A Vicious Circle

The devotion I used during last evening’s prayer service focused on…you guessed it...prayer. In it, Anthony de Mello quotes Mahatma Gandhi who said, “I am telling you my own experience and that of my colleagues: we could go for days on end without food; we could not live a single minute without prayer.” Oh that we might live that type of prayer life! In a world that hoards food every time there is the slightest threat of a shortage, I guess it might be expected that we could easily ignore prayer. The problem is that it becomes a vicious circle. Not only can we become dependent on something, to the point we become addicted, we can also become dependent upon the absence of something in our lives. It would seem some become so confident in their own abilities that they do not need prayer or the leading of the Spirit to guide them, and once you start down that path, it is hard to turn back. De Mello goes on to make this assessment. “The less we pray the less likely we are to live the risky, challenging life that the Gospels urge us to live; the less of a challenge there is in our life, the less likely we are to pray.”