‘Silence in the city’ is a series of talks on silent prayer and contemplative living in today’s world held at London’s Westminster Cathedral Hall. With kind permission we publish below a shortened version of one of those talks, given by Archbishop Vincent Nichols on 22 October 2009.

Many years ago, as a young lad, I was on a holiday in southern Ireland. A local boy of my age took me and my brothers mackerel fishing. I had never done that before. We rowed out into the bay. In fact we went too far and had some difficult moments on our return journey. Then he prepared the lines and over they went into the sea. Almost immediately there were those characteristic pulls on the lines, as the array of hooks caught the mackerel. We hauled them in, six or seven at a time, and soon had enough for a healthy supper for everyone in the hotel.

At the end of each line, on each of the many hooks, was a spinner – a rotating, highly coloured piece of metal with sharp hooks attached. The mackerel could not resist the flash of light reflecting off the spinners and, once we hit a shoal, they were quickly caught.

This is a talk about our spiritual striving to know God, to feel the pull of God, to sense our desire for God and about how to turn all of that into action.

I find encouragement in the words of St Francis of Assisi. We are told that as he was dying he asked his brethren to take him from his hard bed and place him on the floor. There, lying on the earth, he looked round at them and said: ‘Brothers, let us begin to love God for so far we have made very little progress indeed’.

That is how I feel; that is what I know; that is why Francis’ words are an encouragement for me. So far I have made very little progress.

A second thing gives me encouragement. I found a book that gives words to my little experience and, more importantly, to my hope. It is The Way of Paradox, by Fr Cyprian Smith, a monk of Ampleforth, and it is a wonderful exploration of the thoughts and teaching of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century German mystic. I read it quite recently and it rang bells in my mind and heart.

Somehow, in reading this book, a clarity about the purpose of our spiritual lives emerged. It can be expressed in this way: what I seek is that Christ is born in me, day by day, so that he can do his work through me. I like the simplicity of that.

St Augustine said: ‘What does it avail me if this birth is always happening if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’

To this Eckhart added: ‘Therefore we shall speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us and be consummated in the virtuous soul.’ (p6)

Here, in its simple form, is our hope: that our union with the Lord is such that His birth takes place within us and that, somehow, we give Him our actions, our flesh, so that His saving presence may be continued in our world. Mary, after all, is the first of the disciples and what she does is what we may strive to do, too. Or rather, with her, we strive to say: ‘Let it be done to me according to your Word.’

This means that God is a reality to be known, to be experienced. We can come to know God and know that God wants to enter and fill us. God is a reality whom we can know. This is the first step of our quest.
First, we need to think a little about how we come to know God and what it is that opens us up to God.

Here I take my cues from Meister Eckhart, only because they resonate in me, only because in these assertions I find a clear statement of what I just tentatively experience or strive to reach.
On this pathway the aspect of God on which we have to focus is God’s transcendence.

We have to concentrate on the otherness of God. We have to do so in order to free ourselves of a most fundamental error: that of idolatry. God is not of any of the finite things of creation. The otherness of God lies in the fact that we cannot identify, contain, and possess God in any way. Of course God is so close to us that He is the reality in which we live and move and have our being. Yet, at the same time, in this way of paradox, we must assert and strive to experience God as totally other, totally different, totally beyond all that I stand for.

To worship God as transcendent is a kind of leap into the dark. It means abandoning so much that is familiar to us. But this is the way to understand the lure of God.

There is the lure of mystery – the unfathomable, intangible. To say ‘God’ is to say that at the heart of the world we live in, the world of people and things, there lies an unfathomable mystery, something in the end which is unsayable. And to say this is to assert that, in the end, there is the possibility that it all may have some ultimate meaning, that it may, after all, be worthwhile.

Then we can say that the lure of God is that of adventure. We cannot pin down or control a transcendent God. In our own faith it is so important to remember that even though the Sacraments, for example, offer us great security, ‘God is not limited by His Sacraments’ as Thomas Aquinas taught. So to seek God is to embark on an adventure which is far from secure and domestic.

Then there is the lure of God as truth. By this I mean the kind of truth which I slowly learn: the truth about God and the truth about myself. I suppose this is the truth that only slowly emerges in a life-long relationship or marriage. Only gradually are the various surface levels stripped away, until there is no pretence left.

