Recently I began a year of sabbatical. Initially I was euphoric … one whole year with no responsibilities except those that are self-imposed! What a delicious luxury!

That euphoria hasn’t subsided much, but a curious guilt has begun to color it: Sabbaticals are an extravagant luxury that few can afford, the prerogative of the rich. The poor don’t get sabbaticals, for them there is no escape from the work, pressure, and responsibilities imposed by circumstance and duties of state. Beyond that, a sabbatical offers the perfect setting for a self-indulgence that can be rationalized and given a high symbolic coating.

Those issues are worth reflecting upon.

What is a sabbatical? Curiously, the term which is religious in origin and intent, is almost never used anymore in religious settings (where words like “retreat” have replaced it) and has survived for the main part in university circles. University teachers and other such professionals go on sabbatical. In church circles we no longer have much of a theology, nor practice, of sabbaticals. This is unfortunate for the concept of a sabbatical is, in the end, deeply religious.

Sabbatical comes from the word “sabbath”. God, as Genesis reports, worked for 6 days creating the world and then on the 7^th day, the sabbath, rested. What is meant by that curious phrase: “God rested”?

What is meant here has not so much to do with God’s busy-ness or leisure as it has to do with the purpose of creation. The sabbath is the end of creation, the feast for which creation was made, the prefiguration of the world to come, the opportunity for us, already, to taste (every 7th hour) the final state (rest, reconciliation, and play) for which we were made. As Jewish theology has it, God set up things in such a way that already in this life, with all its pressures, tears, and tensions, every “sixtieth hour” we should taste the world to come.

Hence according to scripture, life should have a rhythm: work should be followed by play, pressured and designated time by unpressured and undesignated time. Every “sixtieth hour” we should taste a little bit of heaven – especially given that the hours in between are consumed by demands, work, and duties. Very practically, according to our religious tradition, life is supposed to have the following rhythm: you work for six days, and then spend one day on sabbatical; you work for six years and then spend on whole year on sabbatical. In the past that rhythm, at least as it pertained to having a sabbatical every 6 days was maintained through our observance of Sunday as a day of rest. Once a week, everyone went on sabbatical and this was meant to remind us that, ultimately, we were not created for work but for play, that we do not live by work alone and in the end won’t live by work at all.

Moreover, the sabbath was understood as being more than just a time of rest. It was meant too be a time or reconciliation, a time when one tried to bring oneself and everything else into sympathy with all other things. Hence it was a time to forgive debts, to let go of resentments, and generally wipe the slate clean in order to be more in harmony with everything.

Understood in this sense a sabbatical is not the prerogative of the rich but a religious duty for everyone. Without the sabbath, the sabbatical, without the rhythm of life wherein every “60th hour” we taste the end of life and are called to reconciliation, life becomes a compulsive endeavour wherein work, duty, ambition, greed, and resentments consume us. Without sabbaticals we tire, lose our capacity to pray and enjoy, and, most importantly, lose our capacity to forgive. Whenever we sense ourselves as “caught in the rat race”, we are no longer living the proper rhythm of life as Genesis lays it out.

But a further distinction needs to be made: Sabbatical means unpressured, free, time. There are 2 kinds of unpressured, free, time, just as there are 2 kinds of solitude: We can speak of unpressured time as a private, personal, restful, therapeutic space (one kind of solitude), and we can speak of unpressured time as desert conversion space (another kind of solitude). The former is advertised in tourist brochures; the latter was modeled by Christ in the desert.

A sabbatical, ideally, is a time for both of these. It’s a time to rest and play, a time when one can claim one’s own time. But it’s also a time for conversion and prayer, a time when one must confront one’s demons in the desert. This, as the testimony of Christ and the saints assures us, is often not a peaceful process. The pressures of our work and our many duties, for all their demands, cushion us from the many demons of resentment, greed, jealousy, and fear that haunt deeper recesses within us. One doesn’t need to rest long before they make themselves felt  … and the restful therapeutic space becomes the desert, a battleground for opposing spirits.

