First, let’s put that passage in context.
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.
12 We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, 13 and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. 14 And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. 15 See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. 16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not despise prophecies, 21 but test everything; hold fast what is good. 22 Abstain from every form of evil.
23 Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.
25 Brothers, pray for us.
26 Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss.
27 I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers.
28 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Not my favorite translation, but it was easy to copy. Notice here that v. 17 is not rendered as a separate sentence, but as a clause in a longer sentence. V. 17 raises two questions, neither of which make this verse more appropriate for government use. The first question is: “what is prayer”? The second is: how do we do this unceasingly?
Jacques Derrida actually introduced me to this verse, at the end of The Gift of Death, if memory serves. Google AI tells me:
For Jacques Derrida, to "pray without ceasing" refers not to a continuous religious act but to a fundamental, indeterminate address to an absolute other, which he describes as a "prayer without prayer". This idea, which is explored in his work Circumfession and his lectures on prayer, transforms the religious command into a radical philosophical and ethical posture.
The pure apostrophe
Derrida distinguishes between traditional prayer and what he calls "pure prayer," or the "apostrophe".
A prayer without referent: While a conventional prayer addresses a specific, known divine figure, Derrida's pure prayer addresses a "you" whose identity is unknown and indeterminate. It is a call directed to "nobody" in particular.
An uncertain act: This prayer is defined by its skepticism and suspension of certainty. You cannot be sure anyone is at the "other end" of the call. If you were certain of a response, it would cease to be prayer and become an order.
Pure performativity: This pure prayer is a pragmatic or performative act rather than a theological statement. It is a demand for the other's sheer presence, not for anything specific. The prayer is "absolutely heterogeneous to the minimal description, evaluation or narration".
A radical spirituality
This concept of ceaseless prayer is part of a "radical spirituality" that goes beyond traditional religious frameworks.
A "spectral" faith: Derrida's prayer is enabled by a suspension of belief in a supernatural being, making it a more "spectral" and radical form of faith. This perspective allows him to embrace an atheist perspective while still engaging in "prayers and tears".
A ceaseless desire: This constant state of prayer is a ceaseless human aspiration and longing, not a religious ritual. It is a fundamental hope and expectancy that cannot be monopolized by organized religion.
A childlike and skeptical posture: He describes his own prayer as having a childlike aspect intertwined with the "suspicion of the childish". It is a humble, ongoing call marked by both hope and an absolute lack of certainty.
The impossible prayer
Derrida suggests that authentic prayer must, in some way, affirm its own impossibility.
A fragile hope: The prayer for the absolute other is made precisely because the other's presence is not guaranteed. This hopelessness, or "epoché," is necessary for prayer to be authentic .
Contamination is inevitable: In texts like "How to Avoid Speaking," Derrida acknowledges that a pure, indeterminate prayer is ultimately threatened by contamination. Any articulation of prayer, with its concrete language, codes, and rituals, inevitably reintroduces the metaphysical elements that pure prayer seeks to avoid. However, this contamination may also be what makes prayer possible at all.
In summary, for Derrida, to "pray without ceasing" is to live in a state of ethical openness to an indeterminate and unknown absolute other, an incessant call that persists without the comfort of religious certainty.
This is more helpful than it seems because Derrida is discussing prayer outside a specific religious context. That actually helps the government’s use of the phrase; but it’s clearly not what Paul, or DHS, meant.
I’ll start at the bottom and work my way up, trying not to address this artificial summary as the words of Derrida.
First, the “certainty” of religion is always uncertainty. Abraham was certain God had demanded Isaac as a sacrifice, but the terror of the akedeh (the ritual binding of an animal for sacrifice in Hebrew practice, and the name applied to the story in Genesis, just as Christians speak of “the prodigal” for the story in Luke) lies precisely in the certainty of Abraham and the uncertainty that this is, in fact, God’s will. There is, in fact, more uncertainty than certainty in the Biblical witness. Jesus himself invokes Jonah, famous for his uncertainty about God’s command. Isaiah cries out in frustration “O, that you would come down, as in days of old!” Isaiah is desperate for some certainty. Peter is so certain of death he denies knowledge of Jesus three times. Death is certain. God? Eh, not so much.
I’m not trying to be glib, but certainty is not a mark of faithfulness. “I believe, help thou my unbelief!,” is more like it. Or at least more properly humble.
Which is not to deny we should “live in a state of ethical openness to an indeterminate and unknown absolute other.” The first person to claim they know the will of God is a liar, not a person of faith.
Just ask Job and his friends. Again, I’m not proof-texting to settle an argument; I’m trying to appreciate the complexity of the Biblical witness. Certainty is supposed to be a hallmark of religious faith. I think it is only arrogance and a lack of humility, the latter of which is a Christian touchstone (I limit myself because of the verses, not because “religion” is co-terminous with “Christianity.”). A lot of the blast in the last five chapters of Job is against the arrogance of Job and his friends; the failure of God to speak of the events of the prologue just underline what Derrida would call God’s absolute otherness. That’s a good concept to keep in mind; especially for government agencies laying claim to the word of God (DHS is clearly exclusively aiming at Xians, so I’ll use the Christian term for the contents of the Bible.).
