A Primer on Contemplative Prayer

The Importance of Silence

Be quiet. 

It’s one of the strong admonitions of the Psalms:

• Psalm 4:4 – Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.
• Psalm 23:2 – He makes me lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside still waters.
• Psalm 37:7 – Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices!
• Psalm 46:10 – “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”
• Psalm 62:1,5 – For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation..For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.
• Psalm 131:1, 2 – O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.  But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.

 

One of the things which those who prayed the Psalms into existence emphasize is the importance of quietness and stillness.

Why?  Because silence and stillness are things which can conquer sinful anger (Ps. 4:4).  God desires to bring us to experiences of “still waters,” restful and quiet moments (Ps. 23:2).  Stillness is one of the ways in which we stop trying to take control and allow God to take control (Ps. 37:7).  It is often in quiet rest that we best come to know and experience that God is truly God (Ps. 46:10).  It is in times of silence that we find salvation and hope (Ps. 62:1,5).  And God wishes to bring us to times with him when we are like a weaned child with its mother, resting quietly in his presence (Ps. 131:1,2).

Clearly, there are some things we receive and experience only through silence.  How about you—in what ways have silence and stillness been beneficial in your life?

Tony Jones writes,

“All in all, no spiritual discipline is more universally acclaimed as necessary than the practice of silence.  The Desert Fathers retreated to the wild lands of Egypt; Rufinus, who toured the desert to visit as many of the Fathers as he could, wrote to Jerome, ‘There is a huge silence and a great quiety here.’…Likewise, Benedict fashioned much of his Rule around the keeping of silence…Present day spiritual writers commend silence as well.”[i] 

Silence is absolutely essential to our spiritual growth.

Our Struggle with Silence

Yet silence and waiting are often the hardest spiritual practices to embrace.  Gary Holloway writes,

“For many of us, the hardest thing we can imagine doing is to do nothing.  We have been taught from childhood to be busy, filling each moment of the day with activity.  Our churches often teach us that to waste time is sinful.  We should always be working for the Lord…Everyone knows that the more you work and the harder you try, the more you accomplish.  Even in the spiritual life…Everyone knows that but God.”[ii] 

Similarly, Adele Calhoun comments,

“When we come upon silence, we fill it.  We cram it with something else we can learn or do or achieve.  We break the silence of travel with an iPod, the silence of the evening hours with the TV or computer, the silence of sleep with an alarm clock.  Every part of our life is inundated with words—urgent words, random words, trivial words, hurtful words, managing words, religious words, and on and on.”[iii]

Richard Foster writes,

“How desperately we in the modern world need this wordless baptism…We now have the dubious distinction of being able to communicate more and say less than any civilization in history.”[iv]

Why are silence and waiting difficult for you?

Practicing Silence Through Contemplative Prayer

The type of prayer that “majors” in silence is known as “Contemplative Prayer.”  In a nutshell, Contemplative Prayer is simply spending intentional time in silence before God.  It can be for the sole purpose of resting in God and just being with God.  It can be for the additional purpose of receiving something from God—knowledge of God, a word from God, some action of God’s. 

Here, prayer is not acting.  It is resting.  Here, prayer is not asking.  It is receiving.  Prayer becomes less something we do and more something that is done to us.  We rest in the Lord.  We are quiet and still in His presence.  We calmly wait—for knowledge of him, for action from him, for a word from him.

In the stillness of Contemplative Prayer we can receive the rest God wishes to bring and we can enjoy just “hanging out with God.”  In addition, that quietness allows us to be more receptive to something God may wish to do or to reveal.  We may receive from God a small but important word about our day, about our past, or about something God is teaching us regarding himself.

Primarily during this time we “are attending to him who loves us, who is near to us, and who draws us to himself.”[v]   The basic goal of silence is “to free myself from the addiction to and distraction of noise so I can be totally present to the Lord.”[vi]

Because of biblical texts like the Psalms, for the first 16 centuries of Christianity, Contemplative Prayer was recognized as the goal of Christian spirituality.  It was expected that every Christian would strive to experience this type of prayer.  The Greek Church Fathers used the word “theoria” to describe an experiential knowledge of God.  “Theoria” was translated into the Latin word from which we get the English word “contemplation.”  Literally, Contemplative Prayer is experiencing God, being with God.  One ancient author called it “resting in God.”[vii] 

The Practice of Contemplative Prayer

Ideally, Contemplative Prayer is 20 minutes of silence at the beginning of the day and 20 minutes at the end of the day.  The goal is not to hear from God, but to be with God and be present to God for 20 full minutes.  It takes at least this long for the average person’s mind to stop wandering and grabbing on randomly to thoughts, memories, and feelings and to arrive at a state of true interior silence.