With these thoughts in mind, I begin a sabbatical year, asking for prayers that it might, indeed, be a time wherein I taste that “one-sixtieth part of the world to come” and wherein I might, through some desert experience, might find myself more in a “general sympathy with all things.”

Nothing is as important today in theology and in church life as is the task of continuing the marriage between social justice and the Gospel. One of the groups who have been true pioneers in this area is the SOJOURNERS community based in Washington, D.C. under the leadership of Jim Wallis. They live in a community which builds its life around the Gospel, prayer, and the eucharist, they work actively with the poorest of the poor, they protest radically against all forms of violence and injustice, and they reflect theologically upon their praxis. In them you see something which is too often absent in circles both of piety and of social justice, namely, a radical commitment to both Jesus and justice.

With this in mind, I would like to alert readers to a recent book by one of its members: Turning Toward Home, a Sojourn of Hope, by Joyce Hollyday (Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1989). It’s Hollyday’s autobiography and it chronicles her journey of faith.

The book’s main interest lies not in the fact that she is associate editor of SOJOURNERS MAGAZINE and is married to Jim Wallis (things which she barely mentions) but in the fact that it is truly the story of a soul, a pilgrim soul tempted to many options but which, eventually, through the grace of God is able, in Kierkegaards’s definition of sanctity, to will the true thing.

It’s an important story because, as Dan Berrigan writes in the Foreword, it is not that easy to will the true thing. “Joyce is the story of all of us. At least in ricochet, in longing. (And in recoiling from?) The story we wish were ours, the story we fear might be ours. The life we pray for (and against), the life we know we are called to (at least in metaphor, and according to circumstance), the life we wish could happen, or wish could never happen, to us. Admiration and fear, that uneasy mix.”

Unlike so many autobiographies which tend towards self-indulgence, narcissism, and exhibition, hers faces outward and chronicles a faith journey. It’s a journal of a soul, in the best sense of that phrase.

She begins with the story of her childhood, how she grew up in a comfortable middle class home in Hershey (the chocolate capital of the U.S.). Even as a very young girl faith was already very important to her. However, dreamt the dreams of her generation: a good education, the right husband, the right job, the right home in the right suburb, kids, comfort, travel, culture, recreation. She had all the tools to actuate the dream, but faith and circumstances singled her out for something else and baptized her (remember, baptism means displacement and conscription).

As a college student she went to work with the poor in Harlem. Her life was never to be the same. After an undergraduate degree in Maine, she enrolled in the Yale divinity program, bent on ordination. Sometime before her junior year she decided instead to leave school and join Sojourners. Sojourners has been her life ever since.

The book is rather brief on most of the chronological detail of her life, even after joining Sojourners. She does describe in brief detail some of her work, a couple of arrests for peaceful protest, and trips to Central America and to South Africa. Mostly though the book is about her journey into Jesus and into justice, and the struggle to keep those two ever together.

It’s an exposition of her, and Sojourners ethics, a consistent ethics—one which begins with the Gospel, prayer, and eucharist, flows into (as they call it) “the waging of peace,” tries to be consistent in its stance for life (e.g., she is both a feminist and pro-life, believing the life of a woman and a child may never be pitted against each other), and ends up in gratitude and celebration. For her, as for Sojourners, piety must be wed to Jesus and Jesus to piety and both must ever be wed to gratitude and celebration. That, in brief, is the perennial task of Christianity.

The book is a challenge to many things: First of all, to let ourselves be more displaced, baptized, by the needs of the poor. Conscription by circumstance: “This world cannot be a home for any of us until it is a home for all of us.” It’s a challenge to greater courage: “There are some things so dear and so precious and so eternally true that they are worth dying for.” It’s a challenge to patience, to give ourselves over to the struggle without expecting quick results: “Although we never see results, faith demands that we act. We act for the sake of the faithful ones who went before us and showed the way, trusting that we would follow—and for those who will come after us on the journey.”

