Lent is a spiritual journey, in which we try to deepen our relationship with God. Fr Michael Cunningham SDB explores the role of silent prayer in becoming present to God, and growing in compassion towards our brothers and sisters.

Whenever we embark on the spiritual journey, we always encounter in some form or other the Paschal Mystery of Jesus. This is the pattern of death and life, which is at the heart not just of Christian experience but of all human experience. For new life to grow, something has to die. This is experienced most deeply in the spiritual life by the death of that ego-centred existence that is the false self. The issue is always one of giving up control and surrendering to The Great Mystery, The Great Love, The Great River of Life, which Jesus calls The Kingdom of God, the experience of deep love and communion. When we are working for others, or even saying our prayers, we are still to some extent in control. In silent prayer, we have to face up to an encounter with our wounded and broken selves. This is why many give up this difficult path. As Jesus said in the parable of the Sower, the seed falls among the thorns and stony ground of our human condition.

The biggest obstacle to remaining faithful to silent and wordless prayer is our thinking, what has been called our fly-paper mind. Thinking is not bad, but it cannot lead us to the true self. When we are thinking we remain in control. We analyse and we judge, usually negatively. Our thinking can only really move us in two directions: the past or the future. What happens when I sit in prayer is that my mind races with thoughts and emotions. I look back at things that have happened in the past. I think of some incident where l have been hurt, of some critical comments I might have received, some negative judgement. My mind flips forward to the future, to some meeting I have to attend, or some difficult person I may want to avoid. All these emotions and thoughts control my mind. All the great mystics tell us that the most difficult place to be present in is the now. The now is the place where God IS loving me and accepting me with unconditional love. The present moment is the place where l meet a totally non-blaming God.

So how do we learn to deal with all these distracting thoughts and feelings and learn to be present to the now? The key thing is not to get angry and upset with ourselves when we find our minds distracted by thoughts and emotions. They are not bad in themselves, they are not the real you. They are not the deeper life that we have been talking about as our destiny and our deepest reality. So when the distractions come, we have to learn not to judge them, but to observe them with great compassion. We learn to look at them and to let them go. This needs to be done with great gentleness, as St Francis of Sales reminds us, and not with oppositional energy. Fighting them with oppositional energy simply gives them a longer life. Just let them go and say, That is not me, I don't need this. Gradually this becomes easier to do, but we will never really gain full mastery of this process. To do so would simply let the religious ego back in control: See how well I am doing, I'm really getting this prayer life under control. We can never control the spirit of God.

When we begin wordless prayer we may get all sorts of nice warm feelings. God is calling us to a new relationship. These feelings are unlikely to last as we are led to new levels of love. Some purification is necessary here. Our deep-lying wounds and feelings of past rejections may come to the surface. God will carry these for us. We have to acknowledge them, maybe weep over them and know that it is precisely this very woundedness that attracts God to us, just as we saw Jesus reaching out and healing the sick and the suffering of his day; we may experience a kind of nothingness. This is also humiliating for the ego. We are so used to fixing problems and getting results in our calculative minds that we find this difficult. The contemplative mind just learns to look rather than to judge and analyse. A contemplative mind teaches us how to see, to see what is, and look at it with deep compassion instead of judgement.

The Spirit of Jesus calls us to this challenging journey in which we learn to become present both to the God within and the God without, the God we learn to see in all people. The prayer of presence doesn't originate with us. All we have to do is join in the flow of love that exists between Father, Son and Spirit. All we need is loving attention. We don't even need to think holy thoughts. We are being invited to a deeper level of being.

When we are brave enough to embrace our humanity and offer it to God, we find ourselves in a realised oneness with God. We are at home in God. We rest in the God who delights in our company. Our task is simply to receive this gift; our active role is to let go of thoughts and feelings and attend lovingly to the God within.

The more we create space and time for God, the more our hearts are attuned to the suffering of our brothers and sisters, especially the poor, the outsiders, the rejected ones. Once we have had the courage to bring all that we are to the loving and compassionate gaze of God, we can then show our compassionate gaze to those in need. We share a solidarity ion poverty and need. Love received always becomes love to be shared. We learn to pray unceasingly as prayer becomes our very breath and energy, our presence to God and to his world. All we have to do is say Yes to the great flow within.

From Lost and Found: Spirituality for a Changing World, Michael Cunningham SBD, Don Bosco Publications

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