2025 Lent Series – Prayer as Saying Nothing
Preached Evensong, Sunday 13April 2025 – Fr. David McCormick
Have you ever craved a vacation from your own mind and thoughts? Or perhaps, a flip top head, so you can soak your aching brain in a bucket of soluble aspirin?
If you answered yes to either of those, you’re likely to understand Norwegian Bishop, Erik Varden, who is convinced “we are addicted to distraction”.
Which is important.
Because, if we want to grow in the Spirit, we need to cut through the noisy voices dominating our awareness.
That’s not easy – because we’re constantly encouraged to stimulate our minds: if you doubt that, simply try focussing your mind on one thing for just two minutes. You’ll be surprised how difficult that is, and how long it takes you to realise your mind has wandered off!
The Buddhists call it our monkey mind – hundreds of thoughts racing through our heads like monkeys crashing through treetops. Less familiar, but equally important, St John of the Ladder’s image of thoughts buzzing around in our heads, like flies buzzing around our faces on hot country walks.
For most of us, most of the time, our thoughts, like those images are always on the move, changing, distracting and agitating us. And most of the time we don’t even notice or think it important.
That’s why silence is so important in the Church’s theology of the spiritual life.
Benedictine, Joan Chittister notes that ‘agitation drives out awareness of God’, she writes, “When we’re driven by agitation, consumed by fretting, we become immersed in our own agenda, and it is always exaggerated… We lose touch with the centre of things.”
Culturally we’re waking up to the reality that we are what we feed our minds! Something our spiritual ancestors understood very well.
Silence is the primary way that we change how we relate to our thoughts. It’s not about making our minds blank, rather calming the mind, learning to let thoughts go without hooking our attention and dominating our mind. It helps our minds to rest without being driven by every passing whim or demand.
Speaking of such prayer former Archbishop Rowan Williams offers an unlikely analogy: “there is something,” he says, “about sunbathing I think that tells us more about what prayer is than any amount of religious jargon. When you’re lying on the beach or under the lamp, something is happening; Something that has nothing to do with how you feel or how hard you are trying. You’re not going to get a better tan by screwing up your eyes and concentrating. You give the time, and that’s it. All you have to do is turn up. You just have to be there, where the light can get to you.”
And teaching about prayer Jesus declares, “Go into your room, shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” Meaning our heart, our inmost being, where we can encounter the still and silent reality of God, who is greater than all we can imagine or desire.
The early monastic, John Cassian calls it, the ‘cave of the heart’, and it is there that we can begin to let go of all that distracts us from the still small voice of God, of which we first hear in the cave where Elijah encounters God not in the noise and agitation of earthquake, wind or fire, but in the ‘sound of sheer silence’.
It’s what Jesus means when he says the Kingdom of God is within you – pointing again to the very core of our being, to our heart, only reached by cutting through all the distractions of our racing mind.
He teaches us to draw near to God by being still, quietening our minds as our hearts are warmed by the dawning awareness of God.
So, St Paul encourages us to ‘be transformed by the renewal of our minds’, to change our minds – not in the sense of changing a decision or opinion, but changing how we think, by opening our minds to the reality of God, which we mostly fail to see. It’s about opening our mind and heart to God’s presence and action within us and consenting to him who created us to live well, in good relationship, both with God and those around us.
Prayer as ‘saying nothing’ is to still our mind, to rest in Christ.
To begin with silent prayer is a place we go to – but with time and patience it becomes the place we come from. Slowly, we re-orientate, turn around, turn back to God. Slowly but surely, silence transforms our patterns of thinking. Then equally, it transforms our patterns of behaving.
Released from distraction and information overload, we can begin to experience life anew, in all its abundance, which is the way of seeing and living that Christ promised to all who put their trust in him.