Finally it is a challenge to reconciliation: “Eras of Christian history have been marked by prevailing theologies addressed to particular historical situations. Emphasis has been placed at various times and places on salvation, conversion, or grace; on pietism, evangelism, mission, or liberation. I would assert that what we most need today is a theology of reconciliation—a faith that acknowledges Christ’s redeeming grace, the social burden of the Gospel, and the promise of a new unity in the body of Christ which cuts across all lines of division. At this juncture in history, we must heal the divisions and learn to live together, or none of us will live at all.”

God has a history of calling prophets with strange backgrounds. Amos is pulled away from sheep and sycamores. Joyce Hollyday is pulled away from idle class dreams and the chocolate capital of the U.S. Her writings bear a striking similarity to those of Amos. Turning Towards Home is a truly prophetic book that deserves reading.

David Steindl-Rast once commented that we tend to be resentful when things interrupt our work until we realize that, often times, interruptions are our real work.

Most of us tend to be impatient and resentful, sometimes deeply so, when our plans are interrupted by demands which deflect our energies from what we would ideally like to be doing. Sometimes this is minor: an unexpected phone call interrupts our work or our favorite TV program. Sometimes the interruption is major: an unwanted pregnancy interrupts our career or education; economic demands interrupt our plans to be a writer or an artist; the demands of a family interrupt our chance to travel, to see movies and plays, and to have the type of hobbies and recreations we would like, or the loss of health interrupts our career.

Countless things, big and small, constantly derail our agendas, force us to alter our plans, and slowly kill our dreams. Very often we are resentful: “If only! If only this hadn’t happened! Now I have to wait to go back to school, to resume my career. Now I’ll never have a chance to fulfil my dream.”

Sometime in middle age, or even earlier, this resentment takes a more radical form: “I’ve wasted my life. I’ve been a victim of circumstances. I’ve given in to the demands of others and now I’ll never get the chance to do what I really wanted to do.” Sometimes, however, as Steindl-Rast points out, the opposite happens. Instead of resentment there is gratitude. We realize that the interruptions, so unwelcome at the time, were really salvific and, far from derailing us off of our real agenda, they were our real agenda.

A few examples can be helpful here. I am sure all of us have known individuals or families where an unplanned pregnancy suddenly turns all plans (economic, career, travel, new house) upside down. Initially there is some bitterness and resentment. Later on the unwanted interruption turns into a much wanted and loved child who creates a happiness in life that dwarfs what might have resulted had original plans not been derailed by that interruption.

A.N. Wilson, the British historian, in a recent biography of C.S. Lewis, describes how Lewis’ life as a teacher and writer was, during virtually all of his productive years, interrupted by the demands of his adopted mother who made him do all the shopping and housework and demanded hours of his time daily for domestic tasks. Lewis’ own brother, Warnie, who also lived in the household (and who generally refused to let his own agenda be so interrupted) laments this fact in his diaries and suggests that Lewis could have been much more prolific had he not had to spend literally thousands of hours shopping, walking the dog, and doing domestic chores.

Lewis himself, however, gives us a far different assessment. Far from being resentful about these interruptions, he is grateful for them and suggests that it was precisely these domestic demands that kept him in touch with life in a way that other Oxford Dons (who never had to shop and do housework) were not. Historians like Wilson agree and suggest that it was because of these interruptions, which kept Lewis’ feet squarely on the ground, that Lewis came to insights which appeal so universally.

As these examples demonstrate, what initially is experienced as an unwanted interruption can, in the end, be our real agenda.

This, though, is not always true. Our lives are not meant to be left to pure circumstance and fate. We must also actively choose and create destiny. It is not always good to accept whatever happens. We have dreams and talents, and these are God-given, and so we must fight too for our agenda.

However, we must look always for the hand of providence in our interruptions. These often constitute a conspiracy of accidents within which God guides our lives. If we were totally in control of our own agendas, if we could simply plan and execute our lives according to our own dreams with no unwanted derailments, I fear that many of us would (slowly and subtly) become very selfish and would (also slowly and subtly) find our lives empty of simple joy, enthusiasm, family life, and real community. We do not live by accomplishment alone!