We’re still no closer to our questions, though. Derrida says the action (”praying without ceasing”) is a conscious and willed state of existence. (I hesitate to propose that as a proper restatement, but I think Derrida means it as a similar concept to S.K.’s Knight of Faith. In the terms of Johannes de Silentio, one always making the movements of the Infinite. Yeah, I know that doesn’t help much, either. But the Action
(Paul’s admonition) is a matter of will in existence, a sideways answer to Tolstoy’s question: “How should we then live?” Sideways because, despite the conclusion drawn by Google AI, we still don’t have a good definition of “prayer.”) Praying without ceasing is, to simplify it, the ultimate act of faith, with all of one’s life turned toward the goal. How, for example, do you learn to be last of all and servant of all, without devoting your life to the task? And yes, says Johannes de Silentio, that is what the Knight of Faith does, even as he appears to live an ordinary, bourgeois life. (Here we seem to part company with Derrida, because the Knight of Faith is in the religious, and Derrida’s pray-er is still seeking an ethical alignment. But I don’t think Fear and Trembling (ironically, a phrase from another Pauline epistle) is the fundamental touchstone it’s often made out to be. Not any more than religious faith is about absolute certainty. We can keep the ethical with the religious, for now; although the terms are NOT co-terminous.)
Prayer as an “openness,” however, appeals to me more than prayer as an action, or especially as a demand. Yes, there are prayers for intercession, and prayers of supplication; there are five categories of prayer, if memories of seminary serve. Useful for thinking of uses of prayer beyond “O Lord, won’t you buy me a…,” but ultimately just a way to justify the prayers we want to pray. Every Christian knows the Lord’s Prayer/Pater Noster, but how many think of it as a blueprint for prayer?
The prayer comes up when Jesus is asked: “How should we pray?” And Jesus says: “Like this.” And then we all take off one shoe, to follow his example. The prayer is instructions. We turned it into rote recital. I still can’t recite the 23rd psalm from memory. But the KJV version of the Pater Noster? I could probably get a severe blow to the head and still recite it without thinking.
The instructions are pretty simple:
Address your prayer to God, and keep God’s name holy.
Seek first God’s kingdom (by which I mean work (without ceasing?) to see that it is here, now, and carry on accordingly)
Ask for nothing more than food for the day, mindful it is from God
And be humble; ask for forgiveness only insofar as you forgive. A reminder, IOW, that it’s not about you.
The doxology is a later addition. We’ll skip over it for now.
Okay, there are your instructions. That’s how you should pray. Not much room for a plea for a Mercedes Benz ; but plenty of room, I dare say, for “a state of ethical openness to an indeterminate and unknown absolute other.” That ethical openness inexorably directs you to others, without whom there is no ethical responsibility (there are no ethics for an individual on an island. But no person is an island, separate into themselves.). And “religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all.” So, to whom are you responsible? That’s a very ethical question, isn’t it?
If not, indeed, a very personal one.
We still haven’t settled what “prayer” is. Is it a generalized activity directed at nothing in the blind hope there is something after all, and our ethics are not, after all, just the behavior of the successful people in our society (Aristotle’s Nicomachean ones)? The point then is us, not the…whatever…to which our prayers are directed. Which is not far from wrong, though the effort to ground an ethic in something transcendent, if not knowable, seems a little weak to me. “Do to others what you would want done to you” seems like a pretty solid ethic, so long as you’re not in a society of masochistic sociopaths.
There’s always a catch, isn’t there?
But the question of ethics and how we should then live is not our question today. Our question is: how should we then pray? And why? What, in other words, is prayer for? And what is it?
Annie Dillard, by the way, is on Derrida’s side:
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
"Quit your tents" is a reference to Exodus, to Moses in Sinai. Terrified by the theophany of Moses receiving the law from God, they tell Moses they’re just going to stay in their tents until the show on the mountain is over. It is, as they say, a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
There’s a connection here, which is why Dillard reaches from Moses to Thessalonians. Sinai marks the end of one way of life for the Israelites, and the beginning of another. Paul is marking the same for his church at Thessalonika. He wants them to start it with doing everything in prayer. For their sake, obviously. He doesn’t say, doesn’t even imply, that God needs their prayers. He says they need it. The admonition to prayer is made to them. No different than Annie Dillard, actually. But her direction is towards the silence. Because her God is similar to Derrida’s: one who is not personal, and is wholly other.
We think of government that way: impersonal and wholly other. And usually dealing in directives. We call those “laws.” So is the tweet from DHS a directive? No; but what else would it be? And we still haven’t moved from “to what/whom?”and “how?”
If prayer is for us, are we just talking to ourselves? Possibly. As Derrida says, we can’t know. But we can trust; which is to say, have faith. We can believe. Which, as William James said, doesn’t mean believing what you know ain’t so. Back to Derrida: we can’t know.
There’s actually a great deal we can’t know. I can’t really know what people think of me (maybe they’re just being polite). I can’t know that some people love me. I trust they aren’t lying; it’s all I can finally do. I can’t even know that atomic theory, or relativity, or quantum mechanics are sound. Others tell me it must be so; but mostly they trust what they are told. The whole world, really, runs on faith. It has to. There’s no other way. Religious faith is really no different. I’ve never seen a germ, a molecule, RNA. But I’m told mRNA can be the basis for vaccines, and I accept that I’m given that vaccine and not saline or poison. I trust, where RFK, Jr. does not. My faith in science is, I think, better than his denial. I certainly do less harm than he will. And I believe I am ethically, and existentially, obligated to take care of others, to do what is in my power to help them, even if it’s just a cup of water, or a visit when they’re sick. What is RFK’s ethical obligation? And to whom? He seems to believe in something even more unknowable than the God of Abraham. And to address himself to a more certain nothingness than the cloud of unknowing described by the anonymous Christian mystic as the way to knowing God.
You address your prayer to that, and you have taken a step in the right direction. The prayer is for you, anyway. To remind you of your position in the cosmos; your posture toward it; what you should expect from it; and your position and posture toward the people you are fortunate to know. It’s not for nothing that you do it. It is not towards nothing that you direct it. But it is a cloud of unknowing that you enter into when you assay it.
Things the DHS knows absolutely nothing about. So ignore them.
Yeah, I guess that’s what we’re really supposed to think. But that’s just credulity; not faith. That’s actively not knowing. Who needs that?
