In his book, “How to Pray“, Peter Greig recounts a conversation he had with Brennan Manning:
What if the hour you spend in the prayer room is when you refocus on Jesus so that you can carry his presence with you into the other twenty-three hours of the day with a heightened awareness that he is with you, he is for you, that he likes you, that he hears your thoughts?
You start to pray in real time. You instinctively lift situations to the Lord in the actual moment that you experience them- while you are watching that distressing news report or hearing about your friend’s latest crisis. You’re no longer deferring all your prayers to some later, holier moment, because your whole life is becoming that holier moment. (Brennan Manning)
Praying in Real Time
What a great invitation to pray in real time. Real time is the only time we have after all. Manning’s storied life renders a healing oil of his spiritual journey that would give voice to not defer to “some later, holier moment, because your whole life is becoming that holier moment.” Peter Greig’s response to this was to admit:
This was unfamiliar territory for someone raised in a tradition that tends to box prayer away in an all-important daily frictional, an optimal weekly prayer meeting, and a ninety-minute service on Sunday. And yet it was alluring to think that there could be a deeper, more meaningful way to pray around the clock, not just by saying a lot of prayers, but by becoming those prayers twenty-four hours a day. Not just by intersecting occasionally for God’s Kingdom to come out there somewhere “on earth as in heaven” but by becoming the patch of earth on which it touches down.
Let us therefore become that patch of earth on which the Kingdom touches down.
Let us become the prayer we are praying.
Thanks to my friend Bob Foo, fellow student of prayer, for sending this to me.
Curriculum of the Spiritual Life 