In Living Prayer, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote, “The Greek Fathers set this silence, which they called hesychia, both as the starting-point and the final achievement of prayer.” What does this silence look like? Silence is a way, a state of soul, in which all the powers of the soul and the faculties of the body are completely at peace, quiet, and recollected, perfectly alert yet free from any turmoil or agitation. 2
In the Philokalia, St. Hesychios tells us about this opening to divine mystery, increased intimacy with Christ through contemplation, “It activates the soul to penetrate the divine and hidden mysteries and leads us, as far as this is possible, to a sure knowledge of the inapprehensible God.”3
Is contemplation rather rare among Orthodox Christians today? Of course, I don’t know. But based on my limited experience talking about the personal spiritual journey with good-willed Christians, I would concur with St. Hesychios’s assessment from ages gone by. On the matter of daily and serious quiet time for prayer, I think we all have a long way to go. And there is no better place to start than here. No better time to start than now.
Of course, this opens many questions. How do we deepen our inner stillness? How do stillness and prayer go together? And what is the role of prayer in healing?
The Language of Stillness
WHERE DO WE BEGIN to put the oxygen mask on ourselves first? We begin where the Scriptures tell us to begin. We begin with outer and inner stillness.
Stillness speaks, sometimes clearly and sometimes “through a glass darkly.” We know that Psalm 46:10 tells us, “Be still, and know that I am God.” The converse is implied: If I am not still, I run the danger of not knowing the real God. If I don’t know God, I don’t know myself because I am made in God’s image and likeness. I need to know God to know who I am, to have an authentic identity. Much of the contemporary search for identity is a deeper, though often unconscious, seeking for Christ within our hearts.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
In Isaiah 30:15 we find a clear rebuke from God: “For thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel [when the Lord God is mentioned twice, the emphasis means that what follows is important], ‘In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness [stillness] and confidence shall be your strength.” God’s request of the people is the same request He made of Moses: rest and quietness-that is, stillness. And the next four words in Isaiah are devastating to the Israelites, and to us: “But you would not.” Would not what? Would not be still. “And you said, ‘No, for we will flee on horses …. We will ride on swift horses.”‘
We, too, refuse to be still. We say, in effect, “No! I need to go on the internet and my smartphone. I need to work on my many good projects. I need to talk with friends and plan good things. I will schedule my day with beneficial projects and even church-related work. But, Lord, I’ll tell you one thing: I will not be still.” Okay, but we pay a high price for not being still.
We are back to silence being a choice, as led by God. When my daughter was a teenager, she had a sign outside her bedroom door. The sign said, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.” That may be the way teens think. Beth is now married and living on the other side of the equation. She has learned to be quiet and is trying to raise her three energetic children to value silence. We learn as we grow.
The high price for not being still is the possibility that we might not know God. If we don’t know God, we don’t know ourselves, because we are made in God’s image and likeness. That’s who we are. Hence, today many people are looking for their identity, for their place in the world, for who they are. The only place we can find who we are is in God.
The only person to respond perfectly to God’s desire for stillness was Jesus hanging on the Cross. He did what the Israelites of old refused to do. He did what we often refuse to do. And, in that act of supreme stillness, He saved the cosmos.
We need to seek silence so we can begin to be still. Elders tells us that unless we maintain contact with our inner depths, unless there is a still center in the middle of the storm, unless in the middle of all our activity we preserve a secret space in our heart where we stand alone with God, we will lose all sense of direction and be torn in pieces. All of us must, to the extent that we can, be hermits of the heart.
~Albert S. Rossi, Becoming a Healing Presence
2 Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1966), p. 110.
3 Hesychios the Priest, “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” in G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. and eds., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. I (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979), pp.162-163.
