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The Key of Wisdom

In speaking about the Silence of God and its importance for the Christian life, Catherine de Hueck Doherty recounts her own journey into this silence and then makes this beautiful observation:

“There is a moment when God gives us a key to the mystery of life.  We always had a key to his heart, and he always had a key to our hearts.  But this is a special key.  It is the key of wisdom, which allows us to live a good life.  It is given to those who have walked the silver sands and, out of love for him, decided to plunge into the endless infinity of his sea of silence.  They needed the key to guide themselves amid the noises of the world.  They needed a key to choose what is wise. One of the things Satan does is confuse.  And his favorite confusion is to substitute earthly wisdom for divine wisdom.  Many are caught on this bait.  But with the key of wisdom one can avoid such pitfalls.  And this key can unlock many doors, even doors men have invented that block their own true progress.” Molchanie: The Silence of God, New York: Crossroads (1982), 88-89.

The key of wisdom is vital for those who yearn for true prayer.   Psychological techniques for meditation are often substituted for the silence of God.  This is because such methods yield spiritual experiences – but such experiences lack the wisdom that is only given in God’s silence.  Indeed, no psychological achievement or state of consciousness can replace the silence of divine love, the silence of a heart to heart with the Living God.  This silence lives in our holy patrimony of prayer.  It is entered into through the obedience of faith.  Because this heritage is not passed on as it should be, because it is often rejected as anachronistic out of nothing but chronological snobbery and a lack of confidence in God, we can sometimes find ourselves cut off from the silence in which this key of wisdom is found.   Catholics need to work to recover the tradition of true Christian prayer.

True prayer – where, pierced to the heart, we gaze on the Son of Mary gazing on us in love, where the Father delights in us and the Holy Spirits burns within – such prayer is possible by faith alone.  This standard is strongly articulated in terms of a warning for our time by a Camaldolese Hermit whose words were edited by Father Louis-Albert Lassus, O.P.:

“The dominate spiritual climate manifests … an extreme individualism.  It is not so much God who is of interest to us, to speak with Him and to belong to Him, but rather we look for personal experience, we shut ourselves up in our own spiritual search …Let us admit that, at present, a spiritual self-centeredness reigns, which arises from the current opinion that the world is only an appearance and that, basically, the self and God coincide.  If the supreme criterion of life in Christ is no longer adherence in faith to the Triune God, but personal experience, the change to a religious syncretism will be quickly made.”   In Praise of Hiddeness: The Spirituality of the Camaldolese Hermits of Monte Corona, Bloomingdale, OH: Ercam Editions (2007), 53
True faith opposes syncretism and the lack of confidence in God’s love which feeds it.   True faith creates space for a kind of prayer which deals with reality and one’s own hostility towards God.  True faith frees from individualism and self-centeredness because the prayer it makes possible leads to a heart to heart with the Lord.  By true faith prayer begins when we hear Christ beg us to give Him our misery that He might give us His glory.
In true contemplation, the world is not an appearance but the place God manifests his glory.  We pray precisely because “the self” is not God but someone in whom God has placed his hope.  Prostrating ourselves before the One who is so beautifully other than we are – this is our freedom from individualism and self-centeredness.  Such a raising of our hearts and minds to Him is pregnant with gratitude even when some gifts He offers are especially hard to accept.  What does the key of wisdom unlock for the soul that hungers for a true conversation with God, a conversation that is open to sacred silence?  Even in the deepest sorrows, most tragic disappointments and overwhelming trials, souls like Catherine de Hueck Doherty witness the discovery of astonishing tokens of friendship from the One who constantly lavishes us with his immense love in ever new, ever unimaginable ways.
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My First Retreat

The first retreat I ever made was in a Camaldolese Hermitage in Big Sur, California.  This part of the Central Coast is bathed in a rugged wild beauty.  Though the hermitage is high above the ocean, I remember, if you listened carefully at night, you could hear the surf beating against the rocks far below.  It was like the heartbeat of God.  In fact, the whole experience was very soothing even if as a teenager I found the silence difficult to maintain.
A high school freshman invited to join a group of college students – all of whom were interested in prayer – I had no idea what graces were in store for me.  Having grown up in a household of seven brothers with lots of guests and relatives coming in and out, long hours of silence seemed so exotic I could not imagine what it would be like.  Something was drawing me.  A silent retreat with an invitation to punctuate our solitude by joining the hermits for Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, the enchanting memories of those couple days all those years ago stirs something deep within me even now.   
I spent most of my time reading and trying to listen to the Lord.  In a blanket of beautiful silence, I discovered that prayer was not easy and that the God to whom I pledged my life was much more mysterious and awesome than I could ever understand.  I wanted a spiritual experience, but the Lord gave me something much more important.
I did not fully realize it at the time, but He gently set before me an invitation to begin to pray.  The pathway of prayer which began to unfold on that retreat is not one trod by following feelings or our own thoughts or what we produce by our imagination – even if along the way we do feel, and think and imagine many beautiful things.  An impression was made in my heart that prayer was not about a state of consciousness or any other psychological achievement – even if along the way all kinds of transforming and purifying moments can overtake our psychological faculties.  
What I began to understand is that the pathway of prayer is followed by cleaving to the Word made flesh in faith.  It is fired, not by experiences that please us, but rather by the holy desire to please the Lord.  Such a desire inevitably ignites in the heart that realizes how much it is loved first by Him.  Pondering the love of God is dangerous – you never know when the truth about this love might pierce into deep places you did not even know were there.  
There are those who spend a lifetime availing themselves to just such moments.  Those souls yearn to do something beautiful for God – and feel the need to make all kinds of heroic resolutions, taking up the most difficult work without ever counting the cost.  Overwhelmed by the unsurpassed love that flows from an ongoing conversation with the Lord, they would not have it any other way.   
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