Prayer is the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself--and at the core of all of these is paradox: the absence within presence, the presence within absence that Jewish tradition experiences as the weight of the Divine. We see it in the holy of holies--the inner room of Jerusalem's temple which the conquering Romans expected to find full of riches, and instead, found empty. We see it in the Teacher's pierced and sacred heart, which ran with blood and water till it was finished. But the lesson does not stop with such obvious undercurrents of sadness. [bxA]
Of course, deep calls upon deep. We're busy being what we're not--and that part of us calls on presence like it's elsewhere, like it's an agenda. The distance we feel--this is our predicament. The stepwise motion of vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation is designed to decrease the distance between God and his devotees. That distance would be miniscule indeed, if only we could intuit when to let go of words and thoughts, emotions and desires. Giving up self, the mature practitioner simply ceases to identify with an existence that's separate from God. "How do I give up self?" Buddhists are helpful when they call it a "non-question," a query whose answer, quite simply, gives the problem too much power. In the garden, when the beloved disciple ran away naked rather than allow Christ's detractors to grab hold--in this, we see Christ depriving all Christians of their attachment to self.
All of the words we say and the thoughts we think are just the medications we take to make "dying to self" a little less rough. Word and concept are just palliative care--but the drug is not the rest we seek. There are times when we speak with high levels of honesty and vulnerability--that's an absolute good, and the heart opens accordingly. Watching the superego turn that vulnerability and honesty into an agenda is a hard thing indeed. Harder still is giving any attention at all to the dual task of self-soothing and self-abandonment in the midst of daily responsibilities requiring undivided attention. When something--emotionally, energetically, spiritually--seems off, many of the tools of tantra are designed to be quick fixes, after which we can speedily return to what we're doing. Whether or not we fill it with activity and noise--and whether or not that noise is mundane or pious--prayer will always be the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself. And it is always beckoning us back.
The Word has been with God since the beginning--it's a fact with colossal implications. It means that the universe, suffused with both the Spirit and the Logos, is conscious. God and Christ sustain creation, even on the sabbath. The heavens and the earth, at various times in the scripture, cry out to God, and the stones, faced with the apostles' silence, proclaim the gospel. It's not just metaphor: we have reason to think that prayer is always, already happening. We need a healthy dose of St. Paul here: "we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the holy spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words." When we fail at prayer, the path to recovery is simply a return to listening for the small nuances of sound in the silence of things. Even in a loud room, a moment of pause is available between each practitioner's in-breath and out breath. For those who give healthy attention to emptiness, nothing is lacking.
For Christians, contemplation is "being" with God--and all that is seen and unseen, just by being, is praying. So the brief moments when we concentrate on feeling our own weight against the floor of the grocery store's produce aisle, the small interval of breathing deeply while closing our eyes and putting both hands on the cold linoleum of our desks at work--these aren't just "grounding activities forestalling nervous breakdown." They're attempts to listen to, and join in, the prayer that the cosmos is always offering. For students of Christian Tantra, all spiritual methodology strives, first, to recognize that what the Triune God wills to happen--this is, underneath ubiquitous suffering and ego and violence, already happening.
We can stand outside of prayer--pretend that there's an "us" that exists independent of silence and waiting and emptiness--but that'll always feel angsty to us (on some level, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.) A certain amount of hustle is, of course, appropriate. If meditating on internalizing the Trinity brings serenity, do it. But if thought comes from anxiety instead of peace, we need to give it up. Again, this is rough--the mind loves to use concepts as a shield--and they're not. Trust, not the absence of conflict, not our own carefully-crafted defensiveness, is the only protection. Trust that the words will come at the right time, that the energy for what feels beyond us will spontaneously well up within us, that we'll find quiet quickly when our serenity's disturbed. There is a voice behind us, indeed, saying "this is the way, walk in it." And we need to listen.
So what ought we do? Ultimately, rest in sensation, listen without thinking, and breathe consciously. Sensation, deep listening and conscious breathing--these are the tools that we prodigal students have been given to return to ourselves. And they're as close as the "garment of skins" we received during our exit interview with Eden. Silence isn't "other," and neither is waiting or emptiness. They are all "us." For a while, they seem like atrophied muscles we're re-learning to use. After a while we won't know what's us and what's God. For the willing who learn to wait, confusion turns out to be the door to humility.
Trappist Monks follow a rule that mandates they rise and rest at the same times each day, pray communally at the same times each day, and live a life of silence, celibacy and fasting. About their routine, they say "placidity teases out toxicity." In other words, the serene grind of the monastic day brings each practitioner's attachments and egotism to the surface. This is a chastening, and nothing about it is easy. Practitioners of Christian Tantra--while not following an externally mandated rule, notice the limitations of a life lived in pursuit of desire. There's never enough time, never enough rest, never a full enough experience of God to afford lasting peace. We have a teacher who taught us, by taking seder bread and calling it his body, that celebrating poverty turns sadness to joy--we sit and listen and breathe until the Spirit changes the dread in which we wait to joyful hope.
Humility is not an objective: heaven has no gate, and God has no house. When we've gone through the gate and entered the house, we'll see it plainly. Unfiltered by the mental defenses we deploy against reality, the person we need to be is who we are. To a dreaming Jacob, God said "The land on which you lie I will give to you; I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." God, see, is utterly present. And he hears our prayers before we speak them. The question prayer poses is: are we, ourselves, listening? Can we, in the end, be present to ourselves?
Can we, who sit empty, hope for the transformation of our sad little subtexts? Remember: empty, as well, was the tomb. Empty, as well, were the nail marks and the hole in Rabbouni's side. We want, and maybe we expect the resurrection to be a pleasant experience. But the teacher says to our ego "if it's through other people's anger that I choose to appear with my wounds still open, what is that to you?" We are betraying our location to a joy that includes sorrow, to a gentleness that includes wrath, to a victory that includes failure. Our entire being is becoming the "yes" to the whole of reality that it has always been. When we are nowhere but here, joy-enfleshed will find us.
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