When one makes prayer the life of the mind, one has put on the mind of Christ, and their prayer is nothing less than beholding the face of God.
For this person, life is prayer and prayer is life.
This life-become-prayer is a constant remembrance of God. Even if the everyday consciousness wanders, God is fixed within the soul and heart, communing with one’s being.
Prayer is the life of the mind. In other contexts, “the life of the mind” could refer to rationality, being cultured, or the ideal fostered by higher education. An intellectual person, a bookish person, both might be considered to have a vivid life of the mind.
Paul’s instruction to pray without ceasing in 1 Thessalonians, his exhortation to be transformed by the renewing of your mind in Romans 12, and his linking of the Spirit with life, throughout his writings, can be integrated into the teaching that prayer is the life of the mind. Many of the Church Fathers taught the same thing.
Mind
The mind. When we use the word, we probably mean our thinking brains, home of our self-consciousness, our use of language, logic, calculation, planning ahead, categorizing things. We earn degrees by these rational abilities, and our success in life is measured largely by our demonstrated effectiveness at them.
And none of them are what I mean by “mind.” When Paul writes that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds, or when he refers to the mind of Christ, he uses the word nous. Nous is not located in our brain, and it is not the part of us that reflects, conceptualizes, or even speaks. The nous is located in the heart, and its chief function is to know God and the nature of reality.
Not know about God, but know God, with all the immediacy and even intimacy the word “know” can carry. Consider when we say we think “about” something. There is me, there is the object, and there are my thoughts of the object. The thoughts bridge the object and me, but we are separate.
An appropriate metaphor is reflection. We reflect on things when we think about them. Our minds create a two-dimensional image of reality and study it. The reflection is an appearance of reality, not reality itself. Already this limits what we can know.
With the nous, we move beyond distance and enter into the realm of union with God. With the nous, in the heart, we become like what we know.
The heart is not the physical organ in the chest, though the physical organ is a kind of icon of the spiritual heart. The heart is the center of the person, and in both the Bible and most Christian teachers on prayer in the first thousand years of Christianity, the heart is the seat of the intellect. There we know and are known. We behold the face of God.
A hint about the significance of nous can be found in the word we translate as “repentance.” Usually we hear the word with a moral tone. Something like, feeling regret for sin and turning toward God. That’s part of it, but the Greek term behind repentance is metanoia. The “noia” part is from the word nous. The word can be translated as “change of mind,” “change of heart” or even “change of spirit.” The three terms are basically synonymous here. They have to do with you changing at your core.
In the biblical view, if your heart changes, you as a person change. The heart is the whole person, in a way. If you try to change your thoughts or behaviors and your heart isn’t in it, the changes won’t take. And as Jesus says, your true character is in your heart. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And, “It isn’t what goes into the person that makes them unclean, but what comes out of the mouth, because that comes from the heart.”
Part II to follow…