Saint Basil the Great was bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia when he fought against the Arians despite grievous threats from the Arian king Valens. He has reformed so thoroughly the clergy in his diocese that other bishops sought his help in assisting them in their dioceses. His greatest achievement though was the establishment of a vast hospital and work house outside the city of Caesarea, which came to be known as the “New Town,” and later renamed Basileiad after his death (Laux, 1930). In the sermon, “Prayer must come first” (Everitt et al., 1985) he explored prayer and service through the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10: 38-42. He guided the listeners through the various forms of prayer, keeping in focus its essential characteristics that make prayer a devout interaction between man and God.
The contemplative attitude
Saint Basil commenced his sermon with a counsel on how a Christian must orient himself towards the life, words and deeds, of the Lord Jesus Christ; that all these are lessons “in virtue and piety” (chap1: page44). So that “every man and every woman, contemplating as in a picture the practice of all virtue and piety, might strive with all their hearts to imitate His example.” He proceeded to explain the objective of the Incarnation wherein Christ “bore our body, so that as far as we could we might repeat within us the manner of His life.” He cautioned that each time a Christian hears about the word or deed of Christ, such must not be received as an incidental event, but as something sent to us from Heaven (“mystically handed down to us”).
The two states of serving God
Saint Basil described Martha and Mary as two sisters of respective good will. Yet in their special ways made a choice on how to serve the Lord. Martha welcomed the Lord and served him refreshments (v. 38, 40; Jones, 1966); but Mary sat at His feet (v. 39). “The one ministered to the visible man,” the Saint said, “the other bowed down before the invisible.” And the Lord was pleased with both (“the Lord who was there both God and man was pleased with the good dispositions of both women”).
The examples of Martha and Mary illustrated two states of serving God: “the lower, choosing to serve Him in corporeal ministrations and that which, ascending to the contemplation of the sacred mysteries is the more spiritual” (page45). And, Saint Basil reminded, whichever “should you choose the way of service, render your service in the name of Christ.” Choosing the corporeal ministries is serving Christ through other people (cf. Matthew 25: 31-46). Choosing the contemplative ministries is “a work above the service of corporeal need.” He counseled: “Strive for whichever you will, and be either a servant of the needy of this world, or a zealous lover of the words of Christ.”
However, a Christian can strive to serve the Lord through the two ministries, and from both receive “the fruit of salvation” (chap2: page45).
Saint Basil did clarify the distinction between and separate places of the two ministrations: “But the spiritual motive is the first, all the rest come second.” (“It is Mary who has chosen the better part”; v. 42) He then proceeded to explain what could be the Scriptural basis for the contemplative life, which the Saint himself lived before he became bishop:
“If then you would enter into the mysteries of Christ, let you sit by His feet, and receive His Gospel, and abandoning your way of life let you live apart from men and free from all concern, let you have no further thought for your body, and then you will be enabled to enter into mystic converse with Him in contemplation of His truth and gain the highest glory” (page45).
The two ways of prayer
In the second paragraph of chapter 2, Saint Basil counseled on the ways of prayer. First counsel is not to ask for anything incompatible to the spiritual life (“for what is alien to your life”), such as money, human glory, power, and anything that passes away. Instead, the Kingdom of God must be sought first, and “all that is needed for your body will be provided” (cf. Matthew 6: 25-34). The separation of ‘bodily needs’ from ‘money, human glory, power, and anything that passes away’ constituted an insightful distinction between human needs, which are often biological (‘corporeal’) needs that determines survival of life, and human wants, which had much to do with human vanity and hunger for the baser things of life.
The distinction that Saint Basil made is essential because it delineated between things essential to life and those not. This context can be understood better when remembering the same context that the teaching came off from the Lord. In Matthew 6: 24, the Lord taught about the choices a Christian has to make between God and money. (“No one can be the slave of two masters; he will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn.”) Saint Luke also recounted this teaching about money with the Lord’s parable of the crafty servant (16: 1-13).
Nevertheless, the Lord had a more radical idea pertaining to the abandonment of the worries and cares of life: “That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it” (Matthew 6:25). To the Lord, even worries and cares over the essentials of life must go. This was exactly the intention when Saint Basil mentioned about ‘bodily needs,’ that “He made you and your health is His care, and He knows which state is profitable to each one, to be healthy or to be infirm” (chap3: page46). In Matthew 6: 26-32, the Lord placed all things in their proper roles in the scheme of things: “Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? So do not worry; do not say, ‘What are we to eat? What are we to drink? How are we to be clothed?’ It is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things. Your Father knows you need them all.”
