I left the Dominican Retreat House knowing that I would make this a regular part of my life in the coming years. This experience has helped me to appreciate and better understand that the first and foremost priority of my soul’s existence is to commune with the Spirit of God—on His terms. Through the silence, I learned to listen for God’s way for my life. I found that the things I learn through silence cannot be learned through a preacher’s sermon, ventilating to friends or even religious study as an alternative.
My fellow believers in Christ that are still entrenched in and totally committed to personality driven church traditions, will tend to dismiss the soul’s need for the language of silence as just another path to the same destination. There is a belief that “my pastor’s preaching and teaching provides all that my soul requires,” I disagree. All matters of life (both physical and spiritual) require balance. Preaching alone or studying alone is no more suitable for the soul’s healthy existence than is silence alone. The commitment to the practice of silence can be difficult because it does not feed nor does it nurture any of the ego needs or human faculties. The work is entirely internal.
With so many references in the Bible to God’s gift of peace to all believers, it boggled my mind as to how I could have missed that Christian benefit in my own practice of faith. After all, I had been raised in a religiously devout family and had been pretty diligent in my adult years to take my inherited faith to what I believed to be increasingly higher levels of knowledge and intimacy with God through church and bible study attendance. Although unconvinced, for years I sat in church amongst people who proclaimed [in sermons from the pulpit and testimonies from the pew] to have God’s peace. Maybe if I publicly pretended, like so many others opted to do, to have this coveted benefit of Christian belief, it would eventually find its way into my reality. Better yet, I could try to will myself to have peace—you know, that ‘positive thoughts’ brand (or shall I say delusion) of spirituality. All I knew was that I needed to do something. The unrest in my soul was no longer willing to be repressed and was Hell-bent on taking center stage.
There was always preaching about ‘getting quiet before God’ as a part of prayer and worship, but never any practice. I discovered that what my spirit most needed, my ‘personality driven’ church tradition did not have to offer. It had taken me as far as it could, and I was too tormented a soul to just rest in stagnation. So on top of everything else in my life that was dissolving right before my eyes, my attachment to my church family and the only church tradition I ever knew also dissipated. As traumatizing and saddening as it was at the time, I now see that it opened me up to see God however He chose to present Himself. No longer clinging to all of the subcategories of Christianity, I finally became a Christian minus the man-made boundaries and limitations.
Contemplative prayer is a practice of prayer that makes use of “interior silence.” There is no loud screaming from the pulpit, no requests and commands to God, and no communications that rely on thoughts, words or deeds—just silence. Many theologians refer to silence as God’s first language. Once I learned about the practice, it just felt like the next level of spirituality for me. On a stairway floating in the midst of the darkness, it was the next step—the only step. There was no step back, believe me, I looked for it. I had certainly maxed out the level I clung to for so long out of my fear of leaving behind the familiar. Nothing I learned or experienced growing up in the evangelical church tradition offered this level of interior peace.