The very word baptism means derailment. Christ baptizes Peter on the rock when he tells him: “Because you said you love me, your life is now no longer your own. Before you said this, you fastened your belt and you walked wherever you liked. Now, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” To submit to love is to be baptized… and to let one’s life be forever interrupted. To not let one’s life be interrupted is to say no to love.

C.S. Lewis once said that we will spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers of ours that he didn’t answer. Along the same lines, I suspect we will spend a good part of eternity thanking God for those interruptions that derailed our plans but which baptized us into life and love in a way we could never have ourselves planned or accomplished.

Lewis also once said that God’s harshness is ultimately kinder than human gentleness and that God’s compulsion is our liberation. In our interruptions, not infrequently, we experience this.

A couple of years ago, I was at a conference on social justice. The final speaker was a very impassioned young man and after his talk several of us gathered near the podium to engage him in some further questions. He expressed how frustrated and disappointed he was that so few people ever took up his challenge.

“Why?” he asked, “are people who are sincere so reluctant to get involved in justice issues?”  One man present responded by saying: “Maybe I would be tempted to get involved if people like you didn’t always insult me with your rhetoric!”

I use this story not to accuse particularly the orators of social justice. I hope to make a wider accusation, with this story serving only as one kind of illustration: One of the biggest factors working against community and against our ability to work together as a church or world is abrasive rhetoric. Simply put, too often the language that tries to promote truth and justice is insulting to others, judgmental, arrogant, patronizing, self-righteous, and more apt to drive persons still further away from the truth it is trying to promote than to invite them to embrace that truth. 

This style of language, full of both truth and disrespect, is characteristic of groups both on the left and on the right in the church and world today. We see it in liberals and conservatives, feminists and antifeminists, pro-life and pro-choice persons, social justice advocates and the defenders of privilege. We see it in those who push for the universal against the particular and in those who push for the particular against the universal. We see it in those who push religion and in those who push against it.  Invariably the language that tries to defend and promote the truth carries not just passion for  the truth but a good amount of hatred, judgment, and arrogance as well.

The sad consequence is that rather than unite and rally others around the truth (which is the object of the discourse) it divides …  and it divides not just the sincere from the insincere, and the committed from the non-committed, but it also divides the sincere from the sincere. In the end, it divides the truth from itself.

In doing this, it hardens positions and it creates illicit dichotomies that force people to choose between two positions which, ideally, they should both support. 

To offer just a couple of illustrations: The rhetoric of feminism often alienates others (particularly other women) who, rightly or wrongly, feel trapped in choosing between feminism and pro-life, feminism and a contented staying at home, and between feminism and obedient service in the church. Conversely, the rhetoric of antifeminism often alienates others (again, particularly other women) by suggesting that if you are unwilling to say that “abortion is murder”, if you are not uncritically supportive of the status quo in the church, and if you dare suggest that a woman’s true place can also be outside the home then you are insincere and warped by contemporary ideology.

The rhetoric of conservatives often forces you to choose: “Either you are loyal and a defender of the status quo or you are irresponsible and helping to bring down values and morals.”  The rhetoric of liberals suggests: “Either you are dissatisfied with the status quo or you backward and need your consciousness raised!” The rhetoric of pro-choice says: “If you defend the rights of the unborn, you are anti-woman.” Pro-life suggests: “You can only defend abortion if contemporary ideology has warped your morals.” 

Rhetoric of this kind is not the truth that Christ promised will set us free. It neither unites nor invites. It doesn’t lead to community because it doesn’t melt hearts. Instead it polarizes us into camps, spreads paranoia, narrows our sympathies, and freezes us all more deeply within our immaturities and biases because, within it, there is too much that insults and tries to intimidate.

If we are to promote peace and justice, truth and charity, then peace and justice, truth and charity, must also characterize our language. Scripture tells us that the spirit of God is recognized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long suffering, constancy, mildness, and chastity.  Sadly, it is these qualities which are normally absent from most discourse in the areas of religion and justice. This is often defended with the idea that the demands of justice, truth, and charity call us beyond the simplistic idea that somehow we always have to be “nice” to each other. Not infrequently too there is a reference made to Jesus’ anger and his driving the moneychangers from the temple. 

