Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Sarah Coakley - Deepening Life of a Silent Prayer Group

I have been invited to give a brief account of an experimental ecumenical prayer group that I have been running at Harvard Divinity School now for more than eight years. Arguably the life of a prayer group, like the life of a marriage, does not benefit from too much yanking out at the roots for the purpose of a "progress inspection"; and hence I have approached this task with a certain diffidence. Particularly delicate to chart is the life of a silent prayer group (as this is), since much of what is going on may remain somewhat mysterious even to those who take part in it. Nonetheless I think I can delineate some ways in which this group, despite its inevitable annual shifts of membership, has changed—and perhaps deepened—spiritually and theologically since its inception in early 1994, sometimes in unexpected and surprising ways.

The group started with a request from a small number of students preparing for the ministry—the prime mover was a Roman Catholic-turned-Congregationalist—who wanted help with a regular discipline of prayer. Spiritual direction as such is still not currently on offer at the Divinity School, although there are plenty of places in Boston where it can be found, and we now have a leaflet for students telling them of some of the best resources; but these original students were in search of an organized form of prayer-practice that would also create a sense of spiritual community across the many ideological and religious divides that characterize this unusual School. I was reluctant then, and remain so, to assume the role of anything like a director; but it was clear that the symbolic presence of a faculty member was important to the students, and I was more than happy to organize, and faithfully attend, a weekly hour of shared silence into which various forms of prayer could easily be slotted. The idea was that people could bring a Bible for scriptural meditation if they wished, or a breviary for office, or simply pray silently in whatever way they were accustomed. As it has turned out, virtually all those who attend practice some form of (relatively) wordless prayer; some have been influenced by the "centering prayer" movement, or are familiar with the techniques of transcendental meditation.

The practical advantages of silence were immediately obvious: it bridged the multiple divides of our doctrinal and political differences, as well as creating a brief haven of rest from our (often frenzied) intellectual activities. We were perhaps less clear at the beginning, however, about the theological significance this shared silence would turn out to have. It is this that I shall try to probe below. But first I shall enumerate some practical details.

We began in the chapel of Divinity Hall, where Emerson had preached the Divinity School address and enjoined on his listeners the task of "acquainting [themselves] at first hand with deity." It seemed both a suitable, and a poignant, place to be, since the chapel had at that time ceased to be used for regular organized prayer or worship, and it was a way of restoring it to active use—punishing as its nineteenth-century pews were to those keeping a discipline of stillness. But we were soon forced to move to the Andover Hall chapel by problems of access (Divinity Hall, when used as a dormitory, had no public door, and no elevator for disabled people. Now, of course, it is beautifully renovated and the chapel is in active use again.) The Andover Hall chapel is noisier, but has the merit of greater public accessibility, and there we use an area on the raised dais where chairs can be drawn into a circle.

After a completely austere beginning, we quickly devised some minimalist ritual elements to mark the beginning and end of the hour of prayer: a bell to sound at the beginning and end, and a candle as a symbolic accoutrement and focus of attention. At my suggestion (recalling Tertullian's discussion of early Christian group prayer in his De Oratione) we established the practice of exchanging the "kiss of peace" at the end of the hour: this started as a rather formal handshake in Quaker mode, but has tended to become more effusive and spontaneous, an expression of the deep sense of peace and communion that arises between those who regularly share this time of mutual silence.

The numbers in the group ebb and flow naturally, tending to rise in terms when I am teaching one of my bigger lecture courses, especially the obviously related "Introduction to Christian Spirituality." At times attendance has swelled to about 20, at times sunk to a faithful core of 5 or fewer; more normally, over the years, there have been about a dozen people present each week.

To plunge straight into a full hour of silence is daunting for those not accustomed to the practice, and I do worry sometimes that this may be too demanding and even off-putting; but in practice people are free to tip-toe in and out if they wish to observe a shorter period. The matter of guidance in reading came up early on, and about twice a year I informally provide some reading lists on both classic and contemporary texts of relevance (Dom John Chapman's appendix on "Contemplative Prayer" in his Spiritual Lettersremains, in many respects, an unbeatable practical introduction to the disorientations and distractions of this form of prayer). My course on Christian spirituality, which is offered every few years, is a demanding one intellectually (covering texts from the New Testament to Gregory Palamas in the East and the Carmelites in the West), and it is not a course in which I claim to teach people to pray "experientially." But in practice students know that the silent prayer group is also available at the School, and if, through their reading of, say, Cassian, the Jesus prayer traditions, The Cloud, or John of the Cross, they feel drawn to a practice of silence, then it is often during this same term that they first make contact with it.

In addition to the inputs provided by my course (and other related ones at Episcopal Divinity School and Weston Jesuit School of Theology), Martin Smith SSJE, the former Superior of the Cowley Fathers in Cambridge, on regular occasions for a number of years agreed to meet with us for a "conference," or group spiritual direction, in which students raised their prayer difficulties and asked for advice, sharing their questions with the whole group. Martin proved to be a master at this genre (I had never previously seen spiritual direction done in this communal fashion), and his responses were not only witty and insightful, but also full of wisdom from classic traditions. We have by now established a rhythm of taking two retreats a year together, one usually a residential retreat at one of the local monastic houses, the other a day-retreat, often at the seaside house of one of our former members. These occasions usually involve a rule of silence for the most part, prayer together, input from Martin or another speaker, office if we are at a monastery, and some time to reflect on and articulate what we are about in the group and how we see it developing.

