Announcing the Annual Prayer of the Heart Conference

THE 14th CENTURY ENGLISH SCHOOL OF SPIRITUALITY February 19-20, 2010

In our turbulent world, it's easy to let distraction and turmoil scatter us and leave us spiritually dull and cold. This retreat explores the resurgence of the Prayer of the Heart among the fourteenth century English spiritual writers and mystics: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing. There was nothing easy about living in the fourteenth century, but these witnesses lived a life rooted in Jesus Christ in such a way that their world felt His grace.

Led by Dr. Robert Hale of the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, Dr. Steve Varvis, historian at Fresno Pacific University, and yours truly.

University Presbyterian Church, Fresno, California

Follow this link for more information on The Prayer of the Heart Conference

A guide for deepening your practice

For those deepening their spiritual practice, here's a simple introduction to the classic text on Christian prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing.  Follow this link for the longer article with helpful excerpts from the text.

For the first 16 centuries of the church, all Christians engaged in this silent form of prayer. Both then and today, contemplative prayer is practiced in the orthodox context of communal Christian worship and intense Bible study. Since it acknowledges the inadequacy of language to describe God, contemplative prayer is often called the via negativa ("negative way"). In the 16th century, John of the Cross embraced this prayer, saying that it purifies us and prepares us to love. Teresa of Avila taught that this "prayer of quiet" revives a "desolate and very dry" soul, creating an intimacy with God that is like "rain coming down abundantly from heaven to soak and saturate" the gardens of our hearts. Christians of all backgrounds are returning to this simple Jesus-centric prayer to grow their souls and learn to love in an increasingly complex post-modern world.

In Anonymous's timeless teaching on Christian contemplative prayer, the Cloud, he shows us how to pray and reconnect with a very personal, very forgiving God of love.

Prayer of the Heart: The Three Steps

There's a pretty broad consensus in the classical Christian tradition around the three essential steps or stages of prayer. I repeatedly return to the classical tradition for the same reason many of us return to Mozart or Bach, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and U2. These artists are classic because they've proven themselves over time.

So too with the historic prayer tradition. That it's old doesn't make the ancient teaching valuable---there's plenty that's old, but worthless. It's valuable precisely because it's proven to be true over the ages. That is, those who've awakened to the spiritual life have found the teaching not only consistent with their experience, but competent to guide them on the path.

Okay, for those interested in digging around in the dust a bit, here's a list of just a few of the old ones who essentially agree: St. Dionysius, Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, Nikitos Stithatos, and St. Isaac the Syrian. They speak of the stages or steps of prayer with several different terms such as "the purgative," "the illuminative," "the mystical" (Dionysius), or the "carnal," "psychic," and "spiritual" (St. Isaac).

For our ears today, I'll identify the steps in the Prayer of the Heart, the practice of the Jesus Prayer, in this way:

1. Letting go

2. Becoming aware

3. Resting

There's little new in what I'll show you. It's old as dust. But it's a tested path for all who seek a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God---who want to pray in such a way that they live with a nearly continuous sense of the Holy no matter what they're doing or where they are.

More on each of these stages or steps to come . . .

Enter the theater of your mind and take a seat

You're realizing that entering into the silence before God which is prayer awakens a riot in your brain.  Thoughts and images come from all over to distract you.  You might fight them off or drown out the noise by focusing on a text of Scripture or using words for your prayers.  And that's not a bad path, but it won't bring you ultimately into the presence of God where you must be absolutely still and enter the silence which is the language of God (see the Bible's story about the Mount of Transfiguration). So, today, enter the stillness of prayer and as you do, watch the thoughts your ego parades through your mind.  Get some distance from this riot of sight and sound.  Treat your thoughts like movie images cast upon the screen in the theater of your brain.  Sit down with your popcorn in a seat half way up.  Before you know it, you'll be sucked in, plastered to the screen itself, fully identified with what's taking place there.  When you are, peel yourself off the screen, and troop back to your seat and sit down again and watch your thoughts.  You'll get pulled out of your seat again and again and again.

Be kind to yourself.  This isn't easy work.  Again and again, take up your seat a good distance from the images on the screen of your mind and watch them until you get a little distance between the you who watches the thoughts and the self who thinks them.

You're on your way to "taking every thought captive to make it obey Christ," the Beloved, who is the source and goal of all prayer (2 Corinthians 10.5).

As you begin to pray, there's one who stands in the way

As I promised, I turn now toward the actual practice of the Jesus Prayer. But first, a warning: be wary of the way your thoughts will want to turn the Jesus Prayer into a mere method. When prayer becomes identified too closely to a method, it's no longer prayer. I've written about this earlier.

That said, there are three simple steps that can guide you as you enter your interior landscape---the kingdom within---and meet with God.

But notice what happens when you read the words, "three simple steps."  See how your thoughts are roused to action.  Even now they're planning ways to climb the ladder of prayer, achieving success, so you can congratulate yourself on becoming good at prayer.  On the other hand, it's possible that they're berating you instead, saying things like:  "That's stupid; there aren't three steps," or, "You've tried this kind of thing before and it never works."

You've come face to face with the ego, the false self---the "mind-made me," or, in the language of the Bible, the "flesh."

Before moving further in the practice of prayer, you must recognize the terribly familiar opponent who now stands ready to bar the way . . . your self.