or whatever job I do. We don't want to withdraw people from society to live in spiritual bubbles of perpetual prayer; rather we want to immerse ourselves in society, having immersed ourselves in the Spirit--in the world, and yet full of God and overflowing. (Bold mine)