Prayer - Lesson 14

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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The Gift of Tears

Lesson Transcript

Stillness of the soul is peace of the heart. It's a deep interior serenity that integrates our whole person before God. That’s really the whole significance of Hesychia. As Abba Pambo said on one occasion if the novitiate is not edified by my silence then he will not be edified by my words. And if you were to practise that, what does that mean? You quietly look into the eyes of the person that you're relating with and you're communicating with the eyes love and affection and empathy and kindness and all those qualities. It's an eye contact. Now you can speak. So silence is the vestibule to communication. Try it. Or again, to sit in your cell with fear and in the knowledge of God is far more important than any advice that is given to you about your vainglory.

So this famous senator that learned so richly the contrast between the way of the court and the way of the desert says on one occasion, 'Flee, keep silent, be still; for these are the roots of sinlessness.' He didn’t mean by that this perfection so much as the maturity of growing as a Christian. And so this focus that developed into the prayer of Bartimaeus that became articulated after the 4th century is, of course, one of the ways that you say this in your heart, but it's also to prepare yourself for incessant prayer is, in a sense, incessant silence. And it's referring to the reality that prayer is not an option, nor is prayer an exercise, nor is prayer an isolated expression of our lives. It's the life of a pray-er. It's the breath of the Christian. It's the vitality of the Christian. If my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, then prayer is the expression of that indwelling.

One of the other experiences of the Early Fathers that we have so wonderfully seen in the life of the house churches in China where there are converts is the gift of tears. It's a gift that we become repentant, that we have a change of heart. It's a gift that no longer do we need to suppress our emotions. So this tradition of the gift of tears is a very strong one in the Eastern Church. As Gregory of Nyssa at the end of the 4th century was to express it: it's impossible for one to live without tears who considers things exactly as they are. It's like saying it's impossible to have an emotional life. But it's an emotional life before God. So tears is the expression of a repentant life.

One of the things that I myself have often seen with some of the young people that come to see me, and older ones too, is that they're totally unemotional when they're expressing great tragedy in their lives, or they have a smile on their face when they're talking about deep pain. Ah, I said, you need to be freed from that smile. It's a prison. It's fake. You should be crying. You're not communicating in the way that you should be communicating. And so the gift of tears is an honesty about your emotions. It's entering deeply into your heart. It means perhaps that hardness of heart that the Bible is speaking about is symptomatic of wilfulness and pride. And so pray for the gift of tears that by means of sorrow you will soften your native rudeness or your native denial of who you are. And so Simeon, that we've already mentioned, in the 10th century could say that, 'Without tears our dried heart will never be softened, nor will our soul acquire spiritual humility.' We can't be forced to become humble, but we can cry to become humble.

So Penthos, is the gift of tears and it gives sweetness to life. It may be bitter tears that we start with because tears change from being bitter to being sweet. In bitterness, they're loveless; with sweetness, they come from a loving heart, aspiring after God as emotion of the heart before God. Then bitterness has been washed away and sweetness remains. Isn't that a lovely thought?

Now of course, the danger that I've sometimes spoken to among house leaders, especially in central China, and you know more about this than I do, but there are some sects within the movement that now insist if you really want to be converted, you have to pray all week and that if you don’t keep on praying all week then are you really soundly saved. Well, like everything else, we can abuse it. And so we have to be very careful that when we are being persecuted that we don’t allow our own psyche to be the source of persecution.

I remember when I was in Spain just after the civil war. I was living with three ladies, middle-aged. They were sisters. But it was the middle one who was so rudely outspoken and so she deserved her imprisonment because it was not because she was a witness to Christ, she was just being very rude to the police that were arresting her and the quietness and demeanour of the others saved them from any persecution. So it's even our own temperament that is a cause for our own arrest. And Church leaders have to realise that persecution is not a sign of spirituality. It may be a weakness of emotion. So we have all these tricks because the heart is deceitful about all things and desperately wicked is what the scripture tells us.

And so we can also have extremity of asceticism. Of course, our society is appalled by a theology of asceticism, but there were also ascetics that should have been critiqued as well because they were overdoing it. In other words, whatever we do self-consciously is temptable. That’s where it starts. So what then is true asceticism? True asceticism is a process of making room in our lives for the presence of God. It's getting rid of all the clutter in the living room and making space for our visitor. This emptying, this purging, this cleansing of our minds and hearts and bodies is vital for the presence of God in our temple, which is our heart.

And secondly, asceticism is an initiative that we can take to seek God with seriousness and intent, above all preparing us for an attentive obedience to His will. It's so hard for us to know how we do the will of God, but the true ascetic doesn’t make a distinction between the will of God and the love of God. That’s the beauty of it. Oh, what is the will of God for my life? Well, we isolate that from how do I experience the love of God. And so this attentiveness to obedience. And what is obedience? Oboedire means to listen to. Obedience is listening to the whisper of His spirit. That’s what it is. And His whisper of love will tell us what to do.

All this industry of spiritual direction and mentoring is overdone, totally overdone, in our culture. It's like everything: we abuse by surfeiting ourselves with one mindset.