Photo provided by Fr. Aaron Morris, C.S.C.
To serve him honestly we must pray always and never give up. (Constitution 3:24)
Prayer for most is folded hands, kneeling beside your bed, before the blessed sacrament, a set of rosary beads, a worn book of psalms, hands joined or hands raised, voices in song, a chant or melody; but above all it is time set apart with God. Before God.
But if we are to serve the Lord, this set-aside time must boil over and spill into the entire day. A private prayer becomes public worship not just in gathered liturgy but in the labor of hands, heart, mind and spirit. It sounds like a gentle thing but it’s a rugged, effortful and impossible discipline sometimes. To keep the Lord always before us in the most mundane moments and the most intense occupations. In moments of virtue or honor and moments of failure and shame. To let the Lord surround even your sin!
No longer that quiet peace, this prayer working in the world infuses the whole being–sometimes even a violent state of being: the struggle to overcome sin, the turmoil of internal conflict, the risk of love when the cost is the cross. From the strength of one’s quiet retreat (for us at least 30 minutes a day), comes strength to sustain prayer by the graced effort of the day. A cooperation that wins each next moment of life-in-prayer and in winning even just a moment we are vanquished by it. Consumed whole by God’s eternity that can only be found in the present moment: with God and before God.
So pray as you can in this moment and every moment. Whatever the moment’s occupation. Pray to serve him alone, and even in failure when it feels like time to give up and give in, be with God and before God and let yourself be vanquished by the Lord to serve him even still.
To pray
Is to pursue
A moment in the Lord
To seek within
And without
To be tumbled
And lost
And bent by its weight
As it humbles
And swallows like a wave
For all the hunting
And wrestling
Not a moment is lost
Not a moment gained
Only Eternity
For a moment
Realized
By Fr. Aaron Morris, C.S.C.
Published August 11, 2026 by the Office of Vocations
