Mystical prayer

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, not only becomes foreign to us, it actually frightens us. Such attitudes seep into our way of praying. We want it to be active, to be asking, to be fingering, to be vocal. We are not good at sitting in the presence of God.

Mystical prayer requires that stillness and silence, the ability to gaze 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 openness, listening, waiting and wanting God.

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.

Perhaps that is why we do not step out of the crowd of believers. We have forgotten the practice of mystical prayer, and the power it offers. Let us bring it back. Otherwise, we shall give up at the desert's edge, without even entering upon the long journey.