Again, in this rhetoric there is some truth. The demands of truth, justice, and charity, if taken seriously, eventually shatter the idea that we must, at all costs, be nice to each other.  However, the demands of charity and justice never ask that we let go of charity and justice themselves in our discourse (even as we claim for ourselves a higher charity and justice.) The kingdom is not built through insults and disrespect. Our language must take that seriously.

Today, at many levels, community is disintegrating. It’s becoming every harder to unite and rally people around anything. There are many reasons for this … not the least of which is our failure, in our rhetoric, to properly respect and love each other.

A Catholic journalist recently commented that the world will begin to take the church seriously when it talks about sex if the church, first of all, affirms what it should always be affirming, namely, that for married persons the marriage bed is their daily eucharist.

Sex as a sacrament. Sex as eucharist. Is this high spiritual truth or is it blasphemy? It can be either since, within a Christian understanding, sex is precisely either sacrament or perversity.

In a recent article in GRAIL, British psychiatrist, Jack Dominion, discusses the sacramental role of sex within a marriage. Without denying what traditional Christian thought has always affirmed, that is, that procreation is a function of married sexuality, he goes on to suggest five possibilities (ultimately, sacramental possibilities) which can be realized each time a married couple make love: 

• First, each time they do make love they, potentially, verify their personal significance to each other. More simply put, each act of sexual intercourse is a reminder of (and a celebration of) the fact that they are the most important person in each of each other’s life. Sexual intercourse, within its proper context, love consecrated through marriage, verifies and celebrates (physically, emotionally, and spiritually) what was pronounced in their marriage vows, namely, ‘My love is now consecrated, displaced, for you!’ ”

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer once told a couple he was marrying: “Today you are young and very much in love. You think that your love will sustain your marriage. Well, I give you the opposite advice: let your marriage sustain your love.” Sexual orgasm facilitates a personal encounter that speaks of and demands precisely the type of exclusiveness and fidelity that the marriage vows promise.

• Secondly, sexual intercourse is one of the most powerful acts through which a couple reinforce each other’s sexual identity, making, as Dominion puts it, the woman feel fully feminine and the man fully masculine. 
• Third, sexual intercourse can be, potentially, a most powerful act of reconciliation, healing, and forgiveness. In all relationships, perhaps especially in married ones, wounds will appear (arising from, among other things, different temperaments, disappointment with each other, past histories, weaknesses and inadequacies) which will, at one level, appear to create an unbridgeable chasm. Sexual orgasm can facilitate a peak experience within which harmony is restored beyond the hurt, not because the hurt is taken away, but because in that peak experience something is felt which, for a second at least, lets persons drop the load of hurt, disappointment, and bitterness and meet in a super reconciliation which is a foretaste of the reconciliation of heaven itself.
• Fourth, sexual intercourse is perhaps, singularly, the most powerful way a couple has of telling each other that they wish to continue in this consecrated relationship. Freud once said we understand the structure of a thing by looking at it when it’s broken. Thus we see that within a marriage when the sexual bond is broken, when there is an unwillingness or a hesitancy to sleep with each other, there is, at some level, also some unwillingness or hesitancy to continue the relationship at a very deep level. 
• Finally, sexual intercourse is, as Dominion so aptly puts it, a rich vein of thanksgiving. Orgasm, within a proper relationship, spawns gratitude.

Given these possibilities for sex, it does not strain the imagination to see that the marriage bed is, potentially, a sacrament, a daily eucharist. 

A sacrament is, as theology as always said in one fashion or another, someone or something which visibly prolongs a saving action of Christ; something visible, fleshy, tangible, incarnate, which somehow makes God present.  

More specifically still, what takes place in the marriage bed (between a couple who are properly loving each other) parallels what takes place between ourselves and Christ in the eucharist. Each eucharist also has those five possibilities: In that encounter we say to Christ and Christ says to us: “My life is consecrated, displaced, for you.” Through that encounter, as well, we reinforce our identity as Christians, are embraced in a super-reconciliation, announce through word and action that we want to continue in a deep relationship with Christ, and are imbued with and express gratitude. 

