Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
*Cormac McCarthy. The Road.
Silence awakens us to mystery. Not that we find mystery, we see mystery. Mystery was there all the time; in fact, time arose out of mystery. Silence is not the evasion of Life, but ironically the transformation of our seeing of Life as it already and always has been. Every living thing is a sacrament of Grace. What most religious persons see in religion is an escape from Life, a fleeing into a false reality. The holy person, who has surrendered into the depths of Life, has abandoned himself or herself to Grace prior to religion, to all systems, and has not found an escape, but is gifted with an awakening. If anything, he or she thinks, "How did I miss all of this, right here before me all the time?" Every movement becomes a Prayer.
*Arem Nahariim-Samadhi
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St. Therese of Lisieux (b. 1873) saw herself as what she called a little soul. Her spirituality was a contrast to much Catholic spirituality, which had stressed mortification of the body and doing extreme penances. St. Therese saw herself as that little soul loved by God like a parent loves a child. Harsh actions were not necessary for her little way to the Divine.
To share her teaching on Prayer, she used the image of a child falling asleep in the parent's lap and a patient resting trustingly in bed while being worked on by a physician.
St. Therese was asked what she did when praying. She said, "I don't do anything, I just love him!" Her way of trust in God's love has become known as the way of spiritual childhood. Actually, St. Therese practiced the ancient form of Prayer many now call Contemplative Prayer.
I do not think Contemplative Prayer need be devoid of all things, such as in emptying the mind - which is impossible, anyway. Rather, this Pure Prayer - as it has been called in Christian history - is beyond meditation in that there is fruitful emptiness in which arises images, feelings, thoughts, aspirations ... These come and go. Grace is equally present to the Soul, and the Soul to Grace, in the tranquil flux arising from the Union of Love.
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Those opposing, within Christianity, the simple, loving, and naked gaze toward Grace, which we call Contemplative Prayer, I can only assume are hiding a collective fear of having ourselves shown honestly before the simple, loving, and naked gaze of Grace. Possibly, we have identified faith so with the garb of faith, that we judge in ignorance the act of graceful attentiveness, which is the gift of many loving souls before God. To pray, nothing need be said. Even, however, to call this Prayer by Contemplative Prayer is misleading. This, as prayer is commonly understood, is not prayer, but beyond, not in better, but in expressing a higher Attentiveness, or Beingness, with and in Love with Love Itself. Do not cling to the signs, but enter the sanctum of the Signified. This Life inspires the sign that we might leave and return to Life in simple lovingness. Do not divide the world between sacred and secular, religious and nonreligious, or spiritual and unspiritual, for, then, you are dividing Life, you are seeking to judge and parcel out God Godself, as though God can be here and not there, then and not now, and subject to our interpretations collective and individual - this is subtle idolatry.
