Pray Without Ceasing: How?

In "Pray without Ceasing: What?" we presented an excerpt of Kathryn Jean Lopez' report on the National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington, D.C. on February 4. The next day, she posted an interview with author Gary Jensen about the topic of praying ceaslessly. Following is an excerpt of that interview. You can read the full interview at National Review online.

The National Prayer Breakfast happened in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, and many speakers discussed prayer. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan quoted St. Paul about praying unceasingly. Well, how on earth can you do that? Gary Jansen’s new book suggests starting with 15 minutes. In The 15-Minute Prayer Solution: How One Percent of Your Day Can Transform Your Life, the longtime editor of books on religion (and author of some others himself) says that his life changed when he really started to commit himself to prayer. He points out that with 1,440 minutes in a day, 14 minutes and 24 seconds is 1 percent of the day. Fifteen minutes could lead you “on a path to experiencing God more boldly, deeply, and intimately.” He talks about the pitch. – KJL

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What if I don’t have 15 minutes?

GARY JANSEN: One percent of a day is roughly 15 minutes. Once I looked at the math and imagined looking at a scale where 1 percent was on one side and 99 percent was on the other, I thought, Oh, wow. I have to stop making excuses. I’m being kind of selfish. But I understand the struggles that come with prayer. It’s sometimes hard for me to sit still, so I started to find ways to pray throughout the day. I would pray while walking to work. You can pray when you’re washing dishes or when you’re taking a shower. You can thank God for running water. You can pray at red lights or pray the rosary on your fingers while eating lunch. There are two things I don’t believe in (and I’m open to a lot of things): leprechauns and someone saying they don’t have time to pray. There is always time to pray. Sometimes you just have to get creative.

LOPEZ: Is praying constantly even possible? It sure sounds like more than 1 percent of your day.

JANSEN: One percent of your day is just a start. The goal is to pray constantly. I think we can move toward that attainment by making small changes in our life every day. One of the things this book talks about, and what I’ve been talking about for years, is how making small changes in the way we do things — and being consistent in those actions — can radically change our lives. For example, maybe prayer is tough for you. Start off by praying a minute a day. Do that for a week and then increase it by one minute every day for 30 days. At the end of that month you’re giving 2 percent of your life to God in prayer. If you can pray 15 minutes a day, at the end of the year you will have spent over 5,000 minutes in prayer. That’s nearly four days of your life you’ve given to God! To quote Ina Garten, how cool is that? I love Practicing the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence. He basically offers up everything he does to God as a prayer, so he’s in a perpetual state of connection with the Almighty. Can we do that in the 21st century? I think we can. I think we need to do this.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. She is co-author of the new revised and updated edition of How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice (available from Our Sunday Visitor and Amazon.com). Sign up for her weekly newsletter here.

Read the entire interview at National Review online where Lopez goes on to ask Jansen about intimacy with God, sin and mercy, generosity, and Jesus' call for us to be heroic.