The marriage bed, like the eucharist, is fleshy, tangible, visible and incarnate. (Not at all a sacrament for angels!) Like the eucharist too it expresses special love, fidelity, reconciliation, and gratitude in an earthy way. That quality, its earthiness, makes it, like the eucharist, a very powerful and privileged sacrament. Through it the word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

Second of a two-part series

Contrary to most popular thought, a prophet does not foretell the future and is not necessarily a chronic protestor. A prophet is someone who speaks with God’s voice. Accordingly a prophet is someone who radiates love, not alienation, whose voice attracts even as it upsets, and whose words offer, at the same time, deep challenge and deep consolation.

Hence we recognize the prophetic voice, God’s voice, whenever we hear words that challenge us to what’s higher, what’s truer, what’s more noble, what’s more loving, what’s more ideal. We recognize the prophetic voice in words like these:

“That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the most horrible truth and be shattered.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I still believe that people are really good at heart, I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

“In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I will be able to carry them out.” (Anne Frank’s diary, July 15, 1944—the third last entry in her diary)

“Those who propound an image of the human person that would be different from that which has been developed in the church and preserved in the Western tradition, seem today to make human weaknesses a fundamental principle, and to declare that this is a human right.

“Christ, on the contrary, taught that each person has above all a right to his or her own greatness, a right which transcends him or her. This is in fact where our true dignity really appears… In Christ each person has a right to such greatness. And through Christ the church has the right to the self-offering of such a person through the gift through which one gives all of oneself to God in order to become a servant of all.” (Slightly redacted from John Paul II, in his Nov. 17, 1980 address to the seminarians at Fulda, West Germany.)

“There comes a time in every person’s life when the choice is clear: stand up for what you believe in or die! If we don’t stand up because we are afraid of death, or of losing our job, or of losing our health, or friends, or position, or prestige, or anything whatever. If we refuse to take a stand in order to prolong our life—then it doesn’t matter whether we are 20, 28, 36, 47, or 60, we are dead. And even if we live on until we reach 80 or 90, we have just kept on breathing, not living. We die at the moment when we do not stand up for what we believe in.” (Martin Luther King, in his famous I have a dream speech. Redacted slightly.)

“In any situation dominated by fear, you need people who have died before they die, people who, before death, already live the resurrection. In this is fear, timidity, overcome.

“Too often, however, we just want to survive. Then we choose not to die, but that is not the same as choosing to live. We need to die before we die to live in the freedom of the resurrection already now.” (Mary Jo Leddy, in a retreat given to the Oblates in Saskatoon, Sask., May, 1989.)

“The future belongs to those who have nothing left to lose.” (Herbert Marcuse)

“The church is, of necessity, a community of resistance. But resistance flows from a sense of joyful praise and loving celebration. We are first called to be a community of celebration, celebrating the life we are called to, the life given us to share together and then to give away for the sake of the world. We become a community of resistance. But before that, and through that, and even after that, we are a community of praise and celebration.” (Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion, Page 135)

“Only when a person has fully attained his or her own spiritual identity can he or she live without the need to kill, and without the need of a spiritual doctrine that permits him or her to do so in good conscience. You have to take the time alone to become yourself, to face yourself in your fundamental reality, and to peel away the accretions of mediocre or false values imposed by society, ambition and self-interest. Only then, as the overflow of such contemplation, can you find your truth and your reality.” (Thomas Merton, quoted by J.H. Griffin, in Follow the Ecstacy, Page 200)

“You command the Gospel by living it: the first change of all is exacted of yourself. You declare peace, as others declare war…

“Dorothy Day embraced this design, be it noted, not in order to bring political or economic changes. Not in the first place. The first place was sacrosanct, and existed independent of political gain or loss. She would live in such a way, and speak and write from the bottom, not because it made sense in the world to do so (it made no sense, she would be vilified and despised for it), or because it converted the world (it converted very few), or made human tragedy somewhat less likely.

