The practice of contemplation over many winters into spring often leads to a subtle but fundamental shift in prayer: from using a prayer word as a means of concentration to simple sitting in awareness. Just being. It is much as St. John of the Cross describes it: “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God.” When inner silence sits in simple repose, its prayer is naked awareness. If we used a prayer word, it has not disappeared so much as opened up, something like the way a tulip opens up: what was tightly gathered in pointed focus begins to swell, expand, and open. And now this pollen-painted bowl of petals holds air and light-filled emptiness. This is awareness.
Saint Hesychios, and many like him, consider awareness to define contemplative practice. “Awareness is a spiritual method which, sedulously practiced over a long period, completely frees us with God’s help from compulsive thoughts.” It “activates” the soul, enabling us “to penetrate the divine and hidden mysteries,” and “leads us, insofar as this is possible, to a sure knowledge of the inapprehensible God.” Once it is established, and this comes only with time, “it guides us to a true and holy way of life.” Addressing these words to his brother monks, St. Hesychios cannot overlook the opportunity to remark: “it is now rather rare among monks.”
The practice of awareness has an invaluable potential. As it moves from bud to flower to fruit, awareness is not merely an awareness of particular things (though this is by no means reduced), but a ripening, an opening up from within awareness, an opening up that both grounds and embraces our awareness of this or that thing. Silence cultivates awareness, and when cultivated sufficiently, awareness opens up in the Depths in which we are immersed and have always been immersed. But this realization of what has always been the case does not usually happen all at once, any more than a tree moves from seed to sapling and branch, without seasons of interaction with the soil, water, and light of our daily lives.
Saint Hesychios identifies three moments in this process in which awareness becomes increasingly ungrasping, expansive, and luminous. “While we are being strengthened in Christ Jesus and beginning to move forward in steadfast watchfulness, He at first appears in our intellect like a torch which, when grasped by the hand of the intellect, guides us along the tracks of the mind; then He appears to us like a full moon, circling the heart’s firmament; then He appears to us like the sun, radiating justice, dearly revealing Himself in the full light of spiritual vision.”
The whole human software and circuitry of interiority that St. Hesychios calls “intellect” has little to do with hook smarts or formal education. The wherewithal of human interiority to negotiate the spiritual journey runs deep. Awareness itself runs deep and communes with the Sacred like the Hudson River meeting the Atlantic. The Hudson flows a hundred miles into the Atlantic, while the Atlantic reaches into the fresh waters of the Hudson up as far as Newburgh, New York.
This type of union between waters is something St. Teresa of Avila herself finds useful in explaining the union between the soul and God. She says union with God “is like rain falling from the sky into a river or pool. There is nothing but water. It’s impossible to divide the sky-water from the land-water. When a little stream enters the sea, who could separate its waters hack out again? Think of a bright light pouring into a room from two large windows: it enters from different places but becomes one light. Maybe this is what St. Paul meant when he said, ‘Whoever is joined to God becomes one spirit with him.””
We may try to clothe with words and images this receptive depth, in which giving and receiving circulate as one, but ultimately the silence of awareness sheds them all. As light and space serve as the only clothing of David’s luminous intelligence, so awareness is the radiance of the Light of Christ, the healing hem of His garment (Lk 8:43-48) that brings us to the deeper communion of a more radical surrender to Jesus’ first resurrection command to Mary Magdalene: “Do not touch me” Jn 20:17). For how do we grasp or capture in our sights what is already shining through our own eyes?
“Take nothing for the journey” (Mk 6:8). The implications of these words dawn on us gradually, first as torchlight, then as moonlight, and lastly as sunlight. Due to the filter of experience this journey presents itself as a movement from relative obscurity to increasing light, and so in reality it seems, Yet let us remember St. Teresa’s insistence that the radiance of the sun is already risen and shining within us: “This fountainhead that shines like the sun from the center of the soul never loses its radiance. It is ever-present within the soul and nothing can diminish its beauty.” Why then do we have such a convincing sense of living in obscurity? Because the “wild beasts,” she says, of our wild thoughts make the soul “close her eyes to everything but them.”
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
