We should in ourselves learn and perceive who we are, how and what our life is, what God is doing in us, what he will have from us and to what ends he will or will not use us. –John Tauler (A disciple of Meister Eckhart)
As I noted in previous posts, when I was 18 years old I spent a year (14 months actually) in a monastery. One of the spiritual disciplines I developed was deep meditation, another was the spiritual discipline of prayer – public and, for me, more significantly, private prayer.
Within a few days of my being in the monastery, my spiritual director gifted me with two quotations from John Tauler. He told me that the disciplines of deep meditation and private prayer would help me create the inner quiet and space for the whispers of my inner guide and teacher to be heard.
I came to learn and, at times to understand, that private prayer enables me to engage in active co-operation with god; prayer helps me discern what is authentic and it also helps enable me to discern what I am called to live into and out of.
Private prayer is often defined as speech with God. I found that it did indeed begin that way. As I immersed myself in the spiritual discipline of private prayer I experienced that it does not stop there. I learned that private prayer is more akin to working with God. Private prayer appears to the observer to be a passive activity. As my spiritual director used to stay, prayer, in truth, is a rest most busy.
I learned that the first condition of the discipline and practice of private prayer is: Be Alone! The monastery offered me many ‘places’ to be alone and the schedule also provided me, each day, a number of opportunities to be alone. What I learned, however, that Being Alone is not easy.
Today, in our Culture, Being Alone is a daunting challenge. Each of us is shrouded by and immersed in constant irrelevant stimuli. The external and internal noise and distraction is an addiction. We are also suffering from the dis-eases of hurry sickness and activity.
Being Alone has become a spiritual discipline in itself. We, post-modern busy-bodies, have to learn to be alone. This discipline requires that I discern a need to be alone and, for me, developing my capacity for private prayer provides me this need.
My mother modeled this for me (although I did not become fully aware of her modeling until I had been in the monastery for six months). My mother raised six children (my father, a small town-country doctor, was gone 12-14 hours a day). Even though my mother carried a great deal, each day, during the middle of the day, she would go to my father’s ‘den’ and seclude herself for an hour. We knew not to interrupt her unless there was an emergency. My older brothers and sisters told me when I was young that mother went to the den to pray.
When I was in my late thirties I asked my mother about her ‘prayer time’ and she described it as a time of soul-healing. My mother took her hour of private prayer time every day until she was admitted to hospice (she was 90 years old). She also told me that her role-model for going off and being alone in prayer was Jesus and Francis of Assisi.
So, Gentle Reader, the first condition of private prayer is to discern that solitude (solitude is the positive side of being alone) is imperative.
In one short hour you can learn more from the inward voice than you could learn from man in a thousand years. –John Tauler
