A mind at peace, stilled, available for conscious thinking at will is of major value for those of us who confront chaos, confusion, noise, and numbness as our pace of life quickens with the ever more of things. — Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, OSB1
After years of my own silent prayer practice, I have come to the conclusion that inner peace is not guaranteed to those who dive into the contemplative way. As more than one spiritual teacher has pointed out, entering into the silence within can bring a sense of chaos as quickly as it might bring us peace.
So many of us carry deep conflicts in our hearts. We have interpersonal conflicts with family, colleagues, and other community members. Meanwhile, we so often are deeply concerned about the fault lines in our society, the social, political, economic and religious divisions that seem to cause (or sustain) so much pain and suffering in our world. We may desperately want to experience peace within, but again and again we seem stymied by how the practice of contemplative prayer seems to bring us anything but peace.
Perhaps this is not a failing. Perhaps it is actually a sacred calling.
Kenneth Leech wrote beautifully about how contemplatives explore the waste of their own being.2 His point is that we live in a conflicted and chaotic world; so how can we expect our prayer to be somehow immune to that chaos? On the contrary, when we meet the inner chaos head-on, we may not experience peace but we do experience something even greater: truth, truth that comes to us from the very heart of God. We discover that a contemplative prayer practice is not designed to make us “feel good” so much as it is meant to equip us to meet whatever challenges life may throw at us, responding to chaos with curiosity, to conflict with compassion.
In the first of her five-volume “Matters” series of contemplative teachings, Benedictine sister Mary Margaret Funk points out that “a mind at peace” is “of major value” for this practice of meeting confusion with clarity. On the surface, it may seem that she and I experience contemplation quite differently. I say it is highly unlikely if not impossible to experience inner peace even through contemplation, whereas she affirms not only that it is possible to embody such peace, but that it is extremely valuable to us when we do.
I don’t think there’s a contradiction here. When we bring our minds and hearts into a sustained practice of contemplative prayer, we are given a greater peace, a greater stillness, than we might otherwise have enjoyed. Often, it is hard to truly experience or appreciate this “relative” peace. But Sr. Meg reminds us that even in the midst of the chaos and the noise, the still peaceful awareness is present within us. It may not be a source of pleasure — but it is a valuable resource for meeting life’s challenges with a contemplative heart.
Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, OSB. Thoughts Matter: Discovering the Spiritual Journey, Introduction (Kindle Edition)
Kenneth Leech, The Social God (London: Sheldon Press, 1981), p. 53.