I don’t have the time to write this. With the Writers Guild strike now over, and in its place a sudden deadline for a script, I came close to telling this blog’s editor, Greg Wolfe, that I simply couldn’t make tomorrow’s due date for this, my third post. For better or worse, I’ve never been one to miss a deadline, but the competition between these two seemed to leave me with no choice.

Not to mention the other projects that scream for my attention on a daily basis: a movie script whose completion still eludes me years since its inception (though its subject matter, the devil, gives me a pretty good scapegoat for the troubles thereof); the queries to be made for an extensive non-fiction piece; and, always, the poems, the vast body of poems in various states of revision, which at times makes the prospect of publishing a book feel more like the containment of a plague. Dear Greg, I’m out of my mind….

If only I were out of my mind. Because the problem seems to be how embedded I am in it. For as much as I care about the perennial questions of art and faith, something that I rarely find asked, let alone answered, is the vexing matter of how we spend our time. The culture wars rage on, but most days it’s a far more practical battle that consumes me: with so much time accorded to my craft, even if that craft is a calling, it’s little wonder that I find so little time to pray.

“Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul,” said the French philosopher, Nicolas Malebranche, a widely beloved maxim which makes a good balm for the self-inflicted wounds in this battle. If done with proper awareness, any activity, from writing an epic to waiting for a bus, becomes a form of prayer. I hesitate to argue that, and the last thing I would do is diminish the vigil we must make of our capacity to pay attention. But far too many times a conflict of devotions has led me right past the prayer closet to my desk in the hopes that the latter will somehow double for the former.

Hence I find a greater yet antithetical truth in the first sentence of Too Busy Not to Pray by Bill Hybels: “Prayer is an unnatural activity.” There’s no poetry in that one, but, oh, is there reality. So unnatural is prayer that despite our good attentions we avoid it on a regular basis, and worse yet, delude ourselves into thinking that time in our chair, if spent in the right frame of mind, will count for time on our knees. But I laugh because it’s true when St. Francis de Sales writes: “Half an hour’s meditation is essential except when you are very busy. Then a full hour is needed.”

This is not to say that true contact with the divine doesn’t happen at the desk, piano, or canvas; of course it does. But if I want to get a sense of what it might be like for even a hypothetical God to watch me pass by the prayer closet for my desk day after day, and have to meet me so much more than halfway in that double-minded place, then maybe I should try bringing a script or batch of poems on my next date night with my wife.

In a passage from Jeremiah that enthralls me for what takes place in a white space, the prophet is hectored by his people to seek the Lord regarding their wish to flee to Egypt. After they lodge their desperate request, verse 42:7 simply, but ever so mysteriously, reads: “At the end of ten days the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.”

What did he do for those ten days? No doubt his attentiveness peaked, especially if he fasted to sharpen the ears of his spirit. Chances are there was little in the way of other obligations, even other inspirations. Jeremiah took the time to avail himself, no excuses allowed.

As I have to write this. And lest I feel too good having done so, when do I ever spend a commensurate time in prayer between 8:00 p.m. and midnight?