Yet, as in any relationship, this slow search for what is truly true can lead to disaster. The process of self-revelation may be too much for some, who move off into another relationship, which may well end in the same way, either in another break-up or in an accommodation at a level of mutual comfort.

The same can happen in our search for God. Many will tell us that the very idea of God is no more than a fantasy or a projection. In accepting that there may well be some truth in this, we run the risk that in attempting to lose our projections of God we end up with nothing at all. Indeed, the challenge of atheism and rationalism in stripping away projection leaves us with precisely nothing. In contrast, this pathway of seeking the Transcendent God, which asks us to get beyond all the names and attributes of God, leads to the slow revelation of the hidden depth and the truth of the mystery of God Himself.

So we have to strive to go beyond the external pointers to God, in the material world, in a particular form of liturgy or music, or even a particular way of devotion. We try, in this pathway, to practice a detachment from all material approaches to the ultimate mystery of God.

We also need to step back from our mental and emotional religious imagery, seeing that the signs and symbols given to us, for example, by the Church are pointers and not ultimate substance. They are given to us so that we may know which way to look. But we always need to look beyond them, to search out the ultimate mystery, which will be found only in a profound stillness.

Indeed, this is Eckhart’s way to what he calls the Silent Desert, the inner truth of God, which is beyond all names and all forms.

This I only barely understand and sense. Perhaps we can only ever do so.

It is what is meant, I think, in the phrase ‘unknowing knowing’ and it is found not particularly at the heart of our prayer but at the heart of our whole being, especially of our inner life, which goes on, often without our being fully aware of it, in the depth of ourselves. Only occasionally do we sense a clearing away of so much clutter that we can glimpse, be filled with a perception of the simple Truth, Love and Beauty of God.

If this slow dawning sense of the silent truth of God, the Silent Desert, is the first dimension of our journey, the second is similar. It is pointed out to us in the phrase of the Psalm: ‘Deep calls unto deep.’
The second part of my quest runs alongside and is intermingled with the first and is, of course, the struggle to find the inner depth of myself. In Eckhart’s terminology, I must seek to establish contact with the ‘Ground of the Soul’ or the ‘Ground of my Being’.

In many ways this is a mirror image of the first. There exists a kind of kinship between this Silent Desert which is God and this personal Ground of the Soul. Indeed in it lies the truth of the doctrine that we are made in the image and likeness of God. And because there is a kinship, then there is attractiveness, an impulse of love.

We have to move beyond the functions, the work and the tasks in which we are engaged and which so often constitute our sense of self. We are not what we do. Yet so many aspects of our culture assert that this is not true. And so we have to struggle to step back from activity and the esteem, the rewards, the sense of failure that it might bring, and enter into a deeper sense of self.

Yet we also have to move beyond our inner world, our private world of emotions and thoughts if we are to penetrate our true depth. This does not mean ignoring these powerful inner realities. They are there whether we spend time observing them or not. Rather we have simply to try to move beyond them, find the space behind them, go deeper.

Perhaps the simile of a deep lake can help. On its surface there is activity and movement. That creates ripples and other effects. Occasionally there is a deeper movement of the water, perhaps caused by a rock crashing into the lake. Yet beneath the surface there is a still, silent depth which we only occasionally glimpse.

This is the Ground of the Soul, that still, silent centre of our selves.

Ideally, we act from this centre. When we do so we act with a certain freedom, expressing our deepest selves. We know that we have spoken out of the truth of ourselves and that, in itself, is its own gentle yet profound justification. In this way we retain stillness beyond all other things.

This Ground of Self, the Ground of the Soul, is where the image of God resides in us, in all sorts of ways. But importantly for now, this is the space, the place, where God and we meet and become one. This is the inner sanctuary, this moment, this place of meeting, where the mystery happens and something is born in me.

