Index
Contemplative Prayer
necessary to use many words. Only
For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have “left” it. In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.
the monk’s chief service to the world: this silence, this listening, this questioning, this humble and courageous exposure to what the world ignores about itself—both good and evil.
cannot fill a heart that has not previously been humbled and emptied by dread
it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end.
a wordless and total surrender of the heart in silence.
If you love truth, be a lover of silence.
the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. … More
More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this “something” that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence … after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.
conscious awareness of and dependence on God. Once again, the forms taken by this “awareness” are not defined or prescribed.
The concept of “the heart” might well be analyzed here. It refers to the deepest psychological ground of one’s personality, the inner sanctuary where self-awareness goes beyond analytical reflection and opens out into metaphysical and theological confrontation with the Abyss of the unknown yet present—one who is “more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.”
in the Spirit of God we “see” God our Father without “seeing.” We know him in “unknowing.”
We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by “how we feel.” A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success.
When one is simply obeying God, a little effort goes a long way. When one is in fact resisting him (though claiming to have no other intention than that of fulfilling his will) no amount of effort can produce a good result.
The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no short cuts. Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace. They are self-confident and even self-complacent. They make up their minds that they are going to attain to this or that, and try to write their own ticket in the life of contemplation. They may even appear to succeed to some extent. But certain systems of spirituality—notably Zen Buddhism—place great stress on a severe, no-nonsense style of direction that makes short work of this kind of confidence. One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments.
Those who think they “know” from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything. People who try to pray and meditate above their proper level, who are too eager to reach what they believe to be “a high degree of prayer,” get away from the truth and from reality.
Acedia follows the enthusiasm of pride and spiritual vanity. A long course in humility and compunction is the remedy! We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life.
more and more directed to an obedient and cooperative submission to grace, which implies first of all an increasingly attentive and receptive attitude toward the hidden action of the Holy Spirit. It is precisely the function of meditation, in the sense in which we speak of it here, to bring us to this attitude of awareness and receptivity. It also gives us strength and hope, along with a deep awareness of the value of interior silence in which the mystery of God’s love is made clear to us.
the prayer of the heart has to be always very simple, confined to the simplest of acts and often making use of no words and no thoughts at all.
love on a simply human plane, it does so in order to fill them with a higher and purer light which is “darkness” to sense and to reason. The darkening is therefore at the same time an enlightenment. God darkens the mind only in order to give a more perfect light.
the “dark night of faith,” one passes from meditation, in the sense of active “mental prayer,” to contemplation, or a deeper and simpler intuitive form of receptivity, in which, if one can be said to “meditate” at all, one does so only by receiving the light with passive and loving attention.
in every action we beg from God the success of our labors and satisfy our debt of gratitude to him … and when we keep before our minds the aim of pleasing him.
God works in us while we rest in him. Beyond all grasping is this work of the Creator, itself creative, this rest. For such work exceeds all rest, in its tranquility. This rest, in its effect, shines forth as more productive than any work. Therefore let this action or rest of our contemplation be fashioned so as to reproduce, even though only in faint or sketchy lines, one model (of work and rest which is in God). …
We seek rather to gain a direct existential grasp, a personal experience of the deepest truths of life and faith, finding ourselves in God’s truth.
The dark night rectifies our deepest intentions. In the silence of this “night of faith” we return to simplicity and sincerity of heart.
St. Augustine’s words: Noverim te, noverim me.
purity of heart, an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and of our situation as willed by him. It means the renunciation of all deluded images of ourselves, all exaggerated estimates of our own capacities, in order to obey God’s will as it comes to us in the difficult demands of life in its exacting truth.
must use my freedom in order to love, with full responsibility and authenticity,
the “grace of meditation” (in the sense of “prayer of the heart”) is also a special gift. It should never be taken for granted.
a permanent disposition to humility, attention to reality, receptivity, pliability.
The sacrifices that are not chosen are often of greater value than those we select for ourselves.
the terrible experience of being apparently without faith in order to really grow in faith. For it is this testing, this fire of purgation, that burns out the human and accidental elements of faith in order to liberate the deep spiritual power in the center of our being.
“Just as the light that shows us all has no need of another light in order to be seen, so God, who shows us all things, has no need of a light in which we may see him, for he is himself light by essence,”
Only when we are able to “let go” of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionize our entire inner life.
for us the mystery contains, within its own darkness and its own silences, a presence and a meaning which we apprehend without fully understanding them.