This is an extract from A Season of Silence, available here or wherever you get your books.
Let me come clean at the start: I’m not that good at silent prayer. My first career was in investment banking, which is not a contemplative environment. Funnily enough, though, it was in the city that I became a Christian. I found that two of my closest colleagues went to a lunchtime service every Tuesday and for the first time I thought ‘What if it’s true?’ It started to annoy me. I wanted to figure it out. I read, argued and thought. I even prayed a bit, along the lines of ‘I don’t believe in you but if you do exist, would you please reveal yourself to me?’
This was the start of a long story I needn’t bore you with, which led to baptism, swapping banking for aid work, and, after several other steps and missteps, ending up a Vicar in south London. But from the start, faith was a subject of thought, word, action, research, inquiry. These are good things but as a young Christian I was never drawn to the ‘yet more’ of contemplation. Even at theological college the clever kids went in for silence, but I always preferred to read my Bible or get on my knees and talk to God.
Once ordained, however, I started taking an annual retreat in a Trappist monastery. There was a lot of silence. I didn’t get it, but I joined in. I also put myself under a wise spiritual director, who advised daily silent prayer. Again I complied. My mind wandered. I thought about the Scriptures … what I had to do that day … and … wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Then I started working as Chaplain to the Bishop of Southwark, a notoriously good listener. He turned me on to the power of listening: not just an inter-personal skill but a spiritual discipline: ‘it is from listening that true harmony emerges.’
Now it started making sense. Silence that was just the absence of sound was a nothing. Silence that was alert listening seemed like a something – a something worth digging into. It was hard, though. Nature abhors a vacuum. I fill silence with mental words, ideas, images, hopes, regrets, reflections, thoughts … how interesting it is that the mind wanders … how strangely hard it is to let go of a train of thought such as this one I am now thinking … how interesting it would be to write a book about these problems …
You see my issue. If you’re doing silent prayer, actively concentrating on it all the time, it’s not silent prayer. For silent prayer is not just the absence of vibrations in the air. It is a deeper, inner silence, in which the mind’s monologue is allowed to cease too. This is hard. Thus, I went on thinking and reading about it, which is so much easier. Something went in, though. Sometimes despite myself I got past the thinking and reading. My daily time of silence had more to it and enriched other parts of life. As is often the way with clergy when we think we’re onto something I spoke of it more, commended it to others, lead the occasional retreat or Lent course. At length it became this book.
I hope you are clear now that you are not reading the reflections of an adept. I am no sage in a mountain cave, no wise Abbot steeped in decades of cloistered calm. Books have been written by such spiritual athletes, who live at altitudes I only glimpse from where my lungs and limbs give out. There are some in the bibliography and I encourage you to read them.
The deficiencies of this book, however, may also be its strength. Entering into true silent prayer is not easy. But really, if I can do it, you can too. However baffling and uncomfortable you may find it, I get you. Yet I’m here to tell you, this can be unfathomably life-giving if you will commit and persevere.
There’s nothing fancy here. We are dealing with transcendent mysteries, but our way into them is down to earth. We are going to learn to sit, breathe and listen, here and now. And we are going to sit, breathe and listen, here and now every day. There are 40 reflections. Each day you read a reflection and then sit, breathe and listen, here, now. The first four days you do that for two minutes. Days 5 to 8 you do three minutes. 9 to 12 it’s four minutes. And so on. Until for the last week or so you are up to ten minutes a day. At the end of 40 days, over to you. Keep doing it. Ten minutes a day. Sit, breathe, listen: be here now. I hope by then you will have learnt a few things about how it works, why it’s worth doing, and what it all means.
Forty days should be long enough that this starts to become a habit, and that will help embed it in your day. Forty days is also a handy number if you want to do this in Lent. But you can do it any time. Combining the penitential season of Advent with the first few weeks of New Year would be great: there will be cultural momentum behind a wholesome new resolution. You can follow this book alone or with others. You could run it as a course for your church. There are resources to help with all of this on the website that goes with the book, http://www.seasonofsilence.org.
If this sounds mundane, then good. Explore these mysteries with me and you explore with a frequently puzzled, back-sliding, fairly practical, material person living an ordinary life with no special gifts or powers. This is not a transcendent work. There is no arcane wisdom. I just want to help you acquire a practice I know will be life-giving, in the fullest sense of ‘life’: a deepening of your relationship with God as he reveals himself in Christ through the Holy Spirit. This has always been the aim, but I never found how to say what this book is, with the correct mix of fun, serious intent and practicality, until I sent it to David Shervington, Publishing Director at Canterbury Press, and he said, ‘It’s a kind of “Couch to 5k” for silence.’ That’s exactly what it is. Let’s get started.
Season of Silence 