Meeting the world with silence
I’ve called this talk “Meeting the world with silence”, and in it I want to speak about what is sometimes referred to as “contemplative” prayer or simply contemplative “practice” and to say a bit about the great gift I think it is to us today. Part of the reason I want to talk about this is that I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of the problems we face in the Church today can be traced back to the fact that we have lost the habit of prayer, that for all the lip-service we give to the practice of prayer, for most people today a disciplined pattern of personal prayer — difficult and bewildering at the best of times — has become almost impossibly demanding, and in reality has in most cases simply fallen away.
What I want to do, then, is is to say a little bit about the world I think we find ourselves in today and to say a bit about what it means to meet this world with silence, and finally to say something about the ways this practice bears fruit in our lives.
But before I do any of that I want to say a brief word about prayer in general. As some of you may have discovered, prayer is a subject that is surprisingly difficult to talk about, and that is not primarily because we are embarrassed to talk about it, but because prayer is first and foremost God’s activity. It is God’s gracious work in us for our salvation. And God’s activity in us will always be, at its heart, a mystery. For that reason, the part we have to play in prayer will always be a very small and limited one, it will always be primarily about how we put ourselves in a position to receive whatever it is that God wants to give us, how we clear the way for God to act in us, not about what we do for ourselves.
But because of this, when we talk about prayer it can often feel as though something essential has been left out, that we have talked and talked and talked and yet the somehow we have not touched upon the heart of the matter, and that is because when we talk about prayer, we are inevitably talking about our part in prayer, our very limited part in what is essentially God’s activity, God’s work in us, which will always remain fundamentally a mystery.
As I am going to say in a minute, I believe that for anyone who gives themselves to the practice of contemplative prayer, it has the potential to bear great fruit in their lives. That is one of the reasons contemplative practice of one kind or another exist in a number of traditions other than Christianity. And yet, for us, if it is prayer we are really interested in, which is just another way of saying if it is God we are really interested in, then the fruits of contemplative prayer I am about to describe can never be considered an end in themselves, they will only ever be one of the ways we dispose ourselves to receive what God wants to give us, by which we clear away some of the noise and clutter within us in order to let God to act in us, which is what we are really seeking after.
So having got those preliminaries out of the way let me say a bit about the world I think we are living in today. Listening to the people who come here on retreat — and I don’t pretend for one moment that we are immune to these challenges ourselves just because we live in a monastery — I am continually struck by how much frustration, anxiety and alienation — in a word how much suffering — there seems to be effectively hard-wired into the conditions of modern life. We live in a society now in which to be overworked to the point of exhaustion has become a kind of baseline expectation, in which we are made to feel guilty if we are not perpetually on the brink of burning out, in which we have become so obsessed with productivity that we spend even our leisure time racked with guilt that we are not using our time as productively as we should. And yet when we look at the institutions we are spending all this energy in the service of, including the church, what we find is not a great esprit des corps, a great sense of the noble sacrifice we are offering for the greater good, but a deep sense of frustration and alienation from these very same institutions and from many of the activities that take up the majority of our time. And the result of all this, of course, is a great deal of anguish, an anguish that is made all the more acute by a sense of our own powerlessness to do anything about it.
Now, as I say, I am convinced that one of the main reasons we find ourselves in this situation is that we have lost touch with the practice of prayer, but I want to be very clear from the outset about the ways in which prayer both is and is not a “solution” to the problems we face. When we stand back and look at the situation I have just described, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why most of our efforts to make it better don’t work. If the problem with the way we live today is our society’s relentless requirement for productive activity, then obviously enough this is not a problem that can be addressed with more activity. And yet that is precisely how we generally go about trying to make things better. We ask ourselves what we need to do to fix the problem. But then of course, “fixing the problem” becomes just one more thing to add to our long list of things we need to do. That is one of the reasons we so often feel helpless to do anything about the situation we find ourselves in, because all too often our own earnest efforts to change things simply land us all the more ensnared in the tyranny of activity.
If we are to understand the distinctive character of silence, then, it is crucial to recognise the way in which silence both is and is not an “activity” in the strict sense. It is true that in order to pray we need to set aside some time for it, during which we would not ordinarily be engaged in any other activity, but in a deeper sense it is better to think of the practice of silence not as an activity but as the absence of activity, a bringing of all the activity of our minds and bodies to stillness and silence in order that God may be free to speak and act in us. Prayer, then, by its very nature, strikes at the heart of the culture of noise and activity we live in. And that is precisely why we find it so difficult. Because for us modern people, hard-wired for constant activity of one sort or another, to stop all activity even for a few minutes, is to send our minds into a kind of tailspin. Silence is for us such a demanding practice, not because there is anything inherently difficult about it— what could be simpler than doing nothing at all? — but because we have such terrible trouble silencing the voice in our heads which tells us that we are wasting our time, that what we are doing is achieving nothing at all, and that we might as well give it up as a bad job.
