“I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want
but asking to be changed in ways that you can’t imagine.”
Kathleen Norris
One of the most common changes in developing a rhythm of contemplative prayer is the simple reality that most of us face: we feel so busy. Career, family, church, travel, hobbies, or any of the various other commitments keep us on the go — sometimes eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. This constant rush rush rush may be, in itself, an invitation to listen. We’re so busy doing that activity can crowd out time for living . One of the most ways in which the busy-ness manifests its self is in the way it deceives us, into believing that w don’t space to pray, meditate, journal, or engage in any of other practice that guides us back to center. Just as we eat too fast, not chewing our food properly and suffering from indigestion, so if we pray at all, we pray “on the run” and suffer from the “spiritual indigestion” of a sense of not being centered — in God, or in life.
How do we attend to this trend? How do we break ourselves out from this rut that the hectic pace of postmodern living keeps us trapped in? How do we find time for the silence of contemplative prayer? Naturally, I cannot come up with a magic formula that will help every person become fully-fledged contemplatives — but I do have an idea that has proved useful for me, and I hope you will find it useful as well. The idea is what I call guerilla silence.
By “guerilla silence” I mean the practice of stealing moments, odd moments during the day, and consecrating them. If life seems to be too busy to take even ten minutes for contemplative practice, we in all likelihood can still find a minute here (at a traffic light) or two minutes there (while on hold on the telephone) — not perfect situations for deep, disciplined meditation, but perfectly useful times to remind ourselves that silence — the silence where we encounter the Sacred — is not something outside of ourselves, but truly something that wells up from deep within ourselves.
Here’s an exercise to try to “massage” your busy day, so that moments of silence can creep in:
- Take a few quiet moments — perhaps early in the morning, or just before bed. Sit with pen and paper, and say a short prayer, consecrating these moments with the Divine.
- Think of three or four common times during the day when you are waiting — stuck in traffic, waiting for a bus, waiting for the microwave to stop, or whatever. Write down when those moments occur in your life.
- Write an affirmation. Use the following one, or come up with one in your own words. You may wish to make several copies of this affirmation, one for the dashboard of your car, one for your bathroom mirror, etc. “I allow the times during the day when I am waiting, or interrupted, or on hold, to be given to God — in silence, in openness, and in trust.”
- Every morning, read the affirmation to yourself, and remind yourself of the times during the day when you will likely have a few “stolen moments” to give to the silence. At the end of each day, read the affirmation again, and review the day, celebrating the times you allowed silence to enter into your busy schedule.
Of course, there’s still the issue of the poorly chewed food. Guerilla silence is a transitional strategy for developing a discipline of contemplative prayer. The sad truth is that when we’re “too busy” to pray, what we’re not willing to admit to ourselves that prayer has not yet become a high priority in our lives. Often, a life too busy to pray may have time tied up in watching silly television shows, or flipping aimlessly through catalogs, or some other activity which might be let go of — once we feel truly, deeply drawn to the silence. Guerilla silence is a way to “get to know” silence, to discover the treasures of Divine love that wait for each of us there.
The good news is this: if we take the time to practice guerilla silence during those stolen and odd moments of the day, it’s amazing how quickly our lives open up — and we find that the ten or twenty minutes for disciplined silence is really available to us, after all!
peace, dwight
