To me, this parable says that God will stop at nothing to save a
person. And it shows the significance of every selfless deed – in
contrast to the strenuousness of a self-centered struggle for spiritual fulfillment. In my grandfather’s words, “People who spend all
their energy on ensuring their own salvation or keeping their inner
life just above water are so preoccupied with themselves that they
have no strength left to love.”
I have always enjoyed fishing.
Now, with my children grown
and my grandchildren old enough to come with me, I go fishing as
often as I can get away. Mostly we just sit in the boat for hours and
catch nothing. But those hours of quiet are valuable for thinking. I
have pondered how the first disciples Jesus called were fishermen,
and how they were obedient when Jesus said, “Leave your nets and
come, follow me.” And how after the crucifixion the disciples, in
their discouragement, returned to the solitude of their fishing
boats.
Fishing, like prayer, can bring peace of heart and give time for
personal reflection. Like prayer, it can be disheartening –
sometimes the catch will be small, or there will be nothing but a
few bites. Both fishing and prayer require patience and humility,
because with both, you ultimately depend on an answer from
outside yourself.
A conversation involves both talking and listening, and as we all
know, real listening requires us to become quiet first. What God
wants to tell us is of greater importance than what we want to tell
him. Writer John Dear, a Jesuit priest and peace activist, recently
told me:
I realized that for many years I had been telling God what to do.
But God is a living being, and in a relationship of love, we need
to listen to one another. Prayer is a time of listening to God and
just being quiet with the one I love. It is entering into a living and
loving relationship with God. The listening is important. We
have been talking for so long that we need to let God get a
word in edgewise, give him a chance to change us.
As much as the physical body requires rest and sleep in order to
function properly, so our inner life requires regular times of quiet
in which the soul can be strengthened again: “For everything there
is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to
weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a
time to keep silence, and a time to speak…”
This is true for everybody, but “a time to keep silence” may be
most important for people who are actively involved in a cause or
service. They will find that strength for their work comes first from
the inner springs of their personal spiritual life, and that inner
quiet is essential to balancing the busyness of their days.
The story of the prophet Elijah, as told in the Old Testament, has
always meant a great deal to me, for although Elijah did many
great and wonderful works for God, it is clear that he had his share
of human weaknesses. The difference is that he listened and
“waited upon God.” Through that, his prayers for rain were
answered, his prayer to bring a dead child back to life was heeded,
and he was given tremendous spiritual power to confront idolatry
and false prophecy. And in spite of his low moments, his times of
despair, and his doubts about his own fitness for the task, he remained faithful. Once Elijah was in such despair that he begged
God to take his life. In response, the Lord told Elijah to go and stand
on the mountain, and he sent a strong wind that broke the rocks
into pieces, and after that an earthquake, and then a great fire. But
the Lord was not to be found in any of these –only in the “still small
voice” that followed.
Life seems like a long string of events, planned or unplanned, joyful or sorrowful. As significant as each one appears to be when we
stand in its midst, it can often be a distraction that draws our attention away from the larger picture. If we are to communicate
with God, we must first become inwardly quiet, detached from our
roving thoughts, our worries and fears for tomorrow. It is not without significance that Mother Teresa’s “business card” places silence
first; it is indeed the prerequisite for all the other gifts of the Spirit:
The fruit of silence is prayer.
The fruit of prayer is faith.
The fruit of faith is love.
The fruit of love is service.
The fruit of service is peace.
Just as life demands both thought and action, so there must also be
a balance between solitude and community. Outward silence is easily achieved when one is alone, though mind and heart may still be
busy; but in true solitude one can often come before God in a way
not possible when there is even one other person present.
Communal prayer to God, whether in silence or in speech, must
always have its root in the secluded prayer life of each individual
believer, for how can a church be strong if the prayer life of its
individual members is weak?
Silence can draw a group of believers close together in their common searching and allow God’s power to be felt among them. The
Quakers, or Society of Friends, have long valued silence as the most
direct way to deal with the preoccupations of the mind, so that the
still small voice of God can be heard. But outer silence is not sufficient; there must also be inward quietness.
A woman in my church who spent many years with the Quakers
describes her experience:
Several of us met twice weekly in silence to wait on the Spirit.
Some meetings yielded wonderful outpourings, but others were
just plain dead. It depended on what spirit we were in, and how
genuine we were in our hunger for God’s truth to expose what
lay within our hearts. It took desire and discipline on our part to
shut out all of the other things that so easily came to mind as we
sat in silence: lists of things to do, items not to be forgotten,
projects to be completed…
In our church we have experienced similar meetings where there
was little movement of the Spirit. Contemplative prayer is a discipline, and not easily learned. Alan Mermann, writer as well as physician and minister, pinpoints what may be the problem for many
of us:
It takes so little to distract me, no matter how desperate I may be
for the focused introspection I imagine true prayer to be. The
slightest stimulus from my immediate environment, the silliest
thought, or the most insignificant itch can effectively interrupt
my efforts. But I am confident that prayer links me with that
ubiquitous power, that profound depth of unconscious reality,
that endless source of creative energy that I call God.
