But then, God doesn't live just in our Churches, either. God lives everywhere! Outside us and inside us. So we pray without ceasing by choosing to live mindfully aware of the Presence of God everywhere that we are - because that is where God is also.
But what helps us the most to live mindfully aware of God's Presence everywhere that we go is to first become mindfully aware that God goes everywhere with us because God makes His home within each of us.
If we leave our minds and hearts, souls and lives wide open, God is our honored Guest who lives in us and acts through us and walks beside us, in conversation or in quiet. Not necessarily a conversation of words. Sometimes God nudges us with a deep emotion, or a sudden inner peace, or an insight, or a simple prickly sense of awe at a beautiful scene or at something that just happened. However or whatever you call it, the connection between God and us is REAL AND THERE - if we want it!
Yes, God lives within each of us. Does that sound like an arrogant thing to say? But, the Presence of God within us is a foundational Christian belief. Don't we often speak of our conscience as the voice of God within us? St. Paul said our body is a 'temple of the Holy Spirit,' one place where God dwells. St. Augustine wrote that God is 'intimior intimo meo': closer to me then I am to myself.
If each of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit, we could also say that each of us is also an Ark of the Covenant. If you remember, God gave Moses instructions for the building of the Ark of the Covenant while the Israelites were encamped at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The Ark was built to hold the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, the rod of Aaron, and a jar of manna.
The Ark was a gold-plated chest made of acacia wood, with two gold rings on either side, through which gold-plated wooden staves were placed so the Ark could be lifted and carried whenever the Israelites traveled, especially in advance of their armies. While the Ark was carried, it was always covered by animal skins and blue cloth, hidden so carefully that even the priests could not see it. When the Israelites camped, the Ark was placed in a private room of a large tent called the "Tabernacle," a term which we now use for the small "chests" (like Arks) which hold the Eucharist.
Don't we hold the Ten Commandments, God's Presence in His Word, within us? Aren't they supposed to be written on the fleshly tablets of our hearts? When we receive Holy Communion, don't we hold the Lord alive and present within our souls? If so, then we travel with God within us, like traveling Arks of the Covenant, God the Holy of Holies hidden within us by the covering of our own skins. An awesome thought! If we really believed this about ourselves, we would ponder over every thought, word, and action of ours, to make them worthy of the One Whom we carry wherever we go.
If we are truly aware that we are Arks of the Covenant, then we also know, deep down, that every action of ours, no matter how simple, is holy, when it is performed with love. Every time we change a dirty diaper. Every time we put out food and water for our cat or dog, or groom our horse, or care for a disabled falcon, or feed a baby lamb. Every time we bake bread or a birthday cake. Every time we fertilize or plant a garden or can our produce. Every time we push a neighbor's recycling tote out to the front for garbage pick-up. Every time we feed an infant or someone aged who is disabled by dementia, or push a wheelchair. Every time we comfort a sobbing widow or widower. Every time we march in a March for Life. Every time we deliberately are friendly to someone of a different racial, ethnic, or religious background, or sexual orientation. Every time we teach others how to practically care for our planet and reverse the pollution that befouls water, soil, and air.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said it best: "Just to live is a blessing. Just to be is holy."
He also said "Man is the messenger who forgot the message." Once we forget that we are literally Bearers of God into the world, we forget our deepest meaning and value. Once we forget that others, including all of creation, are also Bearers of God, we forget their deepest meaning and value!
Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, once had an amazing spiritual experience as he looked at all the people passing by in the middle of a busy intersection.
Merton says, "I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. . . ."
A bit further on, Merton writes, "Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes."
Merton continues:
"If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and "understood" by a peculiar gift."
The gift that enables us to see others as Arks of the Covenant, Bearers of God, is the gift of seeing others with God's mind and heart. This is a gift we can grow in the more we take time to let our minds rest in awareness that God truly lives within us. The more often we tell God that we know that He loves us and lives in us, the more often that God quietly nudges us to become aware of God's Presence around us: in the wonders of the natural world, in our family's smiles, in all those strangers walking down the street.
Notice Merton's comment: "I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other." If we were alive to God's pulsating Presence in each other, we would worship the Divine Presence in each other. We would become more like St. Francis, who conversed with birds and overcame his natural aversion to kiss the hands of lepers - whose rotting flesh stank - and to take care of them.
No, God doesn't live just in our Churches. God lives everywhere. The more we become aware of Him inside us, the more we free Him to nudge us to see and experience His Presence everywhere we look, especially in the people, the animals, and the works of nature that we interact with every day. God asks us to become true Arks of the Covenant, bearing God within us with quiet interior reverence even as we laugh uproariously at someone's joke or as we cook dinner. This is praying without ceasing, every one of our words and actions praising the God Who lives without and within us because every word and action is a Bearer of God's love. God calls us to know the true meaning of who we are; God yearns for us to know to the depths of our joyful souls that just to live is a blessing, and just to be is holy.