From the Archives: Silent Surrender

The Benefits of Silent Prayer - 21.09.2024

Silent Surrender

Thomas Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart is a book about the practice of ‘centering prayer’. Centering prayer is essentially a prayer of silence and consent to the presence of God.

I’ve practiced this type of prayer and, as I’ve done so, I’ve slowly come to realise that there is something extremely radical about it.

Firstly, what is it? The whole of Keating’s book is an exploration of the answer to that question, but here’s a definitional statement:

Centering prayer is not so much the absence of thoughts as detachment from them. It is the opening of mind and heart, body and emotions - our whole being - to God, the Ultimate Mystery, beyond words, thoughts, and emotions - beyond, in other words, the psychological content of the present moment.

Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart, p. 12

How we do this is simply by taking 20-30 minutes at the beginning and the end of the day to sit in silence before God.

There is a technique Keating recommends, which is to use a sacred word or image, but this is only (gently) to draw our thoughts back to the practice of silent contemplation when we are inevitably carried away by them.

Thoughts can be compared to little boats floating along the surface of the river of our consciousness. In order to practice centering prayer, we have to allow this to happen and to not take any interest in them. It is natural to notice these boats from time-to-time and to want to investigate them and to follow them wherever they go. And this will always happen. The sacred word or image is the thing that draws us back when we are tempted to take too much of an interest in the thoughts that are distracting us.

As we sit in silence, the idea is that we eventually attain a state of union with the divine.

But, if I have understood this properly, this is not with the express intention of achieving peace or joy. It may very well result in these things, but there is a deeper willingness here, which is to open oneself to God and to whatever it is that God would want to do in us.

This may result in joy and peace, but it may result in something else: barrenness, desolation, conviction of sin…anything that the Lord wants.

In essence this is a type of absolute surrender before God. And there is a strange freedom in it.

It has shown me how - once again - I always place so much pressure upon myself. In my relationship with the Lord, I am always wanting the Lord to bless me with his peace and his joy. But this desire - this stretching out for peace and joy - can become counterproductive as the focus on the experience precludes the possibility of the experience itself. It also turns God into a means to an end as we seek not the Lord himself but an experience of him. The irony is that the only way we can have a true spiritual experience of God is by not trying to have an experience of him.

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Blaise Pascal said that all of humanity’s problem stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. That speaks to me.

When we attempt to sit in a room quietly and alone, as we do in centering prayer, we recognise so many things about ourselves. For me, I recognise that I really believe that my time is of infinite value: how can I possibly sit down quietly fro 40 minutes to an hour a day? Think of all the valuable things I could be doing with that time! Think of all the things that need to be done right now! (Even at 4am in the morning when I can’t sleep!) What would people think if they knew I was simply sitting around doing nothing! They would think me unworthy of their support and their good opinion!

I also recognise the frantic nature of my mind: the fractured character of my thoughts, desires, anxieties…situations with certain emotional or psychological power that flash across my consciousness and which are rapidly pushed away by something else.

There is fear in this silence.

I once went to a monastery with some friends, one of whom fled during the night. When I told the abbot about it, he said it was a surprisingly common experience: the silence is too disturbing for some who are not used to it. Why? Because there is no escape from the turmoil within.

And, yet, “The Kingdom of God is within you” said Jesus (Luke 17:21), and the New Testament is replete with promises that the Spirit of God will dwell within the hearts of believers. It makes sense, therefore, that, our thoughts, anxieties, fears, and distractions function as accretions on our consciousness, crowding out our awareness of God and of his love for us.

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The ‘false self’, as Keating calls it, is the part of ourselves that operates independently of God. It is the part of us that can’t bear the criticism - real or imagined - of other people and so feels the need to keep itself in a constant posture of defensiveness and tension. It is the part of us that can’t sit still because it doesn’t trust that God will provide. It is the part of us that is constantly seeking the gratification of the senses as the deepest answer to our need - and this because it has no trust in the presence of God to bring contentment.

‘“Anything but silence” is the response of the false self” to this kind of prayer’ (Keating, p.63). Why is this? Because the false self must be always vigilant in bringing about its own purposes - it is a megalomaniac which believes that it can control the rest of the world and the interior machinations of the thoughts of others. The false self finds it hard to take a break and eventually ends up wearing down and exhausting its host.

But, if we can sit in the presence of God, knowing his acceptance and love even as we “do nothing”, then surely we can be reassured and changed by this, somewhere deep within:

I do not need to spend this time defending myself…I am loved and accepted by God.

I do not need to spend this time accruing more material security…I have enough in this moment and the Lord will provide for the future.

I do not need to seek the gratification of my senses at the moment…there is a far greater consolation and lasting peace in the Lord’s presence, even if he chooses not to give it to me in the way that I would like at this moment.

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The way this world seems to operate is to say that we must work ourselves into a stressful, death-like state for months on end and then, every once in a while, we should go on holiday so that we can recover some semblance of our humanity, after which we should go back to the world of work and begin the cycle all over again.

God offers us something completely different, summarised in the great prayer of the Church Veni, Sancte Spiritus, describing the operations of God the Holy Spirit: in labore requies - in labour, bringing rest. It is possible.

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