Education is about Prayer

I once heard the story of a Washington DC–area church that subjected its pastors in their weekly staff meeting to straightforward and sometimes harsh critiques of their time on stage. The sermon, pastoral prayer time, communion, and other notable stage comments were collectively assessed by the entire staff. The intent was well meaning: to help the pastors improve their prayers, sermons, and other speaking moments in front of the congregation. The comments, one pastor shared, could be sharp. The chief encouragement was to pray more because corporate prayer time and sermons flow naturally from a robust inner life and personal prayer. It has been years since I heard that story, but I contemplate often what it would be like to have my prayers publicly critiqued. Should I be humble enough to receive the critiques in love, I believe it would be good for me. 

What if education consisted of a classical Christian school evaluating a student’s public prayers? What if final exams consisted of tenth-grader Johnny or eighth-grader Beth coming to the front of the classroom and praying for five minutes? The teacher, distinguishing between bull and beauty, would offer a response (obviously not a grade) to each student and see the how deeply both his instruction as a teacher and the student’s effort and pursuit of beauty had impacted her soul since the beginning of the year. I suspect such a school would have a small re-enrollment number, unfortunately, and the teacher’s LinkedIn would say “Open to Work.” Nevertheless, it is a fascinating scenario to contemplate.  

Keeping all this in mind and understanding that schools are unlikely to implement such a practice, I want to propose, standing on the shoulders of the much wiser Simone Weil, that education is truly about prayer. Despite never being publicly assessed, a student’s inner life, particularly his life of prayer, should be directly impacted by his education. Weil’s essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” written in 1942 to Father Perrin, a Vermont priest, aimed to instruct in the importance of a student’s attention. Attention serves prayer because prayer is really about attention. Weil is not a new voice in this assertion; she writes within an already rich tradition of Christian education. St. Clement of Alexandria in book 7 of the Stromata writes, “The great business of a philosopher, that is, a Christian, is prayer.” This evidently applies to students being trained as lovers of wisdom. Students, who are being trained in the arts, including philosophy, should keep in mind that all their learning will lead them further into a life of prayer if they are attentive and humble to receive instruction to that end. 

One thousand nine hundred years separate St. Clement and Weil, yet they share the voice of Christian tradition and are wise counsel for classical schools seeking to train in virtue and wisdom. A copious amount of work is written on that training, and too little is written on prayer. Prayer is the highest good for students and teachers because prayer is, as St. Theophan the Recluse wrote, “to stand before God with your mind and your heart and to go on standing before God forever.” Learning to learn is learning to pray. Education, then, is learning to stand before God and enjoy it.  

Standing before God in prayer requires attention. Weil writes that “school children should learn the faculty of attention that directs them toward God.” She even notes that students should enjoy all subjects, even the trying ones, because they all mature the muscles of attention and focus. They should all be perceivably good, growing the attention that will be necessary in prayer. Attention and prayer should be held out before them so that they can rightly understand each subject’s end.  

True education teaches students how to stand before God. They must shoulder their own crosses and kiss them themselves, and a good teacher holds up the foolishness of other crosses and the beauty of the one Christ provides, hard as it may be to see at first. Nevertheless, all true classical Christian education that is aimed at the transcendentals culminates and finds its habitual, purposeful, and ultimate life in a life of prayer—the extemporaneous, the scripted, the silent, the spoken aloud, that of the heart, and that of the mind. Literature, chemistry, rhetoric, philosophy, apologetics, theology, history, algebra, geometry, guitar, cello, gymnastics, and all other subjects should aim to help students pray well, pray more, and live in accordance with their nature and the love of God.  

To educate in view of attention, teachers should demonstrate attention and pray constantly themselves. They should practice the quiet prayers of the heart for God’s mercy as continually as they breathe. Teaching should be constantly accompanied by prayer, and teaching should in its own way be a form of prayer. It should be, as Brother Lawrence wrote in Practice in the Presence of God, “one long unbroken act” seeking to stay “in the divine presence,” aiding students to come alongside their teachers and enjoy the presence of God.