Nyssa Continual Prayer

Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

The 2nd Reading of Night Office was electric as the Holy Spirit illuminated the word.

Through the usual fog of the words that jumble and the sentences fragment light shines.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa on Continual Prayer has a paradigmatic clarity and mystical continuity. The Reading may also gain from the translation from the Friends of Henry Ashworth.

Gospel Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told his disciples a parable about the need to pray continually and never lose heart. . . .(Lessons on Prayer).

From a homily on the Lord's Prayer by Saint Gregory of Nyssa
(PG 44, 1119. 1123-1126)

Continual prayer and thanksgiving would be natural for us if we realized how many blessings we have received from God, and how many future blessings are dependent upon our perseverance in prayer.

The divine Word teaches us how to pray, explaining to disciples worthy of him, and eagerly longing for knowledge of prayer, what words to use to gain a hearing from God.

Those who fail to unite themselves to God through prayer cut themselves off from God, so the first thing we have to learn from the Word is that we need to pray continually and not lose heart. Prayer brings us close to God, and when we are close to God we are far from the Enemy. Prayer safeguards chastity, controls anger, and restrains arrogance. It is the seal of virginity, the assurance of marital fidelity, the shield of travelers, the protection of sleepers, the encouragement of those who keep vigil, the cause of the

farmer's good harvest and of the sailor's safety. Therefore I think that even if we spent the whole of our lives in communion with God through thanksgiving and prayer, we should still be as far from adequately repaying our benefactor as we should have been had we not even desired to repay him.

Time has three divisions: past, present, and future. In all three we experience the Lord's kindly dealings with us. If you consider the present, you live in him; if you consider the future, your hope of obtaining what you look forward to is in him; if you consider the past, you would not have existed had you not been created by him. Your birth is his kindly gift to you, and after birth his kindness toward you continued, since as the Apostle says you live and move in him. On this same kindness depend all your hopes for the future. Only over the present have you any control Therefore, even if you give thanks to God unceasingly throughout your life you will hardly meet the measure of your debt for present blessings, and as for those of the past and future, you will never find a way of repaying what you owe.

And yet we, who are so far from being capable of showing due gratitude, do not even give thanks to the best of our ability. We fail to set aside, I say not the whole day, but even the smallest portion of the day, to be spent with God.

Who restored to its original beauty that divine image in me that was blurred by sin? Who draws me back to the blessedness I knew before I was driven out of paradise, deprived of the tree of life, and submerged in the abyss of worldliness? As Scripture says, There is no one who understands. If we realized these things we would give thanks continually, endlessly, throughout the whole of our lives.