The prayer on the cold hillside

Patrick is a slave on a hillside in Connacht and he is praying.

He is not praying the way he was taught as a child in Britain — the formal prayers of a family that was nominally Christian without being particularly serious about it. He is praying the way a person prays when there is nothing else to do — out of necessity, out of loneliness, out of a slowly forming conviction that the one he is praying to is actually listening.

He writes about it years later with a simplicity that is almost startling: In a single day I have said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same. I prayed in the woods and on the mountain. And I felt no harm from the snow or ice or rain.

A hundred prayers in a day. These are not formal liturgical prayers — he has no books, no church, no priest. These are the prayers of a person in continuous conversation, talking to God across the hours of tending sheep on a windswept hill in a country he did not choose to be in.

Something forms in him in those six years that could not have formed any other way. A knowledge of God that does not come from argument or catechesis but from the accumulated weight of conversations held in cold and loneliness and necessity.

He will spend the rest of his life giving away what he found on that hillside. But he could not give it away if he had not found it there first.

Pray without ceasing. Paul's instruction has always seemed impractical until you read Patrick's description of what it actually looks like.

It is not constant formal prayer. It is the orientation of a life — the continuous habit of turning toward God across the ordinary moments of the day, on a hillside, in the rain, with the sheep.

Patrick learned this not in a seminary but in a slave's field, and what he learned there produced a man whose prayers could walk into a country and change it.

The quality of what we give to others comes from the quality of what we receive in solitude. Patrick had six years of uninterrupted formation before his forty years of mission.

What is your hillside? Where do you do the continuous, unglamorous work of learning to pray?