Soul Food October 2008

An excerpt from Mother Teresa's Secret Fire by Father Joseph Langfod

The “Silence of the Heart”

Mother Teresa did not teach any particular method of prayer. Though she offered her Sisters much encouragement in prayer, she neither practiced nor recommended any specific technique. How did she pray herself? This we can surmise both from observing her at prayer and from the recurring themes she touched on in her talks on prayer:

We need to find God and He cannot be found in noise nor in restlessness. See how [in] nature, trees, flowers, grass, grow in perfect silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. ...112

Two themes stand out in her teaching, and were reflected in her example: praying with the heart and inner silence.

Those who came to pray with her were struck by Mother Teresa’s demeanor in prayer, especially by the profound stillness of her spirit, and the obvious depth of her prayer. This kind of inner depth and stillness were at the core of her teaching: “In the silence of the heart, God speaks.”113 This became her formula for prayer — a formula we will examine in its two components, prayer of the heart and inner silence, which together produce the depth and interior quietude wherein God can communicate and give himself to the soul.

Prayer of the Heart

Let us look first at praying with the heart. For Mother Teresa, prayer, and indeed all of life, was an affair of the heart. References to the heart of both God and man appear throughout her letters and talks, especially where she describes the nature of God and our relation to him.

Since God is love, the way to him is the way of love, the way of the “heart” — not in the sense of emotion, but of the depth of love arising from the center of our being. Conscious relating to God in prayer becomes essentially a return of love and, hence, an exercise of the heart.

Mother Teresa’s use of the term “heart,” beyond signifying the realm of the affective, pointed to its broader, biblical sense. Since the heart symbolizes what is deepest in the human person, true prayer, as an exercise of the inner man, takes place in the heart. Biblically, the heart represents our inner temple, the seat of human interiority and intimacy, the proper terrain of the spirit — and therefore, the place of our encounter with God.

Praying Deeply

If we are to follow Mother Teresa’s example of praying with the heart, and placing ourselves in silence before the God who thirsts to love us, we will first need to understand what Christian tradition means by prayer of the heart.

Praying “with the heart” is principally about depth in prayer. Praying at the level of the heart requires the effort to go beneath the surface of our awareness, where we spend the majority of our conscious lives, to find the God who abides within, at the center of our being.

In her classic work The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Ávila describes the soul’s pilgrimage to its depths, to the inner sanctuary where God resides, as a king in the interior of his castle — with beasts and brigands and every kind of distraction inhabiting the outer rings of the soul, on the surface. The journey of life, and the daily journey of prayer, involves leaving behind the distractions that roam on the surface, and then seeking our depths, where God and his love can alone be found and experienced.

Our first task is to learn to go beneath the surface in prayer, to “find the place of the heart,” as the Eastern Fathers of the Church admonished. In coming into prayer, we “come as we are,” which means we come with the center of our awareness at the “head” level. And this is how things should be; we need to be centered in the faculties of the head, focused on the sights and sounds around us, in order to interact with the world. But this self-conscious activity is of little use in prayer, where our goal becomes precisely the opposite.

Ever since fleeing the Garden, a part of us still retains a deep nostalgia for God, while another part of us still flees him. A kind of centrifugal force pulls us away from our center, even as we are engaged in seeking after God. As children of Adam and Eve, original sin has left us fleeing the empty place within — where God awaits with healing and salvation in hand, gently calling our name.

Here on the surface of the soul, where we can more easily be distracted, abides not only forgetfulness of God (which the early Fathers considered the root of all sin), but also the commotion of our selfishness, jealousy, anger, and all that moves us to resist him. The Lord has to call us back, like Adam, inviting us to undertake this pilgrimage of return to our depths. But even as we avoid him, he is there at our center, waiting to pour himself out in love.

We seek for something or someone else to slake our inner thirst, to fill the void God created as a sacred space for himself, a void large enough that only he can fill — but we find none. Or rather, we find too many things — things that neither satisfy nor fill us, but only titillate and distract. All the while, in the depths, our “soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Ps 42:2) — even as we pitch our tent on the surface, dying of thirst.

But God has already prepared a banquet for us, already set a wellspring within to sustain us through this life, and draw us into the next. “The water that I shall give . . . will become . . . a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (Jn 4:14). Or in the sublime words of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “There is a living water within me saying, ‘Come to the Father.’”

Mother Teresa's Secret Fire by Father Joseph Langford

Whatever you thought you knew -- about God, about life, about the world -- Mother Teresa's extraordinary message will take you deeper still! Gain unprecedented access to and understanding of Mother Teresa's secret source of passion, spirit, and impact. This 320-page hardcover book is just $19.95. Order here»