“O God ... your loving-kindness is better than life itself” (Psalm 63:3)

Someone once asked me to visit a woman he knew, who lived alone in her house. So I went to talk to her. “I wish I were dead,” she told me. “I’m just miserable.” “I’ve nothing to do, no place to go. What’s the point?”

“Do you pray?” I asked her.

“I’ve prayed to get out of this place for ages; and God simply doesn’t listen.”

“Do you pray, not for things, but just to be with God?”

“What in the world do you mean be with God?” she asked.

“You know,” I said, “be with God out of love?”

She stared at me blankly. “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

A chilling moment.

Still, what I asked this woman, I ask myself sometimes: Could I ever be “alone” yet not be “lonely”? Could I make my home with God, even here? In a nursing home, in a hospital, in jail even? When I am old and left behind? Or would I be abandoned?

I am asking this because without an answer that makes sense the rest of the Bible and of the Christian life is kind of meaningless: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Where? Why? Who are you? Why would I wish to move and leave and go somewhere new? If there is some place, some basic place of being — ill and alone — where I am faced only with myself, and where God is nowhere to be seen, where I am “on my own” with only my depleted resources, where I look at the world around me and see only mute objects and my own faltering self ... then the gospel makes no sense; and when we listen to it, we too must aver that “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

Be with God, out of love … Do we know ourselves to be people who are living with God, fundamentally and really, always and everywhere, so that in fact we are never alone?  Prayer inhabits the knowledge that “your loving-kindness is better than life itself,” so that “my soul is content, as with marrow and fatness” (Psalm 63:5). These words speak of eating, of sustenance — of life itself. The Church has always taught that prayer lies at the center of human life itself, and of the Christian vocation in particular. I have failed too often, as a teacher of teenagers and confirmands and new members, by neglecting this reality in favor of teaching about “doctrines” and “ministries” and the rest. But prayer! The prayer that constitutes “being with” the Life of our life, with God, as our marrow and fatness. Speaking to him, face to face — that is necessity.

An old professor of mine, Louis Dupré, wrote a small book, The Deeper Life, which is destined to become a classic. He outlines the way in which, in this radically secular world we live in, even our “faith” is something compartmentalized — to church, to special study times or worship times and so on — while the bulk of what we do remains engulfed in the vain play of work and responsibility that is basically godless. And so, of course, at the end of our lives — or even before — when so much of this “usual stuff” of life is stripped away, then we find ourselves sitting in very “empty” rooms.

What then shall we do? Dupré says that we must “turn inward” — indeed, learn to pray — in such a way that we rediscover the Person who lies at the root of our own selves. “My soul clings to you,” the Psalmist writes (63:8). My “soul”! A ringing affirmation of and direction toward the renewal of our lives — which is the life of God already at work within us. “Behold, you were within me, and I outside,” writes St. Augustine, as he wonders at all the years he spent aimlessly wandering in an existence devoid of meaning and hope. You are alone?  Look inside — in the prayer that moves you toward the center of your being.

Where, after all, does courage come from? And hope? And all the things that make a person someone who illumines the world? (Take up your cross and follow!) Courage, hope and all the rest come from within, not as something gained by will power, but as the receipt of a gift offered from the source of life that undergirds us, as the apprehended assurance that “God is in the midst” of the soul and it “shall not be overthrown” (Psalm 46:5). No matter what. “My soul clings to you; your right hand holds me fast.”

But it is not enough to affirm it, verbally: we must actually “experience” it. Practice it; that is: turn inward and see with the eyes of the spirit the very Person of God. And by “practice” I really do mean the constant, regular work of praying to God out of the sheer love of his presence. It isn’t enough today, in this world where we end up too often alone and bitter, to say, “Well, I say a prayer now and again.” We need time; quiet; practice. “I meditate upon you in the night watches” (Psalm 63:6). Night after night after night, inwardly speaking to the Voice before our voice.

Life’s eagerness, beauty, strength and hope derive from this practice. It isn’t some leisure activity of choice. In Africa, where I worked long ago, I lived alone in a small house without electricity, lights or people around me. It was all I had — I would pray alone, night after night. And when things began to fall apart there — the government police roaming in the dark, fear becoming palpable, arrests starting, neighbors nervous and rumors flying — my bedroom mat on the concrete floor where I used to pray was the place I fled. Prayer meant meeting my God.

For “My soul clings to you; your right hand holds me fast.” A priest I respect tells me that at least 15 minutes a day, alone, quiet, turning inward, listening, sitting with God — it is like water, completely and absolutely necessary for every living being with a heart and mind. Fifteen minutes at least, of sitting before the Lord, and of setting him before us. Carrying about the life within us that is God’s life. To see it, we must pray!

I remember a parishioner, with whom I sat as he was dying after two and a half years in a nursing home. This is what he told me: “I’m never alone; never alone.”

How so?

“Why, I can always pray!” he said with a smile — a deep, broad, peaceful smile that touched every person around him.

“My soul is content, as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth praises you with joyful lips” (Psalm 63:5).

In prayer, you will find it: the living face, the presence, the joy of God himself. And then? “Following” is an eager privilege.

The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto. This sermon was preached at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, on Father’s Day and was edited for publication.