Month: October 2016

A young monk went to his Abbot and asked him for some words of spiritual comfort. The Abbot said to him, ‘Go and sit in your cell. Your cell will teach you everything’. Similarly we read of Jesus: that he rose early and went up onto a high mountain, into the wilderness, into a lonely place to pray. He went apart and so must we when we meditate.

If possible it should always be the same place. A space used regularly for meditation gathers to itself its own aura of concentration. In India there is usually a corner of the crowded living room that has a curtain drawn across it, where each member of the family goes to sit undisturbed. It does not shut out the noise but it does become a sacred space, a place apart.

‘Day after day’ says the Bhagavad Gita, ‘let the Yogi practise the harmony of the soul, in a secret place, in deep solitude, with upright body, head and neck, which rest still and do not move: with inner gaze which is not restless …then his soul is like a lamp whose light is steady, for it burns in a shelter where no winds come.’

Prayer, as T.S.Eliot reminds us in The Four Quartets, ‘is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying’. In churches and synagogues across the land we seem to be bombarded with a barrage of information, admonitions, readings, prayers, sermons. The readings are often too fast, and few clergy or rabbis are trained in the use of the voice or the microphone.

How to make space for the heart and the spirit? How to make space, as Quakers do, for silence? To what extent do the rituals and liturgy of organised religion reflect an interior reality?

The great scholar, P.D.Mehta, in his book The Heart of Religion, wrote, ’In the hands of the great ceremonialists, these rituals produced profound psychological effects. Trained to meditate, the attention of the skilled celebrant was wholly concentrated on the psycho-spiritual significance of the ritual.’

And so it is not surprising that so many turn away from our churches and synagogues. It is not that we do not require words – it is that words require space.