Which brings us to the question of how we actually go about practicing this difficult art of silence. In so far as there is anything like what you might call a “technique” or “method” to contemplative prayer it consists almost entirely in what we do with the distracting thoughts that come to us as we sit in silence. Put simply, there are basically two ways of responding to these distracting thoughts which the tradition of contemplative prayer schools us to avoid. The first is to engage these thoughts directly, to accept the invitation they hold out to us, and so to follow them down the rabbit hole of thought after thought after thought. So, for example, as I sit quietly in silence the thought arises in my mind “I think what Br Steven said to me this morning after breakfast was actually a veiled criticism of my singing” and when this thought presents itself to me I immediately engage it by responding with a second thought “yes, and come to think of it he said something similar last week as well” and then of course I begin to feel angry and before you know it I have spent 15 minutes just being angry about Br Steven and all the terrible wrongs he has done me. That is the first kind of response to distracting thoughts that contemplative prayer teaches us to avoid. But there is a second kind of response which is in many ways more subtle, in part because it is most people’s instinctive way of avoiding the first kind of danger. The second response is to notice the distracting thought that has appeared in our minds and immediately to try and shut it out, to think to ourselves “no, no, no, I’m not supposed to be thinking about Br Steven I am supposed to be thinking holy thoughts” and to spend all our energy trying to prevent this thought about Br Steven from re-entering our consciousness. What all the great teachers of contemplative prayer tell us is that to do this, to try and fight off our distracting thoughts, is just as sure-fire a way to get ensnared in them as engaging them directly. The only way to proceed is simply to let the thoughts that come to us in silence come and go without without either engaging them directly or trying to fight them off, but simply letting them be present, letting them pass through our consciousness like leaves on the surface of a river.
And that, in a nutshell, is it. In this deceptively simple practice of letting our thoughts be present without either engaging them directly or trying to fight them off the whole “method” of contemplative prayer essentially consists. It doesn’t sound like much does much does it? And yet, as generation after generation have discovered, the more we give ourselves to this simple practice of silence, a whole host of unexpected doors begin to open. And it is these that I want to saying a little bit about now with what remains of this talk.
The first and the most basic insight that comes to us through the practice of contemplative prayer can be summarised very simply, it consists in the realisation that we are not our thoughts. What happens when we allow our thoughts to be present without engaging them directly or trying to fight them off, is we begin to discover that even though the thoughts that come to us in prayer are present in our minds, we have a choice as to whether we identify ourselves with them or not, whether we can make them “our” thoughts or not. And for most of us, who have spent the majority of our lives imagining that there is no distinction between ourselves and our thoughts, this insight hits us with the force of a revelation. Having spent all our lives believing that we are our thoughts, identifying ourselves entirely with our thoughts whether good or bad, we now begin to see that this is not in fact necessary, that it is possible to let these thoughts come and go like the weather without identifying ourselves with them at all. I heard someone recently put it like this: we are not our thoughts and emotions, we are where our thoughts and emotions happen. And not surprisingly this has a dramatic effect on how we relate to these thoughts and emotions. What happens when we let these thoughts be present without identifying ourselves with them or trying to fight them off is that we begin to see these thoughts for what they really are, which is very often obsessive, harmful and plain insubstantial. In other words, we begin not only to see our thoughts, but to see through them. When I notice that angry thought about Br Steven returning again and again, and yet refuse either to identify myself with it or to try and shut it out, I begin to see it for what it really is, not a weighty and important truth I need to wrestle with, but simply a kind of kink in the fabric of my mental and emotional makeup, a stuck record, and the more clearly I see this the more that angry thought ceases to have the same power over me.
And with this we begin to see why this practice of silence has such a hallowed place in so many religious and non-religious traditions across the world. The great and abiding fruit of the practice of silence is that it slowly begins to free us from the grip of harmful and obsessive patterns of thought, patterns of thought that we may have gone back and forth with for years, at one moment indulging and at the next doing our utmost to shut out of our minds. What the practice of contemplative prayer teaches us is that both of these strategies only land us all the more ensnared in these same patterns of thought, the only way forward is to let these thoughts be present without identifying ourselves with them or trying to fight them off, until gradually they begin to lose their grip on us.
So if that is how the practice of silence teaches us to respond to our thoughts, then in what way does this help us respond to the world? Well, what we generally find is that once we have begun to get used to this practice of letting our thoughts be present to us in silence without either engaging them or fighting against them, then this way of relating to our thoughts quite naturally begins to spill over into the way we relate to our activities. Once we have grasped the fact that we are not our thoughts, then it doesn’t take a great deal of further imagination to see that neither are we our activities. When we begin to realise that the cause of a great deal of our day to day suffering is our uncritical identification with our thoughts, then quite naturally we begin to see the same thing is true of our uncritical identification with our activities.
Almost without noticing it, then, once we have begun to find our feet with contemplative practice we find we are beginning to apply the practice of silence not just to what we think but to what we do. We begin to see that just as it is not necessary to identify ourselves with the thoughts that come to us in prayer then neither is it necessary to identify ourselves with the activities that come to us in the course of the day. We simply let these activities be what they are without either identifying ourselves with them or trying to fight them off. And this is the crucial point of difference between contemplative practice and all strategies for change which are based upon trying to avoid doing the things that cause us anxiety and anguish. What contemplative practice teaches us is that to be liberated from the suffering that comes with the many unpalatable activities we all have to do in the course of our lives, we do not have to stop doing any of these activities. Just as with our thoughts, we simply have to let them be without either identifying ourselves with them or trying to fight them off. And so that third PCC meeting we are having this week we begin to relate to as something like the angry thought that comes to us in silent prayer. It is a fact, it is there, like the weather. We don’t try to fight it. And the more we don’t try to fight it, the more its power to cause us suffering begins to lessen.
So that is just a brief introduction to the practice of contemplative prayer, to the art of meeting the world with silence and the fruit that it bears in our lives. Now if you are anything like me, then the thought that will be in your minds at this moment will be: well that’s all very well and good but is it really prayer? And so let me conclude by referring you back to what I said at the beginning. If it is prayer we are interested in, which is just another way of saying if it is God we are interested in, then once we have done all this, once we have become the greatest practitioners of silence and it has born all this wonderful fruit in our lives, then we have only just begun, we have only just come to the threshold of true prayer, which is God’s work. We have only just begun to do our very modest part in prayer, our little act of clearing the way for God to act in us. And yet to do this, to do our little part to dispose ourselves to receive what God has to give us, is prayer. It is all our part in prayer will ever be.