Saint Basil mentioned two ways of prayer: prayer of praise (“one to give praise to God from a humble heart” and prayer of petition. Having said that, he counseled not to begin prayer with petitions, “otherwise you may then be accused of praying to God only when in need.” That is, even when asking for things not “alien to your life,” petition must come only later in prayer. Prayer must begin with praising and glorifying God.
He also counseled that, before God in prayer, everything else must cease to be of consequence but God. (“Leave behind every creature, the visible and the invisible. Let the earth go, and rise up to Heaven.”) The mind must be focused on God, and “not wandering here and there.” When glorifying and praising God, the Psalms would be the appropriate sources to guide the words used in prayer (cf. Psalms 100: 3).
After praising and glorifying God from the Scriptures, Saint Basil advised Christians to seek forgiveness with all humility (“Lord, I am not worthy to praise Thee, for I have sinned most grievously”). Praying from the heart of a sinner must be done even if without any consciousness of any fault because “save God alone, there is no one without sin” (chap3: page45). He explained that we commit many sins, and most of them we forgot. Saint Paul shared the same teaching: “True, my conscience does not reproach me at all, but that does not prove that I am acquitted: the Lord alone is my judge” (1 Corinthians 4: 4-5). It is not falsehood, he continued, to say that “you are a sinner.” Moreover, if a Christian is not sure of not being sinner, and still said “I am not a sinner,” he sins for saying so. It is, thus, more appropriate to say: “I have sinned more than other sinners I am a profitless servant (cf. Luke 17:10). This stance of a humble and sinful servant before God finds consistency with a teaching of Saint Paul to the Philippians: “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead” (2: 3-4).
Saint Basil emphasized that such persistence in faith, in asking for the Father to grant what is sought in prayer, is an exercise of faith (“We should be strong and persistent in faith.”). There should be no place for discouragement before still ungranted prayers. He only asked one condition to be fulfilled: that “you ask for what God wishes you to ask” (page46). The teaching of asking “what God wishes you to ask” can be confusing to some. How should I know “what God wishes me to ask”? Why should I ask in the first place if what I would be asking is no other than “what God wishes me to ask”? Cannot I ask then what I wish to ask? Is it not more meaningful to me if I ask what I wish to ask and not “what God wishes me to ask”? The resolution to these logical questions is a long one that far departs from the flow of Saint Basil’s teaching about prayer. He too did not expound about this. (Nonetheless, let it suffice to mention that these questions are essential for reflection, and may find answers through the teachings of ‘following God’s will’ in our lives as well as in the mystery of Christ’s unity with His Father, which provides a fitting model for our similar unity with Christ as part of His mystical body, and in extension our unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit through Christ.)
One thing to be very careful with unfulfilled prayers is the misguided attribution of such will of God as an outcome of a person’s sinfulness. Saint Basil counseled: “Do not say: ‘I am a sinner, therefore He does not listen to me.’” That thought can be a temptation towards despair. When that happens, a Christian must be sure in himself that he did or does not “betray what he owes to God”; and he shall be sure he will never be “in want of the divine aid.” Thus, with or without waiting for the fulfillment of any prayer, the person must have no part with what is sinful (“unworthy”). And, that he should have nothing for his conscience to condemn. Once all that had been fulfilled, “only then may we cry out for divine aid and cry earnestly” (page47). Because it is not through indifference but through sinfulness that a person cannot pray as he ought when kneeling before God.
In specific situations that brought about distractions in prayer, Saint Basil had specific counsel on what to do:
(1) If the conscience hints of unworthiness to pray: “Venture not to stand thus in the presence of the Lord for fear your prayer becomes an offense.”
(2) If in prayer the mind wanders around: “Venture not to stand thus in the presence of the Lord for fear your prayer becomes an offense.”
(3) If the soul has become weak through sin: “Strive with yourself as best as you can. Strive manfully before Him, and calling upon Him, and God will have compassion on you.”
The path to unyielding faith
The teaching on prayer will not be complete without the teaching on faith. Saint Basil started this teaching in Chapter 5, and with Abraham, the young man who left his forebears in the lands of the Assyrians in the behest of his new God. God promised him fatherhood to innumerable descendants (cf. Genesis 13: 15-16). For so many years he waited and waited for the promise to be fulfilled without complaint even after “the impulses of nature withered away” in him and too old to live for long. He never doubted, even in his heart, that God would fulfill His promise. Saint Basil described Abraham’s faith so beautifully: “While his body grew old his hope grew young. As his body became weaker and gave him grounds for despairing, his faith gave strength to his and his body.” Then the promise of the Lord took life at a time when nature had lost the power to let it happen.
