Witnesses to Silence and Stillness (II)
In a hospital room a number of years ago, a close friend lay dying. For years he had rebelled against God and against his Orthodox faith, expressing that rebellion by indifference to everything connected with the Church. In the last years of his life he had come home. With the simplicity and openness of a child he now turned his face to God and prayed. You could see in his eyes that God replied.
One day, shortly before he died, we spoke about the need for total surrender in the Christian life. Surrender of our being, our values, our hopes and ambitions, all into the loving hands of our merciful Lord. He was quiet for a while. Then he took a scrap of paper and slowly wrote on it the word “surrender.” We stayed together a while longer, saying nothing. There, too, was silence, a silence filled with mutual longing for “the one thing needful.” In that silence, our friendship, our love for one another, enabled both of us to know stillness, and in that stillness, to know the presence of God and the unfathomable depths of His love.
Repentance, coupled with inner warfare against the passions, is essential if we are to acquire the gifts of silence and stillness, and from there learn to listen to the voice of God. One weapon that proves especially effective in that warfare is the Prayer of Jesus: frequent, quiet repetition of the Name of the Son of God. That Name, which “upholds the universe,” constitutes the heart and soul of hesychia, the stillness from which flows “prayer of the heart.” The Name of Jesus has the power to lift us from spiritual death to a new life of “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” which the apostle Paul identifies with the Kingdom of God (Rom 14:17). It is a Name that possesses such power and grace that it can sustain a person even in the face of physical death. Let me close with another incident that illustrates what I mean.
A sister of the Catholic contemplative community was involved in a near-fatal automobile accident. She was transported to the hospital, and for days she hovered between life and death, comatose and maintained on life-support. Her sisters were by her side day and night, gradually losing hope as she failed to regain consciousness. As the medical team was deciding whether to continue life-sustaining treatment, she stirred and made a sound. The sisters gathered close to her and watched as her lips began to move. While she was still in a state of semi-consciousness, they recognized the words she was forming. Out of the depths of her darkness she was speaking words that, as she later recounted it, preserved her and virtually saved her life: “Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Fils de Dieu, aie pitié de moi!” “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!”
Out of a seemingly impenetrable silence and stillness, she found in the “Name above every name” a strength that sustained her in her struggle from near death to complete recovery. Her experience is a spiritual metaphor for the struggle each of us is called to assume: to speak out of inner stillness the sacred Name of Jesus, and to find there the only true healing of soul and body.
But as we speak out of that stillness, we also listen. We listen for ineffable words of love and compassion, of healing and life. These are words God addresses to each of us, without exception. And He does so in the silence of the heart. There He makes known the infinite depths of His love for us, His passionate concern to lead us from brokenness to wholeness and from death to life.
This is the experience of the saints, and it can be our experience as well. All that is required is that we make our own the confession of the Psalmist that foreshadows and informs the entire hesychast tradition: “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from Him comes my salvation.”
~Adapted from the Very Rev. John Breck, Life in Christ, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), March 02, 2005
