The Sermon on the Mount (Bossuet)/Day 41
Forty-first Day
'Pray without ceasing?' — Luke xviii, I, 8.
'AND He spoke a parable to them, that we ought always to pray, and not to faint.’
This unceasing prayer does not consist in a perpetual application of mind that could only exhaust one’s strength, and which would perhaps after all not attain its end. We ‘ pray always ’ when — having offered our prayer at its regular hours — we gather from prayer, and from sacred reading, some truth or some special saying that we keep within our heart, and recall from time to time with no effort: — when we keep ourselves in thought, as far as possible, dependent on God; showing Him all our needs by laying them before Him without words. Then, just as the yawning and dried-up earth seems to beg for rain by the mere fact of exposing its parched surface to heaven, so does the soul pray by exposing its needs to God. And this is what David means when he says: — ‘I stretched forth my hands to thee: my soul is as earth without water to thee.’[1] That is: O Lord, I have no need to ask of Thee; my need asks Thee; my destitution asks Thee; my necessities ask Thee!
So long as we keep in this disposition, we ‘pray without praying’; so long as we give our minds to avoiding all that might endanger our soul, we ‘ pray without praying’; and God understands this language. ‘ O Lord, before Whom I stand, and to Whom my misery is known in all its fulness, have pity on it! And every time Thine eyes shall behold it, O God of all goodness, may it draw down on me Thy mercies! ’
Here is one way of ‘ always praying’ — and perhaps the most effectual.
- ↑ Ps. cxlii. 6.