For a couple of years, I've been recommending a short book called I will think of Everything. You, think only of loving Me to others. The book, based on the writings of Venerable Sr. Consolata Betrone, recommends the simple practice of praying as often as possible throughout the day, “Jesus, Mary, I love you, save souls!” Someone close to me is reading the book for Lent and has been surprised by quotes within the book like this one:
You should consequently strive to be incessant in prayer, and in the midst of your corporal practices do not abandon it. Whether you eat, or drink, or speak, or converse with lay people, or do anything else, you should always do so with the desire for God and with your heart fixed on Him. This is very necessary for inner solitude, which demands that the soul dismiss any though that is not directed to God (from St. John of the Cross, Counsels, no. 9).
If we're supposed to be praying all of the time, this person asked, how are we supposed to live our ordinary lives? After all, we don't live in monasteries! We have jobs to do and families to take care of. Do quotes like these mean that Christians are supposed to only do religious things? What about our hobbies and entertainment? Does being holy mean never doing anything fun?
Perhaps it's helpful to point out that, first of all, that the advice to try to pray at all times is biblical. St. Paul said in his First Letter to the Thessalonians, “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-19). He wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). This was advice given to ordinary Christians living ordinary lives, not to monks or nuns.
It's also worth pointing out that this advice isn't meant to squash our joy, but to bring us to authentic joy. Because God alone can truly satisfy our human hearts, we find true joy by uniting ourselves more and more deeply to him in the details of our lives. As Pope Francis said in a homily several years ago:
Joy does not mean living from laugh to laugh. No, it’s not that. Joy is not entertainment. No, it’s not that. It is something else. Christian joy is peace, peace that is deeply rooted, peace in the heart, the peace that only God can give. This is Christian joy. It is not easy to foster this joy.
Even if we agree in theory that remaining with God throughout the day would make us more joyful, is it really practical for lay people with demanding jobs and family responsibilities to try to pray “without ceasing”? Can we really remain in prayer throughout our normal activities?
It's not easy, and I don't claim to have mastered it, but I am confident that each of us can, by God's grace, gradually learn to spend our days with our hearts directed toward God in prayer. We have to start by dedicating an appropriate amount of time to prayer every day, then we can learn to let this conversation with God spill over into the rest of our day. This will be easier on some days than others, to be sure, but it is the calling for each and every Christian, not just priests and nuns.
The key to spending our day with God, it seems to me, is learning to do the ordinary things that are part of our lives with God and for God. Our responsibilities as employees, as spouses, as parents, as children, as members of the community, etc., are not obstacles to our union with God, but - if God has indeed called us to do them - are the very means by which God makes us holy. If God has made you a parent, for example, be the best parent that you can be, out of love for God and your family. If God has given you a particular job to do to provide for yourself and your family, be the best employee you can be, out of love for God, your co-workers, and your family.
One holy person who exemplified this way of thinking was a 17th-century Carmelite friar named Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. No, he wasn't a layperson, but we can learn a great deal from him. After all, priests and religious also have practical responsibilities that have to be fulfilled, just like us. Brother Lawrence focused on completing all of his tasks, like cooking for the community, out of love for God:
In the ways of God thoughts amount to little whereas love accounts for everything... I flip my little omelette in the frying pan for the love of God, and when it’s done, if I have nothing to do, I prostrate myself on the floor and adore my God who gave me the grace to do it, after which I get up happier than a king. Our sanctification depends not on changing our works, but on doing for God what we would normally do for ourselves.
I doubt that you or I will literally prostrate ourselves on the floor to adore God in the midst of our jobs - unless you enjoy confused stares from co-workers and awkward conversations with HR - but we can all lift short prayers to God in the midst of our to-do lists. A modern saint who embodied and taught this very well was St. Josemaría Escrivá, a priest who dedicated his ministry to teaching laypeople how to live their lives with God. He spoke, for example, about envisioning our desks as the altars on which to offer our daily work. I'll end with a lengthy quote of his that we can all take to heart:
I have taught this constantly using words from holy Scripture. The world is not evil, because it has come from God's hands, because it is His creation, because 'Yahweh looked upon it and saw that it was good' (cf Gen 1:7 ff). We ourselves, mankind, make it evil and ugly with our sins and infidelities. Have no doubt: any kind of evasion of the honest realities of daily life is for you, men and women of the world, something opposed to the will of God.
On the contrary, you must understand now, more clearly, that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, material and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.
I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how to 'materialise' their spiritual life. I wanted to keep them from the temptation, so common then and now, of living a kind of double life. On one side, an interior life, a life of relation with God; and on the other, a separate and distinct professional, social and family life, full of small earthly realities.
No! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot be like schizophrenics, if we want to be Christians. There is just one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is this life which has to become, in both soul and body, holy and filled with God. We discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.
There is no other way. Either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we shall never find Him. That is why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the most trivial occurrences and situations their noble and original meaning. It needs to restore them to the service of the Kingdom of God, to spiritualize them, turning them into a means and an occasion for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ (Conversations, 114).