Reflections on Praying the Psalter
A rule of prayer is characterized above all by rhythm, the experience of a rule is that of submitting to the rhythm of it. You pray at certain times and in certain words; in these times and words begin fairly soon to give a definite pattern to one's days. When a rule of prayer is first begun, there is usually an ecstatic period in which the prayers are resonant, profound, and extremely moving. It is exactly like falling in love: an extraordinary sweetness gives one's days vividness, depth, and perfection. You wake up into joy - not merely into happiness but into genuine joy, into something richer, sharper, and more actual than any happiness ever can be. Happiness is feeling, but joy is something greater in the same order of magnitude that a child's happiness at play is something far greater than the stuffed teddy bear he plays with. And just as a child's happiness at play may be expressed by only the tiniest outward signs, so a person experiencing the first joy of prayer may in fact be quite subdued. For the first work of spiritual joy is often very largely inward. So it was for me.
But our loving cannot remain ecstatic, nor our children play happily forever, so a rule of prayer soon moves us beyond this first joy. For the experience of prayer that follows that first joy is experience of failure, and experience in which one's own prayer is a very poor thing, with nothing to recommend it. Prayer becomes a place of struggle, not triumph, a place where you just barely keep your head above water. And most of the time you sink and are engulfed again and again by the world you have so badly made and keep on making: your world of work and family and friends and enemies. This disastrous failure also is entirely undramatic and thoroughly un-spectacular. Where it once was vast, gathered, and profound, prayer now becomes mean, scattered, and flat.
There is no way out of this. It is what the early Orthodox Fathers called the desert. You cannot survive in this merciless place unless you submit to the first conditions of it: that is, unless you meet its implacable demand for an ever deeper spiritual poverty. For what the rule is drawing you toward is what Mother Maria [Lydia Gysi] calls the End-Point, that point wherein - as at your bath - you are stripped of absolutely all you possess - "except your sins, and the cry for mercy." With a slowly growing awareness - or else with a sudden shock of insight - you see that the desert is, in fact, the place where you live now - and will live for the rest of your life. Where is joy? In the rhythm.
Into this desert comes the voices of the great Orthodox Masters of prayer, the saints, fathers, mothers, monks, and nuns of the holy tradition. St. Innocent of Alaska says in The Art of Prayer: "the whole Holy Spirit teaches true prayer….A man with the Holy Spirit dwelling in him knows God and sees that He is his Father. He knows how to approach Him, how to ask and what to ask for. His thoughts in prayer are orderly, pure, and directed to the one object alone - God; and by his prayer he is truly able to do everything.”
If we feel something like despair in hearing such a voice (for our thoughts and prayer are anything but quote orderly, pure, and directed"), we are also instructed. I haven't the slightest idea what sustains one in a rule of prayer. Certainly, it isn't pleasure of easily recognizable variety, for desert life is scarcely anyone's formula for personal happiness. Yet what St. Innocent here says - "by prayer he is truly able to do everything "- is illumined by a joy so profound, so strong, and vivid that all our notions of pleasure simply vanish in the way flickers of candlelight vanished in the glaring immensity of the desert sun. You die into joy.
All the time rhythm of the rule keeps on working.
The Shield of Psalmic Prayer, by Donald Sheehan