One of the paradoxes of the mystery of God is that of God’s going out and coming in. The mystery of the Trinity is this: that God is movement, yet also stillness; that God moves out of Himself without ever leaving; that God returns to Himself without ever leaving the place which He has created. There is a similar truth in us. We go out and express ourselves, yet never truly leave ourselves. We touch others yet always experience a certain existential aloneness. Indeed, in his book Fr Cyprian, in reflecting on the Trinity as that communion of persons, explains the true mystery of person (and therefore of each of us) in these words: ‘To be a person, then, means to have learned the secret and paradoxical art: to go out, yet remain within; to exert power, yet exercise restraint; to transcend, yet remain oneself; to be in movement, yet be in total response. This is the truest concept of personhood, being based on the reality of God and of the Human self.’ (p56)

What opens for us the mystery of God, and what opens for us the mystery of our inner selves, is one and the same thing. From all eternity a Word has been spoken. It is the Christ, the Eternal Word. And this is the key to the revelation of God and to the revelation of our true depth, our true capacity to receive the mystery of God.

It is important to understand the difference between chatter and speech. Chatter is there to fill a silence. Speech, the speaking of the Word, actually enhances silence by pointing to its depth through the truth of the word that is spoken.

Of course the Eternal Word, spoken everlastingly in the mystery of God, is the very nature of the Holy Trinity; also it is the source of life of every living thing in the universe and of the universe, that ordered cosmos, itself. And it is the realisation of the ultimate human capacity: to receive that Word and to allow it to echo.

Eckhart would say that the difference between the human person and the created world is this: the created world is the echo of the Eternal Word. But the human person, because of our spiritual nature, is uniquely capable of receiving the Word and then of letting that Word echo in our created words and actions. Only human beings are capable of true salvation for only we have this capacity: that inner space in which the birth of the Eternal Word can take place each day, in which there is a resting place capable of receiving that Word and a space in which the echo of that Word will give rise to grace-filled action.

So my programme unfolds – much more in theory than in practice. Each day I am to be with God in that Silent Desert which is God’s deepest, inner nature. Each day I am to set aside not only cares, but also inner emotions and desires, no matter how worthy or religious, and try to enter that Ground of my Soul. There, according to the will of God, the Eternal Word may be born again in me, and from that birth a new pattern of action in the Holy Spirit may stream.

What does that look like? Perhaps when we stand in that place, no matter how fleetingly, we might see and act as God sees and acts. Such true vision would be like standing within the heart of God and looking out – seeing the world, and each other, from within the heart of God. What a great gift of grace! What a sight of constant beauty that would be! What a joy, mingled with great sorrow, that would bring!
This is not something I really know. It is something to which I aspire.

Of course what is definitive in this endeavour is that this Word of God has been made fully flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the Word spoken, received and expressed in a particular historical moment. It is the utterly transcendent, enfleshed in the human and therefore in our history. This changes all history. Surely we can say that, until Jesus came, the historical world was a prison – beginning, ending, incomplete, unsatisfying. But with his breaking into our history, it is now the antechamber of heaven, our pathway to an ultimate fulfilment!

Therefore all history takes on a new meaning and every action is filled with eternal significance, taking us nearer or further away from our true destiny.

This is why we give so much time to the words and actions of Jesus. They are the gold-plated key to the doors of the mystery of God and to our inner selves. By taking those words and deeds, by letting them echo within us, we can be slowly freed from our selves and find those deeper places.

All of this urges us back to the foundations: that we can be in silence before the mystery of God; that we can still all restlessness and reach out towards the deepest soul of our being; that there the birth of the Word can again occur and its echo ripple out in our word and actions.

These are some of the lessons taught to us by St Thérèse of Lisieux.

I believe it is in the combination of her vulnerability and her strength that her secret lies. She is as vulnerable as a child. She understands our brokenness and knows that, in fact, it is the highway along which God can approach us. Brokenness lays open our deepest, empty self. It brings us nearer to the Ground of our Being for so much else has been stripped away. So the Word can find a welcome at His coming.
In her strength she is an inspiration. Her determination, her perseverance, focused on the little things: doing all things well, out of love, especially for those whom we find to be most difficult. This is the Word of God, born in us, echoing out into action.

She indeed is our tutor in this pathway of silence in the city.

She helps us to surrender our selfish desires, even the fascination we have with our own spiritual experiences. They are not what matters. Similarly, as Eckhart boldly says: we must not let our love of the things of God become an obstacle to the love of God itself. So we strive not for an experiential knowledge of God for its own sake, not for a love of the things of God for their sake, but so that we may be filled with His Word and be changed. That is the purpose of our spiritual lives and of the silence we seek each day. May God bless and guide our journeys. n