“We must return to the Faith of our fathers by way of the prayer of our fathers.” ~ John Senior
The Vacuum of our Secular Era
As modern day Americans, it is nearly impossible for us to imagine what a balanced and healthy Christian lifestyle actually looks like. Protestantism has played a primary role in shaping the way we Americans understand religious life. All too often, this has reduced religion to a private matter, with little to no regard for contemplation. In Orthodoxy, indeed, in all traditional Christian societies, religion is fundamentally communal and contemplative. Christian culture, the culture that creates saints, begins and ends in the liturgical prayer life of the Church.
Secularism has further deteriorated our lifestyle. In the words of John Paul II, “Secular culture leads to “a practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism.” Fr. Francis Bethel suggests: “A Christian today is obliged to live in two worlds. Weekly church services cannot compete with an educational system, an entertainment industry and a public environment that are completely secular, divested of signs of Christianity or of spiritual things, without reference to an existence beyond this world” (John Senior and the Restoration of Realism 204). We are altogether spiritually starved and immature.
What Can Be Done? Return to the Church’s Rhythm
“What is Christian culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish, but the central fact of two thousand years of history.”
“Christendon, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music literature — all these things when they are right, are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: “Senior, Restoration of Christian Culture 16).
The Environment Produces the Saints
“In the moral and spiritual order, we become what we wear as much as what we wear becomes us — and it is the same with how we eat and what we do. That is the secret of St. Benedict’s Rule, which in the strict sense regulated monasteries and in the wider sense, through the influence and example of monasteries…civilized Europe. The habit of the monks, the bells, the ordered life, the ‘conversation,’ the music, gardens, prayer, hard work and walls — all these accidental and incidental forms conformed the moral and spiritual life of Christians to the love of Mary and her Son” (Senior, RCC 222).
Human Flourishing Requires a Foundation of Prayer
“You often hear it said that work is prayer; that is not what St. Benedict said. He said work and pray. For our work to be efficacoius in the order of love, we must first dispose ourselves to grace…Charity begins in prayer” (Senior 6O).
“By prayer I mean above all the practice of solitude and silence exemplified perfectly by the Blessed Virgin who did little and said less because the best communion with her Son was secret, private and quiet” (ibid.).
“Work is a physical necessity; if you don’t work you don’t eat. Prayer is a necessity of obligation; if you don’t pray you will not enter the Kingdom. Prayer is a duty, an office; it is a free, voluntary payment of the debt we owe to God for existence and grace. The Latin word for duty is officium, and the perfect prayer of the Church is its Divine Office; St. Benedict called it the opus Dei, the work of God” (ibid.).
The Role of Monasteries
“Of course the simplest, most practical restoration of Christian Culture will be the reestablishment of contemplative convents and monasteries. Without publicity or the raising of large amounts of money, because grace is not visible or audible in itself and is very poor, just one small house of a few virgins consecrated to the total life of prayer will reinvigorate the spiritual life of a dying town.”
“We must put this on our agenda: Encourage young men and women…to do as Our Lord said, ‘be perfect.’ Of all the possible careers the young might consider and choose, they must put God’s choice first and consider the possibility of a call to the contemplative life” (Senior, 62; 98)
Our Tithe of Contemplation
“Even those of us in the active life are called to a tithe of the contemplative as well. The strictly cloistered monk and nun lead that life in the highest degree, but each of us in his station must pay his due.” Traditionally, monastics have been expected to pray eight hours a day, priests 4 hours a day, and the laity, “to offer a tithe of their time for prayer — about two and one-half hours per day” (Senior 63).
But It Can’t Be Done!
“Everyone will say at once, it can’t be done. That is what I meant when I said that the first thing said about prayer is that we don’t have time for it. But the reason why we don’t is that priests don’t lead the way by praying their four hours every day, and the monks and nuns don’t lead them by keeping all the vigils of the night. We are suffering from the domino effect. Every layman owes his tithe of time — two and one half hours per day!”
How Can We Restore Prayer in Our Life?
“The first question on the agenda of prayer is time: Where has time gone? Well, for one thing it has gone into useless work and in the cities into the tangled difficulties of getting to work and then into the consequent increased necessity of getting away from work in complicated, expensive, time-consuming, unproductive and destructive ways of recreation.”
“We are in a downward, reciprocally causative spin: because our work is disordered, there is not time to pray, and because there is no time to pray our work grows worse. Prayer is the proximate end of every immediate work; it is the humble soil, the humus of our common humanity, irrigated by tears of contrition. Works without prayer are dead. Prayer and work are not the same thing — you cannot use the one as a substitute for the other…Work needs prayer as dry cracked leather needs oil; prayer fills the pores of work and makes it flexible, useful to God” (Senior 64).