Friday, February 12

LISTENING TO THE SILENCE

More than fifty years ago I came to realize that the most important thing about prayer was not the what, or the where, but the how: how to achieve, in Gregory of Nyssa’s words, “a certain sense of God’s presence even when surrounded by the divine night.” For in that night one may fall “into the eternally sucking gorge of the void,” as Jung put it, or be “inhaled by the Real,” according to Panikkar, yet hear nothing; on the other hand, one may be startled by the call of God, as Isaiah was when he heard the Voice in the Temple, “Whom shall I send?” (Isaiah 6:8). The point is how to be ready to see, to hear, or merely to sense the Presence.

This is contemplative prayer, which Dom Cuthbert Butler calls “a state in which ordinary prayer becomes perfect.” Contemplation, he says, dispenses with sensible images or pictures in the mind, with discursive thinking, “the mind remaining steadfast and fixed in one simple gaze”; it is accompanied by ardent love of God, and it absorbs the soul completely. And he quotes a saying of the desert Fathers, “those who were conscious they were praying, were not yet praying.” The emphasis is on arriving at a quiet state where the mind is still; for, as the Gîtâ 6, 19, says, “the light does not flicker in a windless place.” Here no objects are entertained, and no images are visualized; there is only an openness to the divine mystery itself without any mediating objects, words, or images. St. Teresa of Ávila explains that when the soul is joined to God, “it doesn’t understand a thing, for all its faculties are lost.” How, then to achieve this?

Begin with quiet of body. Kneel, sit, walk, or whatever, but be at peace. Let go the nerves. Relax the muscles. Stop mistaking a series of melancholy sighs for a sensible manner of breathing, and breathe like a human being, that is, forget all about it. Throw off the interior whalebone that emotional anxiety or petty resentment has introduced somewhere in the region of the chest. Smile, or at least allow the facial muscles to resume whatever attractiveness nature meant them to give way to in repose. Unclench the teeth. Try in general to attain a state of calm and restfulness of the nervous system before beginning to pray at all.

After quiet of body, quiet of heart. “After” means that we mention it next, not necessarily that it comes next in time; it may have to come first. The disturbances that most deeply trouble our peace are those which cause emotional reactions; and these are almost universally things that touch the raw nerve of our self-attachment, that self-love of the wrong kind which we all have in us. Tiffs, petty injustices, slights, small successes that tickle our vanity; conversations (in our heads!) with people with whom we are annoyed and whom we devastate (in our heads!) with crushing and unanswerable rejoinders; worries, and the ways and means with which we must meet them: all these and many similar things. “Quiet of heart” means putting them out of our mind. The way to do it is detachment. Detachment means that God alone matters, that everything is in God’s hands. “Quiet of heart” means a deliberate disentangling of ourselves from emotional brambles.

Then quiet of mind. In general, this means disengaging the attention from other lines of thought and devoting it as completely as possible to God or to thoughts that will lead us to God. A mind preoccupied must be unoccupied before it can be occupied by God. Above all, this means a wordless openness to God. “To be full of things,” writes Meister Eckhart, “is to be empty of God, while to be empty of things is to be full of God.” But this emptying of the self requires total disinterest, which he equates with “empty nothingness.” And he adds: “When the soul achieves this, it loses its identity, it absorbs God and is reduced to nothing as the dawn at the rising of the sun.”


Ignacio Götz