Prayer and Silence

Kallis­tos (Ware) Bishop of Diok­leia

"When you pray", it has been wisely said by an Or­tho­dox writer in Fin­land, "you your­self must be silent... You your­self must be silent; let the prayer speak". To achieve si­lence: this is of all things the hard­est and the most de­ci­sive in the art of prayer. Si­lence is not merely neg­a­tive - a pause be­tween words, a tem­po­rary ces­sa­tion of speech - but, prop­erly un­der­stood, it is highly pos­i­tive: an at­ti­tude of at­ten­tive alert­ness, of vig­i­lance, and above all of lis­ten­ing. The hesy­chast, the per­son who has at­tained hesy­chia, inner still­ness or si­lence, is par ex­cel­lence the one who lis­tens. He lis­tens to the voice of prayer in his own heart, and he un­der­stands that this voice is not his own but that of An­other speak­ing within him.

The re­la­tion­ship be­tween pray­ing and keep­ing silent will be­come clearer if we con­sider four short de­f­i­n­i­tions. The first is from The Con­cise Ox­ford Dic­tio­nary, which de­scribes prayer as "...solemn re­quest to God... for­mula used in pray­ing". Prayer is here en­vis­aged as some­thing ex­pressed in words, and more specif­i­cally as an act of ask­ing God to con­fer some ben­e­fit. We are still on level of ex­ter­nal rather than inner prayer. Few of us can rest sat­is­fied with such a de­f­i­n­i­tion.

Our sec­ond de­f­i­n­i­tion, from a Russ­ian starets of the last cen­tury, is far less ex­te­rior. In prayer, says Bishop Theo­phan the Recluse (1815 - 1894), "the prin­ci­pal thing is to stand be­fore God with the mind in the heart, and to go on stand­ing be­fore Him un­ceas­ingly day and night, until the end of life". Pray­ing, de­fined in this way, is no longer merely to ask for things, and can in­deed exist with­out the em­ploy­ment of any words at all. It is not so much a mo­men­tary ac­tiv­ity as a con­tin­u­ous state. To pray is to stand be­fore God, to enter into an im­me­di­ate and per­sonal re­la­tion­ship with him; it is to know at every level of our being, from the in­stinc­tive to the in­tel­lec­tual, from the sub-to the supra-con­scious, that we are in God and he is in us. To af­firm and deepen our per­sonal re­la­tion­ships with other human be­ings, it is not nec­es­sary to be con­tin­u­ally pre­sent­ing re­quests or using words; the bet­ter we come to know and love one an­other, the less need there is to ex­press our mu­tual at­ti­tude ver­bally. It is the same in our per­sonal re­la­tion­ship with God.

In these first two de­f­i­n­i­tions, stress is laid pri­mar­ily on what is done by the human per­son rather than by God. But in the re­la­tion­ship of prayer, it is the di­vine part­ner and not the human who takes the ini­tia­tive and whose ac­tion is fun­da­men­tal. This is brought out in our third de­f­i­n­i­tion, taken from St. Gre­gory of Sinai (+1346). In an elab­o­rate pas­sage, where he loads one ep­i­thet upon an­other in his ef­fort to de­scribe the true re­al­ity of inner prayer, he ends sud­denly with un­ex­pected sim­plic­ity: "Why speak at length? Prayer is God, who works all things in all men". Prayer is God - it is not some­thing that I ini­ti­ate but some­thing which I share; it is not pri­mar­ily some­thing that I do but some­thing that God is doing in me: in St. Paul’s phrase, "not I, but Christ in me" (Гал. 2:20). The path of inner prayer is ex­actly in­di­cated in St. John the Bap­tist’s words about the Mes­siah: "He must in­crease, but I must de­crease" (Ин. 3:30). It is in this sense that to pray is to be silent. "You your­self must be silent; let the prayer speak" - more pre­cisely, let God speak. True inner prayer is to stop talk­ing and to lis­ten to the word­less voice of God within our heart; it is to cease doing things on our own, and to enter into the ac­tion of God. At the be­gin­ning of the Byzan­tine Liturgy, when the pre­lim­i­nary prepa­ra­tions are com­pleted and all is now ready for the start of the Eu­charist it­self, the dea­con ap­proaches the priest and says: "It is time for the Lord to act". Such ex­actly is the at­ti­tude of the wor­ship­per not only at the Eu­charis­tic Liturgy but in all prayer, pub­lic or pri­vate.

Our fourth de­f­i­n­i­tion, taken once more from St. Gre­gory of Sinai, in­di­cates more def­i­nitely the char­ac­ter of this ac­tion of the Lord within us. "Prayer", he says, "is the man­i­fes­ta­tion of Bap­tism". The ac­tion of the Lord is not, of course, lim­ited solely to the bap­tized; God is pre­sent and at work within all hu­mankind, by virtue of the fact that each is cre­ated ac­cord­ing to his di­vine image. But this image has been ob­scured and clouded over, al­though not to­tally oblit­er­ated, by our fall into sin. It is re­stored to its pri­mal beauty and splen­dour through the sacra­ment of Bap­tism, whereby Christ and the Holy Spirit come to dwell in what the Fa­thers call "the in­ner­most and se­cret sanc­tu­ary of our heart". For the over­whelm­ing ma­jor­ity, how­ever, Bap­tism is some­thing re­ceived in in­fancy, of which they have no con­scious mem­ory. Al­though the bap­tismal Christ and the in­dwelling Par­a­clete never cease for one mo­ment to work within us, most of us - save on rare oc­ca­sions - re­main vir­tu­ally un­aware of this inner pres­ence and ac­tiv­ity. True prayer, then, sig­ni­fies the re­dis­cov­ery and "man­i­fes­ta­tion" of bap­tismal grace. To pray is to pass from the state where grace is pre­sent in our hearts se­cretly and un­con­sciously, to the point of full inner per­cep­tion and con­scious aware­ness when we ex­pe­ri­ence and feel the ac­tiv­ity of the Spirit di­rectly and im­me­di­ately. In the words of St. Kallis­tos and St. Ig­na­tios Xan­thopou­los (four­teenth cen­tury), "The aim of the Chris­t­ian life is to re­turn to the per­fect grace of the Holy an Life-giv­ing Spirit, which was con­ferred upon us at the be­gin­ning in di­vine Bap­tism".

"In my be­gin­ning is my end", The pur­pose of prayer can be sum­ma­rized in the phrase, "Be­come what you are". Be­come con­sciously and ac­tively what you al­ready are po­ten­tially and se­cretly, by virtue of your cre­ation ac­cord­ing to the di­vine image and your re-cre­ation at Bap­tism. Be­come what you are: more ex­actly, re­turn into your­self; dis­cover him who is yours al­ready, lis­ten to him who never ceases to speak within you; pos­sess him who even now pos­sesses you. Such is God’s mes­sage to any­one who wants to pray: "You would not seek me un­less you had al­ready found me".

But how are we to start? How, after en­ter­ing our room and clos­ing the door, are we to begin to pray, not just by re­peat­ing words from books, but by of­fer­ing inner prayer, the liv­ing prayer of cre­ative still­ness? How can we learn to stop talk­ing and to start lis­ten­ing? In­stead of sim­ply speak­ing to God, how can we make our own the prayer in which God speaks to us? How shall we pass from prayer ex­pressed in words to prayer of si­lence, from "stren­u­ous" to "self-act­ing" prayer (to use Bishop Theo­phan’s ter­mi­nol­ogy), from "my" prayer to the prayer of Christ in me?

One way to em­bark on this jour­ney in­wards is through the In­vo­ca­tion of the Name.