Introduction, Part 1

In Silence. Why We Pray
by Donald Spoto

From the author of The Hidden Jesus - an eloquent, wide-ranging exploration of humanity's intimate dialogue with the divine.

The literature of prayer has an old and rich tradition, but Donald Spoto's extraordinary new work of scholarship and devotion may be the first book to explore not only what prayer says about God but what it reveals about us and the universal experiences that have moved us to call on God throughout the ages.

Drawing on the words of religious thinkers of both East and West, from the author of Psalms to Rumi and from Teresa of Ávila to Chögyam Trungpa, In Silence explores the nature, quality, history, and effects of prayer: as petition, as forgiveness, as cry of suffering, as abandonment, as serenity, as loving, as silence.

Erudite, beautifully written, and filled with wonder, this is a ringing celebration of our most precious habit of being.

"Faith itself is the soul's true country, and prayer is its native language."

With those words I concluded a chapter of an earlier work, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life. That book considered certain specific questions about the ancient Hebrew notion of the mystery of God, and about the earliest Christian assertions concerning God's continuing activity in Jesus of Nazareth. The questions and the assertions, taken collectively, comprise the basis for Judeo-Christian faith.

Faith, I suggested in The Hidden Jesus, is primarily an attitude about reality - a refusal to admit that life has no meaning and that everything is doomed to extinction; faith then involves a willingness to wonder, to ask questions rather than simply to deny what the senses do not immediately validate. Faith goes further and more deeply than belief; I hope to make this the subject of a future book.

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The apparent problem of the hiddenness and silence of God runs like a motif through the entire range of the Jewish-Christian Scriptures; they very much concerned me in The Hidden Jesus. Hiddenness and silence do not imply nonexistence, absence or a sort of divine detachment. On the contrary: people have become aware, however dimly, of the reality of God, and have realized a relationship with Him, only in silence. Hiddenness and silence are not nothing, nor are they to be taken for God's remoteness; they are in fact the condition of our meeting with God in time, amid the chaos of the world.

If the silence and hiddenness of God are signs of His presence and the key to understanding the deepest meaning of our lives, then we may indeed listen for God, hear Him in His silence, and find Him as the ultimately real Reality precisely in that silence and hiddenness. In other words, communication with God may be not only possible but also necessary; indeed, it may be actual long before we realize it is as so. Hence the book you are now holding - an inquiry into the meaning, nature, history, quality, types and effects of prayer in human experience.

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If one wishes to approach prayer as an intellectual construct, it can be studied as a psychological phenomenon, a theme in the history of world religions, a subject for academic theological discourse or simply in its most familiar form as written or spoken entreaties or formulas directed to a higher being. In this book I have chosen to examine the subject from a different perspective. My aim is not to present yet another history of religion, nor an analysis of the sociological aspects of certain forms of institutional religious life or formal worship. Likewise, I do not offer a history of mysticism: the rarefied language of many mystics is too idiosyncratic to be adequately treated in this book. But some mystics are more accessible than others, and because sometimes they have cogent and powerful things to say about prayer, their writings will be considered here.

I have elected to treat prayer as an expression of an individual's inner life as it develops within the contexts of several dimensions of human experience. Dialogue is one mode of discovery about oneself and others, and prayer may be spoken of as a profound sort of dialogue. Asking, needing and desiring in some ways characterize every life in its ordinariness, and this implicit sense of one's contingency relates directly to our sense of a relationship with God. Suffering often makes people turn to God, or at least wonder about His presence or absence, and a cry amid suffering is among the commonest kinds of prayers. Love, too, in all its guises and categories, makes us somehow aware of the inevitability of connection with another and others: this human experience cannot be separated from a sense of the divine. Reflection on our experience, on what we do or feel or endure or receive, forms what we call our inner life. That reflection is the first and basic kind of prayer.

The primal awareness of the Beyond is sketched in the first chapter, which offers selected moments in the spiritual history of humankind, but only insofar as they illuminate the interior mystery of prayer. In the chapters that follow, then, I try to trace our inclination to pray out of certain basic universal experiences, for I believe that it is in dialogue, petition, forgiveness, suffering, abandonment, serenity and loving that we not only act and endure but also reach the depths of being truly alive. Transformation - not just of our outlook but of our very selves - then occurs inevitably. At the level of everyday, common hu- man experiences and in our very particularity, we meet the living God.

In a way, I am attempting a new understanding of the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of a universal language that we are, as individuals and as a species, always just beginning to fathom. Among the central motifs of this book is the notion that it may well be impossible to consider prayer apart from life as a whole. We are as we pray, and our prayer is always in a state of becoming. Prayer parallels and enriches the process by which we discover the depth and breadth of what it means to be human.

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Any attempt to speak of prayer in the 21st century is likely to lead to a confrontation with a cluster of objections - the two most notable being that prayer is irrelevant in a sophisticated age of science and technology; and that prayer is primarily a solipsistic dialogue with the self. Both rest on a belief that prayer is by its nature psychologically suspect. But its critics, if they are intellectually honest, ought to ask themselves whether they can dismiss or deny profound interior experiences claimed by others merely because they themselves are strangers to those experiences.

We should not lose sight of the fact that psychology itself is a remarkably fluid and mysterious discipline, one that deals with all manner of highly variable conjectures and subjective interpretations. Various schools of analysis have emerged, and partisans often apply their own fixed systems as templates for interpreting each and every human life or dilemma. This methodology, however, tends to reduce the unique human person to a standard issue that can be "treated" by certain established principles. But good science does not proceed in so reductive a fashion.

Just so, it is helpful to recall that no less a figure than Albert Einstein observed that human awareness of the divine could not be summarily discounted, and that in fact (as he wrote) "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Since Einstein's death a half-century ago, most scientists would agree that what we call "laws of nature" are best regarded as a series of probabilities in a universe that remains mysterious and open.

The idea that there are fixed laws of nature is in fact useful only as a way of assessing the current state of what is known about the material world: in other words, these so-called laws enable us to understand certain phenomena as they appear to us now, at our current stage of interpreting the world.

On the other hand, the realms of creative thought and art, the worlds of aesthetic and interior spiritual life, gain little from being subjected to a priori principles. In this regard, we can consider that when Aristotle contemplated the universe, when Mozart composed, when Monet painted and when Mendel experimented with plants and seeds, they were engaged in interior activities that were not ultimately comprehensible through merely rational methods.

Still, for some people prayer is fundamentally incompatible with a modern scientific worldview. What good is it, they ask, to pray for rain in the midst of a drought? After all, tomorrow's weather is determined by today's conditions - more accurately, it was determined by yesterday's. A similar argument might be made about the course of an illness. What use is it to pray once all the medical remedies have been applied? Nature, they conclude, has taken and will take its course, either in response to scientific protocols or despite them.

Two replies come to mind. First, we constantly alter the course of "nature" by expressions of our will and in light of evolving knowledge. We seed the clouds; we build breakwaters and construct complex irrigation equipment; we discover that a rare herb just might treat a grave illness. It is ridiculous to suggest that we can always know the circumstances under which a desired end might be accomplished. The second response is more abstract and yet more to the point. Scientists receptive to a mysterious and often unpredictable universe can, as we have seen, admit that the laws of nature have more to do with a current sense of probability than with anything like certainty.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Donald Spoto, author of The Hidden Jesus, taught theology, Christian mysticism, and biblical literature at the university level for twenty years. His other eighteen books include internationally bestselling biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, and Ingrid Bergman.