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Pascal believed that the greatest enemy of not only of prayer, but the whole spiritual life was inattention, drowsiness, and complacency. Using Jesus’ encounter with his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane as an example, Pascal called this inattention “the Gethsemane Sleep.” ……….Pascal claimed that prayer is really being awake, attentive, and intensely open. Prayer is not simply closing one’s eyes and reciting a list of nonnegotiables to God. Prayer, rather, is an awareness of what is going on in one’s midst. For Pascal, sin was described as anything that destroyed this attentiveness: pride, self-will, self-absorption, double-mindedness, dishonesty, sexual excess, overeating, overdrinking, overactivity of any sort. They all destroy, he would maintain, our capacity to be attentive. Thus, Pascal believed that the whole purpose of prayer was to move us out of our “Gethsemane Sleep” and into a life of openness and attention in the things God is doing in our midst.
Bruce Main
(from Spotting the Sacred)
