(An extract from the book Finding Your Hidden Treasure by Fr Benignus O’Rourke.)
The prayer of silence and stillness is widely promoted as a cure for modern life’s frenzy. And it may be that this is what first draws us to it. But as we grow to love this form of prayer it is not for its side effects that we persevere. After a time we come to this prayer with only one desire – to come into the presence of the Living God. We seek our still center not to find inner peace for its own sake, but to find God.
We let go of ideas about what we are supposed to achieve. We rest in the Lord, stay quiet, so that we can be in his presence without seeking anything. We lay down our burdens, our problems. We let go and let God carry us. At first this does not seem anything like prayer. Yet we are prepared to go along with it.
We find, after a time, that we no longer seek God’s gifts, his graces, no longer ask for anything or expect anything. We leave self behind.
Our relationship with God changes from wanting things from him to simply being with him, with no other motive. ‘If you keep asking God to do things for you, your time in prayer is one prolonged ego trip’ John Main said. ‘You become more deeply hooked into yourself. To gain freedom of spirit you must be unhooked from your own self-conscious preoccupations.’
Of course, we are used to seeing God as a giver of gifts. The idea that we can have a relationship with him in which we ask for nothing and nothing is given is very rare and very liberating. St. Augustine teaches us: ‘do not wish to ask anything of God except God. Love him without seeking again. Desire him alone.’ This is how to love God freely, without seeking gain, he says: ‘To hope for God from God, to wish to be filled with God to be satisfied by him.
Meister Eckhart wrote: ‘When I pray for nothing that I pray rightly and that prayer is proper and powerful. I never pray so well as when I pray for nothing and for nobody.’
Father Pedro Arrupe, a past superior general of the Jesuit Order, told the story of a young pupil of his whom he had met when he worked on the missions. She would spend hours on end kneeling in the chapel, close to the tabernacle.
‘She would arrive in the chapel, and walking with the peculiar silence of those who are used to walking barefoot and noiseless from childhood, she would get as close to the Lord as her respect would allow her, and there she would kneel, indifferent to all that surrounded her.’
One day they met as she was leaving. ‘We began to talk and little by little I turned the subject of our conversation towards her visits to the altar’, Father Arrupe wrote. ‘Without hesitation, as if she had thought out her reply long before, she answered “Nothing.” “How do you mean nothing?” I insisted. “Do you think it is really possible to kneel there for so long and do nothing?”
‘The position of my question, which removed all possibility of ambiguity, seemed to disconcert her a little. She was not prepared for this kind of interrogation and she took longer in replying. At last she opened her lips: “What do I do before Jesus? Well… be there!” she explained. And she fell silent again.” It would seem to a superficial mind that she had said nothing. But in reality she had said everything.
Into those few words, Father Arrupe saw, was condensed the whole truth of all those endless hours spent near the altar. Hours of friendship. Hours of intimacy, in which nothing is asked and nothing is given. One is just there.