Brendan Hoban: We don’t always have to pray with words                  

Western People  13. 8.2024

Almost 60 years ago when, with 83 classmates, I entered Maynooth College to study for the priesthood, we were given a number of books to guide us (as it were) on our way. One was Philips Meditations, another an introduction to meditation. We gathered for Mass on the first morning of the rest of our lives and were told to spend a half-hour ‘in meditation’. It was the first we heard of it. And the more we heard of it, the more we realised that using meditation as a starting point in prayer was the equivalent of running before we could walk.

Recently, I discovered a remarkable book called A Hundred Roads to Here, Introductions to Meditation by a Dominican priest, Donagh O’Shea – and for the remarkable price of €12 – and discovered a sure guide through the maze of prayer-forms. The book, Donagh informs us in the introduction, was written in response to requests for brief inputs at the beginning of meditation sessions. They are not, he insists, points to ponder during meditation or suggestions for further reflection. They are simply ‘doors to meditation’.

Meditation (or what is sometimes called ‘contemplation’), he says, is a simple matter, though few find it so. Probably because we don’t keep it simple by bringing so much baggage with us from our own experience of prayer and praying. And this book is for dipping into as we find our way along the road to silence.

In an early key to meditation, Donagh writes: ‘Many years ago my cousin was so seriously ill – and for so long – that no one expected her to live. Her weight had dropped to an alarming 30 kilos, and she began to resemble a corpse. But every day her boyfriend came and sat by her hospital bed for hours. She lived, regaining hr health very slowly. She left the hospital and was convalescent for almost a year. Every day he came to visit and sit with her. A few years later they were married. Fifty years later she died, aged 75. He had a headstone erected over her grave, and a limestone seat beside it. Every day, until he died aged 93, he came and sat by her grave.’

That reflection helps to situate if not explain key features of meditation. As with ‘He came and sat’, there is little else to say. ‘A human relationship’, Donagh says, ‘that could not endure silence would be exceedingly shallow’. It is the same – but more so – with our relationship with God. We won’t lose contact with God if we stop praying with words.

Meditation is about sitting in silence in God’s company. It’s about saying nothing, doing nothing, adding nothing. It’s about waiting and listening for a rumour or even a whisper of God, that if it ever arrived would be regarded as ‘unexpected and undeserved’. The spiritual writer, Sr Ruth Burrows, who has written more than a dozen books on prayer, including mystical prayer, admitted that despite a lifetime of meditation she never felt the presence of God – yet she never regretted the time spent in contemplation.

Here is a rough summary of what’s involved in meditation. You sit in silence ‘as if you were to sit forever’. You are alert to the busy-ness of your mind and you try and leave your ego ‘outside the door with your shoes’. You settle yourself by becoming aware of your breathing. You remind yourself that you are in the presence ‘of a God who will not desert you’. Don’t use words – apart from a few simple one-word mantras to keep a focus on God: ‘Mercy’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Come Holy Spirit’. 

You are sitting with God and meditation is about the holy grail of patience. Don’t force anything. Let things be. For God there is no past or future – just the present moment. And inside the act of contemplation, you are conscious only of God.

Recently I discovered a poem by Edwina Gateley, Let Your God Love You, which explains meditation in a simple prayer-poem:  Be silent / Be still / Alone / Empty / Before your God / Say nothing / Ask nothing / Be silent / Be still / Let your God look upon you / That is all / God knows / God understands / God loves you with an enormous love / God only wants to look upon you / With love / Quiet / Be still / Let your God love you.

Part of our difficulty is that for many, prayer was caught in a fear-trap where, as in the words of that terrible Bette Midler song, God is watching us, and we prayed out of fear that if we didn’t God would hold it in for us ­– as if God was on the look-out for sufficient evidence to ensure that the gates of heaven would be firmly locked against us. The God that Edwina Gately depicts (above, in Let Your God Love You) is the complete opposite. God’s love is not something we have to earn or else! It’s a gift. It’s given to us to enjoy and all we have to do in prayer is to sit still, keep our egos from distracting us, and let our God love us.

So many kind and good and loving people have lived their lives with this burden of a false God-image weighing them down with guilt and with an infantile faith that is a caricature of a healthy life-enhancing friendship with a God who loves us beyond all expectation or imagining. 

God’s love is not a bounty we have to earn, but a gift that’s offered to us that’s life-enhancing, liberating and often a sheer joy. In Edwina Gateley’s words, all we have to do is to be silent, be still, say nothing, ask nothing. Just let your God love you.

Donagh O’Shea, A Hundred Roads To Here, Introductions to Meditation (Dominican Publications), €12.

https://dominicanpublications.com/products/a-hundred-roads-to-here?variant=46699061379416