“None of these. Her politics stemmed from a command that she heard proclaimed from someone of no time or place, of every time and place. Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the poor in spirit, what you do for the least of these, you do for me.” (Daniel Berrigan, To Dwell in Peace, Page 70)

And, in a bad redaction of Rudyard Kipling, “If you can sense deep truth in these quotes, when all about you they are settling for something less challenging… you are listening to today’s prophets.”

It’s no secret that it’s hard to sustain daily prayer. The reason for this is not always as obvious or deep as some would make it.

Why do we find it so hard to pray regularly? Some answer by blaming the culture, with all its pressures and seductions. Others blame the devil or concupiscence or laziness. While others blame prayer forms themselves, claiming that our worship services and ways of praying are outdated and unimaginative.

There is, I suspect, some truth to all of these, but, relying on the testimony of the mystics (persons who sustained very deep prayer lives for long periods of time) I want to suggest another reason: boredom, lack of energy, tiredness, distaste for prayer, and the simple inability to crank it up. According to the mystics, the biggest problem we face in sustaining prayer is boredom and lack of energy, pure and simple.

This is important to recognize because, invariably, the solution suggested by spiritual authors, preachers, liturgists and prayer leaders is new prayer forms, more variety, endless novelty, or the simple challenge that we shouldn’t be so lazy and selfish and crank up more energy for prayer.

These solutions are, I submit, largely dysfunctional because they do not respect properly the rhythms of prayer and life. Praying is like eating and eating is like life itself; you need some variety, but mostly you need rhythm and ritual.

Eating has a natural rhythm and there are natural rituals to it: banquets and quick snacks, rich meals and salads, high times with linen serviettes and low times with paper napkins, meals which take a whole evening and meals which we eat in five minutes… and the two extremes depend upon each other, ordinary time and high season create each other.

Our eating habits generally respect anthropology—our time, energy, tiredness, the season, the hour, our boredom, our taste.

Prayer is the same as eating, but this isn’t generally respected. Too common are the myths that suggest that the following rules should guide prayer and worship: All celebrations should be high celebrations, upbeat, with lots of singing and energy expenditure. The more variety the better. Longer is better than shorter. More is better. Time and tiredness may never be a consideration. A good prayer leader or celebrant does not need a good wristwatch. The persons participating in the prayer need not have a clear durational expectancy. The solution to boredom and lack of energy is more variety and imagination.

Given those guidelines, it’s no wonder that we are often too tired and lack the energy to pray.

If boredom and lack of energy are the major culprits working against daily prayer, and the mystics suggest that they are, then, I suggest, what we need is a better rhythm and better rituals governing our prayer and worship. Monks have secrets worth knowing and they have, since the beginning of monasticism, suggested that the key to daily prayer is not so much variety and novelty as it is the expected, the familiar, the repetitious, the ritual, the clearly defined, clearly delineated prayer form which gives people a clear durational expectancy and does not demand of them an energy that they cannot muster on a given day.

There are times, important times, for high celebration, for variety and novelty, for spontaneity, and for long celebrations. There are also times, and these are meant to predominate just as they do in our eating habits, for ordinary time, for low celebrations, for prayer that respects our energy level, work pressures, and time constraints.

It is, I submit, no accident that more people used to attend daily Eucharist when daily Eucharist was precisely shorter, simpler, less demanding in terms of energy expenditure, and gave people attending it a fairly clear expectation as to how long it would last. The same holds true for other prayers, the office of the church, the rosary, and other such ritualized prayers. What these clear, and most of the time simple and brief, rituals would provide is precisely a ritual that depended upon something beyond our own energy input. The ritual could carry our tiredness, our lack of energy, and our occasional indifference or distaste. It would also carry us… keeping us praying even when we were too tired to muster up very much energy.

There is much to be commended in the renewal of prayer forms and liturgy in the past decades a renewal that has stressed more variety, more novelty, more celebration, more personal involvement, and has demanded more energy from us when we pray. But sometimes, I fear, we have fallen into the trap we are working too hard at it… and we are not letting the ritual do its work.

