Prayer - Lesson 12

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-12

Asceticism

Lesson Transcript

This is our sixth discourse on the introductory programme that we have on prayer. And in this and the next of our sessions we want to focus on a historical context for our life of prayer. We've been profoundly exploring all the motivations that relate to our personality and our temperament. Now we need something more of a historical framework. And of course, there are many things we could have chosen, but the first choice is an aspect of prayer that we're very ignorant of in our Western culture. It's on the subject of the asceticism of the Early Fathers, especially in the desert, and their exercise of Hesychasm, which became so significant in the whole traditional prayer life of the Eastern Church.

This word Hesychia in Greek means stillness. It's the prayer of quiet. It's not something that’s audible, but at the same time it's what was interpreted by these Desert Fathers as the incessant prayer life that we can have as we ruminate silently a particular phrase or just simply a quiet receptivity of God's spirit and His presence dwelling within us. So one of the forms of interpreting [1 Thessalonians 5:17 00:01:57] that the Apostle Paul exhorts us to pray incessantly without ceasing is something that some of these ancient fathers did, especially in the more ascetic life of Assyria, or Syria as we would call it today. And in that, the Messalanians were people who literally took that to give a single quote of scripture. And the quote that they chose was the prayer of Blind Bartimaeus, 'Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.' And so some of them would recite it even 5,000, 10,000 times a day. Some even called themselves true athletes of God if they could even reach 15 or 20,000 times a day. In other words, it became so frequent that you breathe in and you say the prayer and then you breathe out and you say part of the prayer and so you go on so that your very counting of your breathing is consciously related to the quotation of this prayer.

Now, of course, everything gets corrupted when you institutionalise it or when you become self-conscious about doing it before others too much. And so are we doing this as showbiz to show our piety? Or are we in fact privately, as Jesus tells us, to go into our own closet, not to do it in a public space, but to do it in the chamber of our heart. So to go into our own chamber is to go within our own heart and that was what really the true Hesychastic tradition was doing. The location of the heart in the life of prayer is again something that's not Western. It is Semitic. It's certainly an understanding of Biblical anthropology in the Old Testament that the prayer of the heart is a kind of sacred space for the presence of God that we associate with the Semitic, rather than Greek, perspective. The Greeks were much more concerned about the mind and they saw a dichotomy between heart and mind which is of course the dichotomy that we've inherited too between our mind and our emotions. But we can think of the heart in a more unitary way, which is the Biblical way, that we're intelligent about what we are doing. We use our minds and so there's a component of the mind in our prayer life. But there's also the component of the heart, of our affections. And so this conjunction of our affections and our mind is really what was understood in the Old Testament by having a heart for God. And out of the heart are then the issues of life.

In a commentary of a passage of Bernard of Clairvaux's Commentary on the Song of Songs, he illustrates this dichotomy very neatly when he says there are two kinds of contemplation: one that's seated in the intellect and the other in the disposition of the heart. The one is accompanied by light; the other is accompanied by warmth. The one consists in perception; the other is the expression of devotion. And so to this day, we need to be aware that our minds need to be illumined and the heart to be set on fire. All these metaphors indicate the unitary character of what our inner life should be. So there's no dualism in the Semitic world. There's no dualism that exists in the Biblical world because the heart is symbolic of the whole person. It's certainly symbolic of the seat of one's personality, but it has no physiological importance as to where the location of the heart is. It's an awareness that one is praying with the whole person.

So one of the early Orthodox Eastern Fathers of the 9th century, the Archbishop Simeon of Alexandria, says prayer is deficient when the body does not toil by means of the heart and the heart by means of the mind, together with the intellect and the intelligence gathered together. (7.27) And he sees that for him much of prayer is the experience of weeping, of deep-felt groaning. He sees that prayer is really like a woman coming to birth with a child, that prayer is a miscarriage when your mind is focused on other business or your attention is not paid upon the reality that you're in the presence of God. And so not to pray with the heart is not to have this whole holistic view of being a unified person that’s in the presence of God. This is one of the essential qualities that we in the Western Church have lost compared with the Orthodox tradition.

Not only is the heart then, in Semitic and Biblical background, the innermost point of our being, it is in fact unlocatable in space. It’s the space relationally where we have contact with God. It's the heart which speaks to God. It's the heart that receives His presence. It’s the heart that relates to Him. And since prayer is conversational as an encounter with another person should be, then the prayer of the heart is basically nothing other than a genuine communication from the centre of our being with God Himself. So we could say that according to this Syrian tradition, the heart is the place where prayer takes place.

One of the 4th century Syriac writers, a man called Aphrahat, lived in what is now Iraq. And he comments on the passage of Matthew 6: 6 that to enter the chamber and pray to your Father in secret is, he says why, my beloved, did our Saviour teach us this saying to pray to your Father in secret, with the door shut? I will try to show you, as far as I'm capable. He said pray to your Father with the door closed. Our Lord's words tell us therefore to pray in secret in your heart, and shut the door. But what is the door he says we must shut, if not your mouth? For here is the temple in which Christ dwells and you, as the temple of the Lord, enter silently into your inner self in this house, to enter into that which is cleansed and where your mouth is closed.

It's some time since I thought about this, but when I was in Japan this spring with my daughter and I realised anthropologically that half of Japanese communication is silence, that it would be a wonderful revival for Japanese Christians to understand this whole posture of Hesychasm because it's so natural to them, that the communication of silence is a very appropriate thing for us to have. One of our alumni, who’s now a dear widow, is having a ministry in spiritual direction in Japan and it's the ministry of silence: how we communicate through silence, how we gain insight of our need, or our needs, before God and certainly in the exercise of prayer.

For what this silence does is to deepen our consciousness of the need of the receptivity to give God place in our hearts. And to have a place for God in our hearts, as the Psalmist himself is expressing in Psalm 51, is to have purity of heart. And purification comes through affliction. It comes through mortification. It comes through withdrawal from the world. And so this purification is the focus of this asceticism of the Desert Fathers. It's also the awareness that the heart is our altar where we worship and so these early writers speak of prayer as an offering of sacrifice. It's what, of course, the epistle to the Hebrews is reminding us, that we present our bodies as that offering of sacrifice.

There's a costliness about this offering. There's a sacrificial understanding that prayer to have a transfigurative effect must be sacrificial. And there's also the thought of the mirror of the heart, that the mirror of the heart is revealing the depths of God's presence within us. And the mirroring of that, of course, has a profound effect upon our behaviour. So it's often taught by these Eastern writers that purity of heart is not just a pre-requisite for prayer, it constitutes prayer. Abel's sacrifice, says Aphrahat, was accepted because of his purity of heart. It was Cain who had no purity of heart and his sacrifice was rejected. It's this purity of heart then that is sacrificial and that is what counts as prayer.