Into the Silent Land Revisted

Martin Laird, O.S.A., journeyed to Wernersville last week-end to lead a two-day contemplative prayer retreat ~ for me, the retreat within a retreat.  Ninety people, probably all of them familiar with his books, Into the Silent Land and A Sunlit Absence, showed up to listen to his presentations and to spend time in silence with one another.

 

(Michelle and I spent some months awhile ago blogging back and forth about Into the Silent Land; those posts remain linked in my bar above.  I've read A Sunlit Absence as well and, to tell the truth, I couldn't make head nor tail of it.  I will probably give it another try soon.)

 

I thought I'd offer just a very few vignettes from the presentations, and explore them in more detail later, as I sort through my own prayer and reactions. I'm using quotation marks even though these are not verbatim quotations; they're close enough, and I want to indicate that the source is Martin Laird rather than myself.

 

*****

 

"Inner silence constitutes inner spaciousness."

 

"In our spiritual lives, we are like someone fishing for minnows from the back of a whale ~ sitting on the greatest catch of all, and yet satisfied with something puny."

 

"You will know that you are in the countryside of prayer when you experience joy and reverence at the same time." (That one comes from Evagrius rather than from Marty Laird.)

 

"The purpose of the Christian life is to open the eye of the heart, where God may be known." (That was one of Augustine's contributions.)

 

"In the practice of contemplative prayer, we move away from the chatter of discursive prayer in our heads in which, no matter how dreadful the narrative, we always have the starring role."  (A Laird riff on Evagrius, which I found hilarious, and oh-so-true!)

 

*****

 

As you might be able to tell, the presentations were divided roughly into material on the history of Christian contemplation and reflections on its actual practice.  Marty Laird is the master of metaphor, and listening to his measured, unhurried  observations is itself an exercise in contemplative prayer.

 

I've studied a lot of the material he presented and I'm somewhat familiar with the development of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition.  (And even in my Presbyterian seminary, we were offered a tinge of an introduction to the desert fathers and mothers in the context of our church history sequence ~ a linear and factual introduction, not an invitation into the spirituality of the desert by someone who had himself delved deeply into its pathways.)  But to hear a master of the tradition, someone who has spent his life exploring its nooks and crannies, bring it to life is to be yourself immersed, however briefly, into that sea of prayer.

 

*****

 

We do, in reality, mostly relax in our beach chairs on top of the whale.

A Sunlit Absence - I (Book Review)

After months of eager anticipation, I have zipped through Martin Laird's A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation and begun, as of late last night, a much slower and more careful second read.

A Sunlit Absence is a companion volume to Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, upon which Michelle and I reflected  over a period of several months last year. (See tab at the top of the page.)  I think that most readers will find A Sunlit Absence to be more challenging and, without a great deal of attentiveness paced over an extended period of time, less easily satisfying,  On the other hand, of course, perhaps such attentiveness will lead ultimately to a more rewarding experience of reading and prayer over that longer timespan.

Into the Silent Land, using the metaphor of the doorway, provides an introduction to contemplative practice in the sequence of a journey.  Moving from an introduction to Christian contemplation into the methodology of utilizing a prayer word, addressing the difficulties with mental distractions that cause many people to run as fast as possible away from anything that smacks of silence, and providing instruction in how to persist in prayer despite or even in aid of life's traumas and crises, Into the Silent Land eases us into an orderly exploration of prayer.

A Sunlit Absence is more akin to the experience of opening a scrapbook, inviting us to sift through a cascade of images, allusions, and parables in pursuit of the elusive God who need not be pursued at all because we live and move and have our being, always, within God's love.  I've just counted, and I have at least 25 of its 175 pages turned down as indications of material that called out to me for further reflection ~ but I don't yet have a sense of the whole.

The title of  the book comes from a Seamus Heaney poem which begins with the words, "There was a sunlit absence."  I'm not sure that Laird ever addresses the poem (as I said, my first read was a speedy one), but what he does describe in the introduction  is our experience of the God who both envelops and fills us as  that of water merging into water and light merging into light.  As Teresa of Avila says, "love melts into love."

As I pondered some days ago, before the book arrived, I have begun to wonder whether the silence of God is not, in fact, the compassion of God.  When I mentioned that possibility to someone else, he suggested that the silence of God is the patience of God ~ and, perhaps not surprisingly, referred me back to a passage in Into the Silent Land.  

I have been wondering, also, whether the silence of God perhaps reverberates through the universe?

Silence as the compassion of God, the patience of God, the echo of God?  We shall see what this book suggests.