By Most Rev. Dr. Yvon Ambroise, Bishop of Tuticorin –
Most often we tend to stick to our ideas, our own goodness, our thinking, etc. This attachment serves as a great obstacle to let ourselves, be led by His Spirit. We must gradually realize this truth and start giving up our sureties, based on our own imaginations and practices.
To start to abandon them would not be an easy going task nor a cake walk. When God’s Spirit works with us and we have a willing heart to cooperate with such inner movements it facilitates the Spirit to take over our lives and maximize our sense of detachment and the spirit of abandoning ourselves to God.
There should be no misunderstanding to imagine that God wants us to be indifferent with a certain asceticism, forced on us to practice this emptying of self in everything. God does like anything to be coming out of a force. We have to maintain a spirit of liberty that enables us to detach ourselves and keep our hearts free. We must exercise this freedom when we try to abstain from material possession and the desire to accumulate material goods. The same trend should be extended to our own ideas, our own conceptual thinking and ideologies and our ways of doing our daily routine.
Let me quote the advice of a Franciscan of 11th century (Juan De Bonila, The Interior Peace, Edition of Beatitudes, 1990 p.86.) “May your will be always ready to every eventuality. May your heart not be enslaved to anything. When you want to fulfill anything you desire, it should be in such way as to accept fully the pain it may cause due to its failure. But particularly at that time one must preserve the spirit of peace and tranquility as if nothing happened. True liberty consists of not attaching ourselves to anything. If we thus detach ourselves, God works miracles in us”. We need to search always the ways and means of fulfilling the will of God rather than our best intentions and plans.
Practice Silence and Peace at Heart
The Spirit of God is the Spirit of peace. He speaks and acts only to those who have peace and are humble at heart and in a situation, freed from a troubled and agitated heart. If our hearts remained boisterous and disturbed the gentle voice of the Holy Spirit would encounter a very big hindrance to make Himself be heard in us.
Let us listen to what St. John of the Cross tells us. We need to take care to maintain our heart in peace and that no event of our life troubles us. Even when all our plans are defeated, all happenings go against us, it would be useless to trouble ourselves on these events since these troubles can only lead us to more troubles than benefit us in our lives.
The biggest problem is to make ourselves, incapable of following the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. Interior peace is linked to the moments of silence in our life and especially during the silent moments of prayer in the presence of God. This silence is not and should not be void and empty but filled with peace of heart, arising out of the interiorization of the presence of God and attention to others. It is an expectation filled with confidence and hope in God.
Big interior noise (not in a physical sense) in the sense of disturbance, caused by our thinking, imagination of the words that we have heard or said about which we are very much concerned. It makes us more preoccupied, excites our fears, our dissatisfactions, etc. All these surely do not give any opportunity for the Spirit to activate us and make us listen to His inspirations. As said above we insist that silence is not a void moment but an active attitude in general of deep interiority that contributes to preserve our “Interior cellule” in our heart (as St. Catherine of Sienna says) where we are in the presence of God conversing with Him.
A Silent Prayer
Silence is contrary to the distractions of the heart always to exterior things, to our curiosity and to our gossips. It is a capacity to come back to our interiority of heart that is activated by the presence of God who lives in us. Hence we must preserve in us to retain every day certain moments, very faithfully fixed for our prayer, meant to be alone with God. As Jesus recommend in Mt 6:6 “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you”.
Let me conclude with words of Henri J.M. Nouwen (Life of the Beloved, Spiritual living in a Secular world, St. Paul’s Press, Bandra, Mumbai 2016, 5th Print, pp.57f) “It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: ‘You are my Beloved Child, on you my favour rests’. Still, if we dare to embrace our solitude and befriend our silence, we will come to know that voice. I do not want to suggest to you that one day you will hear that voice with your bodily ears. I am not speaking about a hallucinatory voice, but about a voice that can be heard by the ear of faith, the ear of the inner heart.”
Often you will feel that nothing happens in your prayer. You say: “I am just sitting there and getting distracted”. But if you develop the discipline of spending one half hour a day listening to the voice of love, you will gradually discover that something is happening of which you were not even conscious. It might be only in retrospect that you discover the voice that blesses you. You thought that what happened during your time of listening was nothing more than a lot of confusion, but then you discover yourself looking forward to your quiet time and missing it when you can’t have it. The movement of God’s Spirit is very gentle, very soft and hidden. It does not seek attention. But that movement is also very persistent, strong and deep. It changes our hearts radically. The faithful discipline of prayer reveals to you that you are the blessed one and gives you the power to bless others”.