One of the best-known quotes from the Benedictine writer
Sister Joan Chittister originated when she was addressing her fellow nuns in a
seminar, and she asked them, “Why do we pray?”
They supplied all sorts of worthy and lofty answers. But Sr Joan said, “No – we pray because the
bell rings.” And indeed the Rule of St
Benedict provides[1]: On hearing the signal… monastics will
immediately set aside what they have in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with
gravity… But then comes a typical
Benedictine touch – the first Psalm, Benedict orders, is to be said quite deliberately and slowly, to give
time for latecomers.
Now what is the point here?
Sr Joan provides it, in a way, in one sentence: Prayer
is not just one more thing in the day….
She adds: We are meant to go to it
consciously, seriously, with concentration, so that every day we may become
more and more immersed in the presence of God. Well, to modern devotees of the secular
culture, this sounds simply incomprehensible...
more and more immersed in the
presence of God. It is what they
always feared about religion and religious people, that you retreat into some dreamland
based on hopes and myths, and lose your grip on truth and reality. But also, to many sincere church-going
people, it sounds over the top. Prayer,
they would say, is a Good Thing, no doubt, in its place… and so on. It suits some church folk very well (not all
of course) to have their prayer said for them in an orderly and objective
manner, by priest or vicar or pastor, in familiar language, at set times.
A contemplative person is one who, we might say, after weeks
or months of perhaps shaky attention to a discipline of silence and stillness, woke
up one morning and realised that familiar attitudes and actions were shifting,
altering. Making a space in which we are
simply present, having a mantra as something to return to repeatedly from the drip-feed
of distractions and preoccupations… all of this is effecting change. The changes are subtle, but at times
unmistakable. There are various ways in
which prayer-silence, attention, insight, we might say, are now quietly and
gently spilling over into all of life.
The heart and the mind inwardly know… oddly enough, often enough, by
unknowing. We may be aware of a new
steadiness. Fears, anxieties, seem no
longer to loom the same ways. We are
disinclined to talk about it much – or at any rate, if we do, we might later
wish we hadn’t.
It is what the 17th century French Carmelite
monk, Brother Lawrence, called The
Practice of the Presence of God.[2] It is absolutely not that we have
become starry-eyed and always on the edge of some rapture... “heavenly-minded
but no earthly use”, as some have put it. Just the opposite – we are now freer than we
were to attend to truth and to reality, and to bear pain.
In the monastery the bell rings at set times. In lay contemplative life it rings frequently,
usually faintly in the background, as a reminder and a call. We are those for whom the bell tolls… we hear, and we respond with love.
[1] Rule of St Benedict, ch 43
[2] My
copy is a translation by New Zealander, E M Blaiklock (Hodder & Stoughton
1981. Published also by Thomas Nelson,
1982).
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