Into The Silent Land

I recently made my annual eight day retreat. A wondrous luxury to have that every year! On retreat I pondered, prayerfully, an excellent spiritual book, one I suspect could, some day, be destined to become a classic. It is written by Martin Laird, an Augustinian Friar who teaches at Villanova University. The book is entitled, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

In one sense, contemplative prayer is quite easy. In another, it entails work, effort and perseverance. Into the Silent Land is written, in many ways, both for beginners and for adepts. It draws on a rich tradition of the early Fathers and Mothers of the Desert. The first thing we need to know about contemplative prayer is that God is not ever far away. from us. We may be absent from our deepest desires and personhood but God does not know how to be absent from us. We discover God all around us in prayer. We do not acquire him for the first time. As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it: “ God is your being; and what you are, you are in God, but you are not God’s being”. When we, mistakenly, conceive that we are separate from God, it is well to remember those words of the Jewish mystic, Simone Weil: “ Every seeming separation from God also contains a link to him” Or as Augustine sagely noted: “ You, God, were within me and I was outside myself” ,Laird insists that God is our homeland and that we are all naturally built for some genuine variant of contemplation..

Contemplative prayer is about two simple and essential things: silence and becoming aware. Silence is an necessary ingredient for contemplative prayer. In silence, we meet our deepest selves and God. As the Welsh priest poet, R S. Thomas tells us: Silence “ is when we live best, within listening distance of the silence we call God.” He also reminds us that “ the silence holds with its gloved hand the wild hawk of the mind”. For, just as Buddhists refer to an active, chattering ‘ monkey mind’, Christians know the reality of distractions, noise, elements which keep us from the still silence where we meet God.

The early modern mystic Angelus Silesius in The Cherubic Wanderer notes: “God far exceeds all words that we can here express. In silence he is heard, in silence worshiped best”. Laird notes how place and posture in prayer and a rhythmic breathing in and out of a prayer word helps us find and keep that silence. Whatever our body does actually also affects our soul. There are few ( probably no) maps of silence. Surrender becomes our most ordinary map into the silence with and of God.

There are multiple forms of contemplative prayer and ways to it in the Christian tradition. The Ignatian variant draws, in silent prayer, on images, a potent appeal to our five senses, a probing and dwelling with our deep feelings and persistent desires as revelatory of God. Laird is closer to the prayer of quiet, centering prayer around a mantra or a prayer word. The prayer word –often a very short phrase from scripture—gets repeated ( sometimes chanted) over and over. It brings us back when ‘the hawk of the mind’ distracts us. It wards off commentary when distractions or afflictive feelings befall us. In time, we come simply to observe any distractions that come our way and see them like the weather. We need to learn to look over our shoulder at them.

Not all thoughts or feelings which emerge in contemplative prayer, however, are true distractions. Some are promptings from God and his Spirit. The second element in contemplative prayer is watchfulness, a discipline of becoming aware. We meet any thoughts or feelings which arise during prayer with stillness, without commentary, more as a witness to the doorway of the present moment than as passive victims to outside thoughts and feelings. In the end, almost every distraction—if we are aware—serves some useful purpose. Laird, in a moving chapter entitled, “ The Liturgy of Our Wounds: Temptation, Humility and Failure” reminds us that failure, too, is part of our search for God. God gently leads us to learn how to be in our wounds. By being still and aware before our pain or fear, we discover that our fear or pain is never just private to me. As Laird puts it:“ What we once saw as an obstacle or something that isolated us from God, ourselves, others, is now a place of communion”.

While Laird offers some useful techniques to move toward silence and awareness, he warns that too much emphasis on technique is, itself, a kind of distraction. Whether we are adepts or initiates in contemplative prayer, as the great mystics all knew, we are all always just beginners. The point is to enter, in a unitive way, into God’s embrace of all humanity ( indeed, all creation), in its suffering and joy. In the end, contemplative prayer is a way for us to see, profoundly, that we do not belong to ourselves and that our lives, as Saint Paul knew interiorly, are hidden with Christ in God. But we need to find a place, time, posture, prayer word or image which takes us gently to that place. Read this gem of a book. I guarantee it will entice you to silence, watchful awareness and contemplative prayer.