When a prayer remained unfulfilled, Saint Basil said, it is because “you have prayed badly.” He enumerated three ways to pray badly. First, praying “without faith.” Second, praying “with a distracted mind.” And, third, praying “for the things that were not expedient for you.” And, even when prayer for things useful spiritually, perseverance was lacking (cf. Luke 21: 19; Matthew 10: 22).
Then, for what reason that God be asked in prayer for what people need when God already knows what they need? Saint Basil confirmed that God indeed knows already what people need for their bodies, and that God, in His being good, sends down all these, rains and all, upon the just and the unjust alike, and causes His sun to shine upon the good and the bad (Matthew 4: 45), even before people asked Him.
But there are things that will not be given to man unless asked from God: “faith, the power of virtue, and the Kingdom of Heaven” (chapter6: page48). These gifts must be asked in striving and resoluteness. These gifts must be first longed for. Then when strong desire sets in, they must be striven with all heart, sought “with a sincere heart, with patience, and with faith.” And in time, when God wills, the prayer will be granted.
Saint Basil cited five reasons why He delays His answers. First, He knows better when these gifts become useful. God wants to grant the prayer in the right time, in His time. Second, He wants the attention be focused upon Him in persistent prayer. The heart must first learn the persistence of longing for the gift before God can grant it. Third, He wants to make sure that it shall be understood well that the gift is God’s. As a gift, the Giver is free to give it whenever He wants, in His time. The receiver of the gift must wait for the unknown time when such gift will be granted. Fourth, He wants that, as the person learned to love the gift through prolonged anticipation, the person will guard and zealously defend the gift (because treating lightly God’s gifts will earn unworthiness of life eternal). Fifth, He knows that granting the gift too early, the person will lose the gift. If He knew otherwise, Saint Basil explained, “He would have been prepared to give it to you unasked” (chap7: page48). If the Master condemned the servant who received a single talent and hid it, he asked, “How much more would he have been condemned had he lost it?”
Instead, Saint Basil counseled: “let us continue to give thanks to the Lord whether we receive speedily or slowly that which we pray for. For all things whatsoever the Lord may do He orders all to the end of our salvation.” He exhorted not to let faintheartedness persuade the person to cease praying. For it is through steadfastness in prayer that what was asked for will be obtained.
Saint Basil closed his sermon, saying: “Let us give Him thanks at all times, so that we may be found worthy of receiving His everlasting gifts.”
Conclusion
In his sermon, “Prayer must come first,” Saint Basil of Caesarea taught of two crucial things in the life of Christians: prayer and service. And as the title indicates, of the two things, prayer must come first.
Prayer must come first because it puts God at the center of everything in the person’s life. Prayer connects man directly and exclusively to God. In prayer, the person tells God: “In this moment, in this very moment of my life, it is You and I, Lord, and no one else matters more.” It is in prayer that man finds himself in an environment of worship to God, to contemplate at the mysteries of God like Mary. It is in prayer that man gets the chance to ask God for things that truly matters to him personally, as God takes care of all the thinks corporeal in life. God created man, and in that act of creation God commits Himself to take care of man, he may be good or bad. It is also in prayer that man gets the chance to intercede with God the provision of spiritual gifts to others. Nonetheless, the higher purpose of prayer is to worship and glorify God above all things. Asking for ‘bodily things,’ this is of lesser importance.
Conversely, people may serve God in two ways, that of the corporeal and that of the spiritual. Saint Basil, consistent with the teachings of the Lord and His Church, taught that the spiritual way of serving God is the “better one” because God always takes care of the corporeal (bodily) needs of His people like the birds in the sky. In corporeal ministrations, man seeks to find God in other people, to serve God in other people. In spiritual ministrations, man seeks to find God directly, to serve God directly. Nonetheless, it is possible to serve God through the corporeal and the spiritual in an integrative way. After seeking God in prayer, man then became overflowed with God’s love he cannot sustain until he shares that love to others through corporeal ministration.
And all of these are good when done in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
References
Everitt, C. et al. (Eds.) (1985). Prayer must come first. Part III: The Christian testament since
the Bible, New York, NY: Penguin Books; 44-48.
Jones, A. (Ed.) (1966). The Jerusalem Bible, Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday
& Company, Inc.
Laux, J. (1930). Church history: A complete history of the Catholic Church to the present
day, New York, NY: Benziger Brothers, Inc.; 121.
