Mark tells it in a single sentence, right after the busiest day of Jesus’s public life: Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he rose up and went out, and departed into a deserted place, and prayed there.
The whole city had been at the door the evening before. The disciples wake to find him gone, and go hunting, and when they find him they say what everyone says: everyone is looking for you. He does not apologize. He has been somewhere with nothing in it, before the light, and he is ready.
This is the pattern of his life. Forty days alone before the ministry. A night on the mountain before choosing the twelve. A garden before the cross. Whatever Jesus was, he was a person who needed silence and went to great lengths to get it. If he did, it is not optional for us.
Meditation, contemplation, stillness
The words get tangled, so briefly: in the Christian tradition, meditation usually means thinking about something holy, turning a passage over as in lectio. Contemplation means resting beyond thought in the presence itself. And stillness, in Greek hesychia, is the state the whole thing is aimed at: the quiet in which the kingdom within can be noticed.
What most people today call meditation is closer to what the tradition calls contemplation: a wordless attentiveness rather than thought. That is what this chapter teaches. It is the oldest practice in Christianity and the one most often forgotten.
How to sit
Where. A place with nothing in it. A room with the door shut. A corner with a chair that faces a wall. Outside before the light, if you can. The point is fewer things to look at.
When. Before dawn, fasting. There are reasons: the body is quiet, the mind is not yet full, and no one needs you. It is the easiest hour to be still and the hardest to choose. Set the alarm. Do not negotiate with it.
How long. Begin with ten minutes. Move to twenty over the first weeks. Twenty minutes, twice a day, is the classic prescription and has been for fifteen hundred years. Ten once a day, kept without fail, is worth more than an hour done twice.
Posture. Sit upright, in a chair or on a cushion, spine straight but not rigid, hands resting. Eyes closed or lowered. The body should be alert and at ease: the posture of someone waiting for a friend they are sure is coming.
What to do
Choose a single word. The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century English text, says one syllable is best: God, or love. Many use Jesus, or abide, or within. The word is not to be thought about. It is a place to return to.
Sit. Breathe. Let the word rest quietly in your attention, not repeated aggressively but simply present, the way you might hold something small in an open hand.
Thoughts will come. Working with them is the practice. When you notice you have been carried off, planning or remembering or arguing with someone who is not there, return to the word. Gently. Without comment. Without frustration. Return is the whole technique, and every return is a small act of the thing Jesus called repentance: turning around.
That is all. Sit, hold the word, return. Ten minutes. Then get up and go into the day.
Centering prayer
The method above is what the Trappist monks Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and William Meninger, drawing on the Cloud, called centering prayer, and they summarized it in four guidelines that are worth having exactly:
- Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within.
- Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word.
- When engaged with your thoughts, return ever so gently to the sacred word.
- At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes.
The key phrase is consent. You are not achieving anything. You are agreeing to be present to something already happening. Remain in me, and I in you. The branch does not strain; it stays.
What to do with the thoughts
The instruction “return to the word” is simple, but thoughts deserve a few notes.
They are not the enemy. A mind that produces thoughts is a healthy mind. The practice is not to stop them but to stop following them, letting them pass like boats on a river while you sit on the bank.
Some will be sticky: a worry, a grievance, an idea so good you must write it down. Those are the ones to watch. The pull to get up and act is strongest exactly when the stillness is starting to work. Sit through it. The idea will still be there in ten minutes if it was any good.
And some will be about the practice itself: this isn’t working, I’m doing it wrong, nothing is happening. Return to the word. Those thoughts are the small self defending its territory. It does not like being ignored. Ignore it kindly.
Fasting and stillness together
The two practices strengthen each other more than any other pair. A fasting body is a quiet body: no digestion, no sugar, a mind that is clear rather than padded. And a still mind is what makes fasting bearable: the technique for hunger (turn toward it, let it be, watch it pass) is exactly the technique for thoughts. Someone who has learned to sit through a wave of hunger without eating has learned to sit through a wave of thought without following it, and vice versa.
This is why the morning sit should be before breakfast. You will find, within a week, that it is the best twenty minutes of the day.
What happens
Nothing, at first. Then, usually, restlessness, which is the mind objecting to being unplugged. Then, if you keep the hour, a settling. Sits that feel like rest. A quiet that begins to follow you out of the chair into the day: a beat of space between a provocation and your response, a moment of noticing the light on a wall, a tenderness toward the person in front of you that was not there before.
Then, for many, a stretch of dryness. Nothing again, but a different nothing: deeper, drier. The tradition calls this the desert, and it is the practice going below where feeling can follow. Keep the hour.
And then, one morning, sitting in the dark before the light comes, you will know something you had only believed: that you are not alone in the room, that you never were, that the kingdom he spoke of was within you the entire time. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Everything on this site is a way of walking toward that morning.