In this time, we sit with our eyes closed and are present with God in total silence.  No inspirational music playing.  No humming or singing.  Just silence.  In the silence our mind begins to wander.  Rather than try to ignore those distracting thoughts, we intentionally let go of them, as if releasing a stick and allowing it to float down the river.  As each emotion or random thought comes, we attend to it and let it go down stream.  The goal is let these go and to just exist in the presence of God.[viii]  We are not trying to solve any problems, process any feelings, or understand any text.  We are trying to intentionally spend 20 minutes in stillness with God. 

Foster writes that “This kind of prayer obviously is more an experience of the heart than of the head” and “In Contemplative Prayer talk recedes into the background, and feelings come to the foreground.”[ix]

What can we expect from this time?  Thomas Keating urges us to have come with few expectations and to come in the posture of a beginner:

“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…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!”[x]

Gary Holloway provides these thoughts: [xi]  After a week of being silent before God for ten to twenty minutes a day, you may experience many things.

• First, you might feel some physical or emotional pain.  Difficult emotions and experiences which have been suppressed may suddenly surface.  (Indeed, as Adele Calhoun writes, silence can be a bit like a spiritual can-opener: “Like a can opener the silence opens up the contents of your heart, allowing us deeper access to God than we experience at other times.  As we remain in silence, the inner noise and chaos will begin to settle.  Our capacity to open up wider and wider to God grows.  The holy One has access to places we didn’t even know exist in the midst of the hubbub.”[xii])
• Second, you might feel euphoria or deep joy as you are submerged in a peace beyond understanding and gain a sense of God’s nearness. 
• Third, you might feel nothing.  You might begin to think silence is a waste of time.  But, “Silence is…not about feeling.  It is not about creating experiences.  Feelings may come.  If so, embraced them as gifts or face them with God as challenges.  You might feel nothing.  That is also fine.  Silence is not our attempt to be spiritual or create spiritual experiences.  Instead, it is an act of pure faith.  We trust that God blesses those who spend time with him.  We believe, even when we do not see, that God is working in us in the silence.”[xiii]  Thomas Merton echoes this line: “If we bear with hardship in prayer and wait patiently for the time of grace, we may well discover that meditation and prayer are very joyful experiences.  We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by ‘how we feel.”[xiv]   Though, at times, we may wonder if our times in silence are “productive” or “useful,” we must trust that God is at work in hidden and unknown ways during this time. 

 

Richard Foster warns that contemplative prayer is not for the novice.  He suggests that contemplative prayer compared to other types of prayer is calculus compared to basic multiplication and steak compared to milk.  He writes,

“Contemplative Prayer is for those who have exercised their spiritual muscles a bit and know something about the landscape of the spirit.  In fact, those who work in the area of spiritual direction always look for signs of a maturing faith before encouraging individuals into Contemplative Prayer.  Some of the more common indicators are a continuing hunger for intimacy with god, an ability to forgive others at great personal cost, a living sense that God alone can satisfy the longings of the human heart, a deep satisfaction in prayer…”[xv]

I find great inspiration in these quotes which Merton cities:

• Desert Father Ammonas (4^th Century): “Behold, my beloved, I have shown you the power of silence, how thoroughly it heals and how fully pleasing it is to God.  Wherefore I have written to you to show yourselves strong in this work you have undertaken, so that you may know it is by silence that the saints grew, that it was because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them.”[xvi]
• Peter of Celles (Middle Ages): “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.”[xvii]

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[i] Tony Jones, The Sacred Way (Zondervan, 2005), 39-40.

[ii] Gary Holloway, You Might Be Too Busy If…Spiritual Practices for People in a Hurry (Leafwood Publishers, 2009), 41.

[iii] Adele Calhoun, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook (IVP, 2005), 108.

[iv] Richard Foster, Prayer (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 115.

[v] Ibid., 158.

[vi] Calhoun, 107.

[vii] Thomas Keating Open Mind Open Heart (Continuum, 1992).

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Foster, 158.

[x] Keating, 37.

[xi] Holloway, 46-47.

[xii] Calhoun, 109.

[xiii] Holloway, 46-47.

[xiv]Thomas Merton Contemplative Prayer (Image Books, 1996), 34.

[xv] Foster, 156.

[xvi] Merton, 42.

[xvii] Ibid., 59.