Main news for 2 December 2022

Describing the spiritual life of a Christian as, in the apostle's view, it should be, Paul places prayer at its center - continuous prayer and always with thanksgiving. The whole life of a Christian is built around such prayer. It would seem that praying continuously is impossible: after all, there are other things in life that in any case have to be done, so one will still have to be distracted from prayer in one way or another. But it looks this way only to someone for whom prayer is merely certain words that must be said to God.

Yet words are only the outward form of prayer. In some cases one can do without them altogether: in all spiritual traditions, at least those that go back to Abraham, there exists the practice of prayer without words, silent prayer, or prayer in which short prayer formulas are used. These can easily be repeated to oneself in a whisper or even mentally anywhere, practically under any circumstances. It is possible that Paul too has something similar in mind; among believing Jews in his time such prayer was known and popular.

As a prayer formula they usually used either the prayer "Shema" ("Hear, O Israel...") or simply the invocation of the sacred name, the name of Yahweh, which could not be pronounced aloud but which no one forbade invoking mentally. In church practice, especially in the East, inner prayer later became widespread and is usually called the Jesus Prayer, because in it, in any case, though there are several variants of such prayer, the name of Jesus is present, whom the one praying invokes.

But whatever the prayer formula may be, it still remains only a means of directing the will of the one praying toward the One to whom he wants to turn, toward God or toward Christ. The goal remains precisely the union of the human will with God's will or with Jesus' will. Ideally no gap should remain between the two wills; they should form a single whole while each remains itself - as it was with Jesus Himself and His heavenly Father.

Such unity of a person with God makes possible everything else that Paul lists in his letter: constant joy, attentiveness to every movement of God's breath, listening to prophetic revelations. But the most important thing is that it creates the space of relationship between God and the person, outside which normal spiritual life is impossible at all. That is why the apostle places prayer at the center of the spiritual life of Christians: it makes possible in that life everything else about which Paul reminds the Thessalonian Christians.