Bonhoeffer once while instructing a young couple for marriage said: “Tonight you are young and very much in love and you thinking that your love will sustain your marriage. But I give you the opposite advice: Let your marriage sustain your love.”

The advice that comes to us from the mystics regarding prayer is the same. You think that your good will and energy will sustain your rituals, Eucharist, divine office, devotional prayer, but instead, let your prayer rituals sustain your good will and energy.

To come to peace as a human being is not a simple task. We aren’t simple. Our hearts and minds are pathologically complex and pull us in many directions all at the same time. To be human is to be a bundle of contradictions, seldom certain of what our hearts and minds really want.

This makes it difficult for us to live simple, peaceful, and restful lives. To be at rest is to be at peace, but peace is more than the simple absence of war. Peace is a positive quality, the positive ordering of various elements into a harmony, a symphony.

Thus, for example, if someone sits down at a piano and strikes various keys at random, the result is discord, an abrasive sound, something far from peaceful. If, though, the various notes played are bound into a certain harmony, you have a melody, a peaceful sound. Most melodies, however, are far from simple, they’ve many notes. Hence if someone plays a certain musical score and omits certain notes, again you have discord, no melody. Peace depends upon ordering the notes correctly and upon having all the notes there.

Given this idea of peace, we see that the task of coming to peace as human beings is one of bringing into harmony all the various notes, elements we experience inside of us. This is far more difficult than it sounds and is a task that we rarely do well. Why?

Because most often we try to make the melody without all the notes. Rarely do we accept all that is inside of us, rarely do we resist the temptation, coming to us from our own temperament, to not reduce and render too simple our own hearts and minds.

By temperament, we are much simpler than we are in actuality. Each of us have certain propensities—to be liberal or conservative, upbeat or morose, individualistic or communitarian, intellectual or emotional, earthy or spiritual, given to feasting or fasting, prone to naïve trust or more naturally given to cynicism and doubt. By nature, we tend to one or the other and thus, perennially, our temptation is to reduce the complexity of our hearts and minds and of life itself to what we are most at home with inside of ourselves.

If we are liberal by temperament, we tend to reduce the bad to the good, the head to the heart, the soul to the body, the fast to the feast, law to conscience, the individual to the social, the next world to this world, and Good Friday to Easter Sunday. If we are conservative by temperament, we tend, conversely, to reduce the good to the bad, the heart to the head, the body to the soul, the feast to the fast, conscience to law, the social to the individual, life after birth to life after death, a joyful resurrected life to a “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

Accordingly, if we are liberal or conservative by nature we judge the validity of all conventional wisdom, ideology, theology, spirituality, and catechetics according to whether or not it emphasizes strongly what is most evident in our particular temperament.

The price of this is lack of peace. Our hearts and minds have many more rooms than does our temperament. In reality, we are always both: good and bad, head and heart, body and soul, creatures of fasting and feasting, subject to both law and conscience, social and individual, destined for life after birth as well as life after death, living in joy and pain, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, all at the same time.

To come to peace we must bring all of these into harmony, we must make these various elements within us be friends with each other. Not to do so, to reduce in any way any of these elements, is to create a heart and a mind, and a life, which is ultimately too small for us to live in.

To vary the metaphor: We need every letter of the alphabet if we are to write words for every season and aspect of our lives. To deny part of ourselves is to lose some letters and to make it impossible to ever make a symphony of our lives. We need a song for every season of life. Again, to deny part of ourselves leaves us without some notes we need to fully sing the song of life. We need a heart with many rooms. To deny any aspect of ourselves is to close off a room which, on some occasions, we will desperately need to live in.

We need an alphabet with enough letters to write words both emotional and rational, spiritual and bodily, individualistic and communitarian. We need a song with enough notes to sing about life after birth as well as life after death: a song that can be sung while feasting or fasting. And we need a house with rooms enough for crying during our bitter seasons of death, sickness, hurt and loneliness, and with rooms enough for celebrating and drinking, for feast lies at the heart of life itself.

To be human is to be pathologically complex. To come to peace is to find an alphabet with enough letters, a song with enough notes, and a heart with enough rooms.