Entering the Desert Place

In his book Discovering the Hidden Reality: A Journey Into Christian Mystical Prayer, George Maloney writes: Our culture feeds us with the idea that we can do anything that we set our minds to do. In the time of St. Augustine, this concept was called "Pelagianism."

Maloney goes on to explain how such a concept keeps us always busy about "doing" things, so that silence, especially the silence needed for mystical prayer, is foreign to us. It goes so far he says, as to making even prayer an object where we are either getting something or doing something for God. And that is so not mystical prayer!

Mystical prayer is a gazing at God so as to learn his goodness. It doesn't so much ask God for gifts or plan great deeds for God. It consists more of an attention to God, an awareness of his abiding presence, of a mind set to think more in the light of his goodness than on accomplishments.

Maloney writes further: There is a subtle type of pharisaism that uses God as a static object who will flood us with consolations and a feeling of a good conscience. What we fail to see is that we have gradually lost the willingness to take the wild risks of Moses and the Israelites as they followed God for forty years in the dry and threatening desert.

Here I am reminded of the scripture verse that says, For God sends rain, and causes his sun to shine upon the just and the unjust. Such is the an attitude of one in union with God, were one doesn't use what is happening to us in the here and now to judge how much we love God or he us. It is an important part of our journey, to realize that life goes forward in a very organic way, with both rain and sunshine, and that it is our awareness of God, not his gifts, that is paramount. 

The very difficulty of such type of prayer explains why mystical prayer had fallen out of favor. But recent  interest must be accompanied by a realistic approach to this form of union with God. Otherwise, we shall give up at the desert's edge, without even entering upon the long journey.