Introduction, Part 3

In Silence. Why We Pray
by Donald Spoto

(Page 3 of 6)

AlthoughI write from the perspective of a Catholic, as one who affirms the faith of the apostles and tries each day to discern anew its meaning, I have written this book with all people of goodwill in mind, with whatever backgrounds, affirmations, doubts or denials. I ask only of readers that they bring to this book the openness with which I myself have tried to approach this subject. In Silence seeks to prove nothing, nor is it a defense for a particular religious tradition. The paths to God are as many as there are people.

Because my concern here is with private prayer, there are only a few passing references to group prayer, or to corporate or liturgical worship, which by their nature are less than personal in expression. The forms of prayer composed for worship are notable for telling us what the particular tradition of a given faith proclaims - lex orandi legem statuat credendi, runs the ancient maxim: how we pray reveals what we believe. But those collective forms are ultimately meaningless unless we bring them to life within ourselves.

In Silence has been written in the same atmosphere it hopes to encourage: one of a dark and quiet interiority. If anything has become clarified for me in my seventh decade of life, it is that there is nothing simple or blind about faith, and there is nothing easy about prayer. And whatever I have to say must be inadequate.

Meister Eckhart, a sinewy medieval philosopher and mystic, proposed that there is nothing so like God as silence. I find much of his writing nearly incomprehensible, but in this case, I think he was bracingly clear. After a half-century of studying a dizzying array of books about prayer in various religious traditions, reading about the philosophy of prayer and investigating some rarefied mental states better left to the psychologist, I am at last left with the haunting simplicity of Eckhart: there is nothing so like God as silence, and there is no greater ambiance in which to encounter Him. Silence, after all, is not nothing.

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But if Eckhart was on the mark, why not keep silence? Why another book on prayer? In my defense, I would say that the most valuable subjects to think and write about are those issues we can never fully comprehend or articulate, those things with which we have never finished. Prayer, after all, is linked to faith - as we have seen, an attitude about reality that (among other things) refuses to accept the final opacity of the universe, refuses to accept that life is meaningless, that the world makes no sense. This habit of being is also the foundation of an intuition that insists that love is better than hatred, that chaos is inferior to order, that compassion and respect are superior to vengeance and malice.

The French theologian Jean Daniélou once wrote, "To be occupied with God is the highest occupation. But this requires an apprenticeship." That training, I believe, begins again each day for us - however we describe our search, and however we express (or do not) the primary fact that God is first and always occupied with us, long before it occurs to us to give Him a thought.

This connection, this communion that tugs at us - this hunch that in the final analysis we may not be alone - is at the heart of prayer, and prayer is the most human response to our experience of that sensibility. In this regard, another recurring theme of this book is that prayer is not so much something we do as something God does, something we experience, something unbidden and uninvited, something heard but imperfectly sensed - it is, in other words, a voice and a calling that want to be heeded, despite our lassitude and tardiness in the face of it.

Prayer is an immense, enduring connective thread in human history, as it is in each human life and destiny. It is our surest link to a Beyond in the midst, a connection to what does not vanish, to what is not subject to our mood or whim; indeed, the Reality beyond prayer never fades as, so often, religious enthusiasm and high emotion fade like watercolors exposed to the sun. The astonishing fact of history is that everyone can pray - and perhaps, somehow, everyone at least makes an effort to do so. "The beginning is the more important part," according to Teresa of Ávila. "If a person takes only one step, the step will itself contain so much power that we will not have to fear losing it, nor will we fail to be very well paid."

Many women and men who have prayed over the centuries have written compellingly of their experiences of prayer, and I occasionally refer to them in this book. Sometimes they can be more or less amiable, wise guides as we try to understand our own understanding of Reality. But their language necessarily reflects their experience, and it is always conditioned and limited by their times, cultures and personalities (as is ours). These people can inspire us, they can hint and suggest directions we might take - but the journey must ultimately be our own. We need to discover our own language and our own silence. "A lively person prays one way," as a 4th-century desert monk said with remarkable psychological insight.

A person brought down by the weight of gloom or despair prays another way. One prays another way still when the life of the spirit is flourishing, and another way when pushed down. One prays differently, depending on whether one is seeking the gift of some grace or the removal of sin. The prayer is different again when one is sorrowing . . . or when one is fired by hope . . . when one is in need or peril, in peace or tranquility; when one is flooded by the light of heavenly mysteries, or when one is hemmed in by aridity and staleness in one's thinking.

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To speak of a "history of prayer" would be to imply that there is some sort of logical development or discernible chronology in humanity's relationship with prayer - that we can trace it in an orderly fashion down through the ages, something like the stages of scientific thinking about the cosmos, for example. But the sort of "history" I draw upon here is more concerned with certain experiences and themes in life that are identified in the chapter titles.

Can a thematic survey of personal prayer, then - with special reference to the data of ordinary human experiences, like dialogue, suffering and love - take us beyond those ordinary experiences? I hope I have offered that possibility. Prayer derives from a conviction that God is indeed the Ultimacy toward which everything that is yearns, however imperfectly or unknowingly. This cannot be proven: it can only be experienced. And if we have not yet known it, we may still come to that unique awareness, to our everlasting surprise.

In a way, this book in fact explores our aptitude for deeper experience - a subjective inner experience, to be sure, but one that is discovered, not invented. And so In Silence also reflects on our ability to be astonished, which I take as a direct consequence of what Bernard of Clairvaux, in 12th-century France, called the universal capacity for God. That capacity is directly linked to the fact of prayer.

Persons who pray in light of that capacity, even vaguely perceived, experience what can only be called a sense of God, and they require no defense from an intellectual fortress. Indeed, the spontaneous and direct expression of an experience of the Beyond can take us - perhaps must take us - to a still, silent point where we begin to live as never before.

The "sense of God" is not a metaphor: it is a consciousness as sharp as love or pain, heat or light; it is like the homing instinct of birds, which can be neither explained nor denied. And to those who experience it, there is no doubt about its reality.

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When I was a first-year college student, I spoke one evening with a professor I much respected, who was also a kind of spiritual counselor to me. I do not recall the subject of our conversation, but at one point I put some question or other to him about the meaning of prayer. What seemed a long moment of silence intervened before he answered very quietly: "What can we do - what can any of us do - but throw ourselves into the arms of God?"

This book is offered in the spirit of that quietly overwhelming question.

© 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.