Those words were written by William Hazlitt in one of
English Romanticism’s oddest books, Liber
Amoris, the shame-less autobiographical account of his all-consuming
passion for a young, uncultured and slightly bewildered shopgirl. But they also
reflect the experience of many Christians, in long periods when their prayers
seem to be going nowhere, when there is no sense of an answer, an
encouragement, a hearing even. One goes on praying because one has been told
that that’s important and in any case it has become a habit; but there’s no
sense of a conversation any more. Once, there was: we felt that we were being
given great spiritual gifts almost every day; we felt privileged, loved,
cherished by the Father we were learning to love. And then, gradually more
often than suddenly, a curtain of increasing density seems to be drawn between
us and Him, and our prayers feel as if they were being absorbed and powdered
into dust.
Those who know, the spiritual masters and novice masters,
tell us that this is a recognised stage in one’s spiritual education, to which
perseverance is the only answer. That’s a slight comfort to know, but it
doesn’t help explain the phenomenon; and we feel that somehow an explanation
would help us weather it. Should we, greatly daring, try to find one?
Suppose it is we who are the cause ourselves. It might be
that, simply, our prayer has become a habit, that repetition has made it
routine, that we can recite our prayers without being fully there, and that consequently they arrive
in Heaven as a confused mumble hard for even God to hear and decode. On a
higher plane, the perceived silence might be the result, the backlash, of a
period of intense concentration, a backlash which is telling us to calm down,
to give it a rest, to recharge our batteries. And a third reason might be that
we have become a little deaf: that we are waiting for a mighty roaring wind, at
the least a small earthquake, and that for some reason – ears battered by daily
life, eyes glazed over by the Internet, senses numbed by private griefs – we
cannot perceive the faint rustle trying to reach us.
Suppose, on the other hand, that it is God who is the cause.
If so, the one thing we should not do
is take the silence as a rejection: as if God had other things on His mind, as
if he didn’t think we were worthy, as if he thought us too ugly or too
insignificant to reply to. God rejects nobody who seeks Him: not the sinner,
not the idiot, not the creep, not even the saint. So if it is not a rejection,
what else might it be? We can take it as axiomatic that whatever His reason, it
is meant for our good. Hard, to try to second-guess the Divinity; to plumb the
Mind that made us. What might He mean? One possibility is that He wants us to
try different kinds of prayer: less formulaic, more spontaneous, or conversely,
less ejaculatory and more soberly formal. Or it might be that He wants us to
spend more time in action, helping the poor buggers who show us Christ
on the bus: action, not words. Or, finally, it might simply be that He is
training us for the long haul. The true spiritual life, if we are to believe
the masters, is never a sprint and always a marathon.
Every great prayer figure – Theresa of Avila, St John of the
Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, Hildegard of Bingen – somewhere
mentions the silence, which can be as deep and desperate as “the Dark Night of
the Soul”. And all of them tell us that we must not give up, that beyond the
night, beyond the silence, there is a brightness beyond describing. As a
Carthusian put it, we are made to enter into the flow of love that passes from
the Father to the Son and into the glory of love that returns from the Son to
the Father. By the gentle force of the ruach,
the pneuma, the Spiritus Sanctus, we are invited, perhaps destined, into the very
life of the Trinity. The marble is not to be broken: if we are steadfast, it
will melt.
