The brethren also asked Abba Agathon "Amongst all good works,
which is the virtue which requires the greatest effort?" He answered
"Forgive me, but I think there is no labour greater than that of prayer to
God. For every time a man wants to pray, his enemies, the demons, want to
prevent him. For they know that it is only by turning him from prayer that they
can hinder his journey. Whatever good work a man undertakes, if he perseveres
in it, he will attain rest. But prayer is warfare to the last breath.
Desert Father Stories
Reflection – I
have always loved this particular story, and often quote it to people in
spiritual direction. The desert father stories tend to exist in various forms,
due to the oral nature of the original tradition. The version I like of this
story ends with ‘prayer is blood to the end’!
I like this because it helps clarify that there is
not something terribly wrong with us if we happen to find prayer difficult, if
we are reluctant to go to our time of prayer, find ourselves restless and
distracted during that time of prayer, and even find a sensation of relief or
easing of tension when we are leaving our time of prayer.
All of that may or may not be the case for you on
any day, but all of those are common spiritual experiences, which can cause
distress or feelings of guilt or discouragement to a person. The great thing
about reading the desert fathers is that we find written in their experience
our own experience, but reflected on from a deeply spiritual vantage point.
Prayer is blood to the end. While I have no doubt
whatsoever that the devil and his legions have quite a bit to do with our
struggle to pray and the kind of temptations and distractions we encounter in
that, the evil spirits can gain no traction in us unless there is something in
us for them to work with. And in the matter of prayer, unlike some of the other
spiritual struggles that are more specific to this or that individual, we all
have this weakness for them to exploit.
Namely, prayer is an action that directly counters
and remedies that fundamental wound of our humanity, the basic problem out of
which all our other problems arise. That is, we are alienated from God. We do
not, somehow, even in light of the revelation and saving work of Christ,
experience God as one who is near to us, one we can easily and readily be with,
talk to, listen to, be in communion with.
Because of Jesus all of these are true and are
ours, but the effects of the wound of sin in us remain, and so we do not know
them to be true as we should. And so, when we come to pray, we are touching
upon and experiencing the precise heart of the wound of humanity, the very
place where it hurts, the ground zero of our fractured and fragmented being.
And so of course it is hard. Of course we don’t
‘want’ to pray. Of course we have to struggle to get there, find it hard to
stay there, and flee from the battlefield of prayer after a time. A directee of
mine likes to use the phrase ‘skittering away from God’, and that’s a pretty
fair description of what many of us do. Kind of sidle up close to Him, and then
skitter away, then creep a bit closer again, and then skitter away, then
approach again… like a nervous horse or dodgy dog.
And yet this story also tells us that there is no
more important spiritual work, nothing that is more vital to our growth in God
and in virtue than prayer. And of course this all goes together. Since prayer
touches the very heart of the wound of our being, of course it is only prayer
that heals that wound of our being.
Only prayer, constant recourse to God,
constant turning of our face to Him, constant lifting up our mind and heart to
Him, finding time in our day to do this exclusively, but striving from that to
do it throughout the day and whatever activity it holds—only this (and we have
to be clear about it—ONLY this) provides us with the grace, the help from God,
the strength that is needed for the rest of the spiritual life: mastery of the
passions and the mind, and from that the keeping of the commandments, and
crowning that the practice of charity and works of mercy.
Without prayer, constant prayer, none of that
happens, and our condition is a woeful one. But with prayer, with that daily
choice to ‘bleed’ a little bit… well, we are not the only one bleeding here,
are we? Our blood shedding, our choice daily to turn to God and do this
difficult work, mingles with the blood of God who chose to turn to us in this radical
way and shed his blood to overcome that division, that alienation.
But you’re never going to ‘feel’ like praying, just
like Jesus probably didn’t ‘feel’ like being crucified. And so in all this
there is a deep and serious matter of identification with Christ and following
of Him, without which it doesn’t make very much sense and our Christian
religion is not terribly attractive or persuasive. But in Christ, prayer is
Blood to the end, a sharing in the redemptive and saving work of love of God in
the world, and that’s something worth shedding a few drops for, don’t you
think?