Inner silence and quiet before God is especially important at times
of decision. Jesus knew the value of seclusion; he withdrew from
the company of others at several crucial moments in his life: prior
to his temptation by Satan, before the transfiguration, and in the
garden after his last meal with his disciples. Likewise, we need to
take time for reflection and silent prayer, asking God for wisdom
and discernment to make the right choices and decisions as we
meet the many demands that make up daily life.
All religions of the world
contain an element of mysticism, and
each has nurtured its own tradition of the mystical life. Essential to
all mystical traditions is the belief that the mystic’s spiritual journey is undertaken on behalf of all humanity, and that through discipline of the senses, freedom is granted from the physical and temporal, revealing to the soul the true experience of God. My father
loved the writings of Meister Eckhardt, the great mystic of the
thirteenth century, because they emphasize the heart that listens
to God alone. The mystics believe that, rather than intricate liturgies and strict observances, God desires a heart that detaches itself
in silence from everything and turns and listens to him, so that he
may fill it with his infinite love.
The following poem by Madeleine L’Engle expresses this thought
eloquently:
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.
Doris Grumbach, in
The Presence of Absence,
recounts how, as
an atheist, she experienced the reality of God, not through
anything she did or anything she imagined – it just happened. She
was sitting on the steps in front of her home, when she was
overcome “with a unique feeling of peace, an impression so intense
that it seemed to expand into ineffable joy.”
It went on, second after second, so pervasive that it seemed to
fill my entire body. I relaxed into it, luxuriated in it. Then with no
warning, and surely without preparation or expectation, I knew
what it was: for the seconds it lasted I felt, with a certainty I cannot account for, a sense of the presence of God.
At the time of this experience she was, in her own words, “a young
woman without a history of belief, without a formal religion or
rather any at all.” As a result, she began attending church. Then,
after five decades of church-going, she realized she needed something more, and turned to the mystics, the contemplatives. She was
tired of form and wanted a spirituality “reduced to nothing, no
words, because I had begun to distrust the vehicle of words.”
Contemplation, that deep inward concentration of the soul, has
often been held up in contrast to the active life of devout service.
Yet the two are not mutually exclusive; indeed, one requires the
other. In the New Testament we are told that Mary loved Jesus so
much that she simply sat at his feet and adored him, while Martha
busied herself with the housework and served the guests. She complained to Jesus about her sister Mary, but he chided her for her
worry, and said that Mary had chosen what was better. Too often
the Marthas feel that they are accomplishing the good in the world
while the Marys merely spend their time in idle meditation. Each
has a task in life, although they may be very different, and each
task is necessary and has its own purpose in the whole picture.
Regarding contemplation, I have found nothing better than the
words of Thomas Merton, monk, mystic, author, and activist:
The contemplative life is the search for peace not in an abstract
exclusion of all outside reality, not in a barren negative closing
of the senses upon the world, but in the openness of love. It begins with the acceptance of my own self in my poverty and my
nearness to despair in order to recognize that where God is
there can be no despair, and God is in me even if I despair…The
contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God in their imagined chariot, but simply he who
has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond
ideas, where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure
trust – that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp
upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist.
The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, is
not that you need to find your way through the jungle of
language and problems that today surround God; but that
whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you,
lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an
understanding and light that are like nothing you ever found in
books or heard in sermons…If you dare to penetrate your own
silence, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to
understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union, in
the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self.
Over the centuries there have been many who found their spiritual
calling in contemplation, meditation, or mysticism, and out of their
experiences, countless techniques to further our spiritual silence
have been developed, such as
lectio divina
(spiritual reading),
journaling, and various forms of meditation. Though these aids are
certainly of value, they should never become an end in themselves.
What is of utmost importance is not the spiritual state of the individual in itself, but his attitude – that he is standing in reverence
before God.
Much “alternative” religion today focuses on our personal relationship with God and emphasizes the inner silence of which I have
been speaking as a means to attain community with God. Not all of
it is “Christian,” yet I believe there is still much that can be learned
from it. Last year I visited a Buddhist commune in France, Plum
Village, and though there was no formal prayer as we know it,
there was an atmosphere of togetherness, mindful listening to one
another, and the recognition that peace and harmony are easily
disturbed by too much chatter and bustle.
Many people, disenchanted with institutional religion, go outdoors into nature to satisfy their spiritual needs. There is great inner strength given through the beauty of the unspoiled creation,
and the peace, the fresh insights, and the wide horizons are certainly of psychological and physical benefit. But it will remain selfdeification as long as we remain focused on ourselves and our personal experience, instead of on God. New Age and similar movements are partially attractive because they are non-threatening and
demand little from the participant. But a true relationship with
God requires energy and commitment, and is often tumultuous, not
simply a feel-good phenomenon. Whether we adhere to Christianity, Buddhism, or anything else, we must go beyond the “looks
good/feels good” stage to a recognition of God as the creator and
redeemer of the earth and skies. The moment we acknowledge God,
centering our heart and mind on his power, a spiritual depth can be
realized. As John Michael Talbot writes, “All creation bears the
traces of its creator and will lead the spiritually sensitive seeker
back to God.”