What is happening, then, in this prayer group, and what is its significance in the distinctly pluralistic, "liberal" atmosphere of Harvard Divinity School? A number of tentative points may perhaps be hazarded.

First, the group clearly participates in that democratization of a learned practice of silence (to call this contemplation risks definitional awkwardness) that has become a feature of contemporary Western spirituality, but would have been undeniably problematic to classic Counter-Reformation spiritual direction. That is, many of the participants in this group do not have a previous grounding in scriptural meditation, and indeed some are "seekers" who are yet unclear even to which form of Christianity they subscribe. The approach of Thomas Keating OCSO, however, expressed in his 1997 Wit Lectures at Harvard (and also in several of his books), was a reassurance to me on this point. In his view, silent prayer of this sort is almost impossible to maintain unless one has a discernible attrait for it, and, if these other practices have not already been established, it will inexorably lead on to the other bases of the spiritual life–the additional dimensions of lectio divina, imaginative scriptural meditation, liturgical prayer, intercession, and so on. The jumbling of the "hierarchy" of spiritual advance that became normative through the developments of the later medieval period in the West is what startles here; we have become accustomed to think of silent prayer as a rare gift for the advanced or enclosed. But arguably the frenetic mental bombardment of twenty-first century life is what is here reversing the order: forcing people onto their knees in a desperate quest for simplicity and stillness, from which other fruits will flow in due course. As such, there is also a recapitulation of an older monastic spirituality of repetitive, mantric prayer even for the beginner—one thinks here of Cassian's Conference on Abba Isaac. Interestingly, students who take part in my prayer group for a year or two will often decide thereafter to pursue a course at Weston on "Ignatian Spirituality," without thereby abandoning what they have learned from this basis in silence.

Secondly, any group of this sort (Quakers are well aware of this) will discover that its sum is mysteriously more than its parts. Here are not merely individuals praying, but a life in the group, a presence, that manifests itself over time in a deep sense of communion, trust, and peace between the participants. (If that were not so, how many would stand the tedium of a seemingly unrewarding and demanding discipline?) We are careful not to talk of this too much for fear of destroying it; we are just as much aware of the "gift" quality of it, and the possibility that other, more negative, forces could in principle invade this arena of mutual trust and vulnerability. But at least one (previously non-Christian) Unitarian member was surprised and disturbed into having to talk for the first time of the presence of Christ in this way in the group.

Thirdly, the group is not just ecumenical (it has at various times contained Unitarians, Congregationalist, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, Pentecostals, Baptists, Quakers, African Methodist Episcopals, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox); it has also become on occasion—almost without planning—inter-religious. Early on a Japanese Buddhist student and one trained in Daoist practices took part; later several other practitioners of Zen joined (some of them, but not all, also Christian), along with a student reconsidering Christianity but practicing a form of Hindu meditation. Two Reformed Jews—one a cantor in a local synagogue—have been particularly valued members of the group. The group never consciously intended this development, and the effects of it have been quite different from what one might imagine: here is no "lowest common denominator" phenomenon, no whittling down of mutually conflicting commitments. Rather, as Merton and others have disclosed, the deeper one goes on one's own path, and the more one's doctrinal convictions are internalized, so, mysteriously, the freer one becomes in recognizing the limitations of one's previous understanding of one's own tradition; and particularly in a silence shared regularly between people of very different (even passionately different) convictions, there may arise a level of unifying mutual regard and trust beyond words which strangely shifts the ground of discussion when one returns to it. There is much talk these days, especially in feminist and post-colonialist theory, of attention to the "other"; but arguably there is not enough comprehension of the practices that alone can enable such focused attention. Tom Keating set this strange adventure in transreligious wordless interaction in a grander light than I had thought of it when he called it "an experiment in world peace."

Fourthly, another feature of the group that has emerged at times in the last few years (and was not explicitly envisaged at the inception) is its additional commitment to honoring requests for intercession. It has interesting how this came about spontaneously at a certain point in the group's maturation, initially with members of the group mentioning names or concerns at the start of the hour, and then with requests for prayer coming from those outside. (The silence of the hour is not broken, but intercessions are quietly mentioned before the bell opens the prayer time.) Occasionally a student has come to the prayer group for a number of weeks simply to be helped through an especially difficult time. During a traumatic period several years ago, when there were three deaths in the School within a month, there was a huge swelling of the numbers at the group. In the case of Professor Robert Scribner (only recently arrived from England before facing a diagnosis of fatal cancer), members of the group went to his house to assist at his anointing before death, and those of us who took part will not quickly forget the poignancy and wonder of that event.

It is worth reflecting on the way in which a group of people committed to shared silence in an institution can often act as a kind of sponge for accumulated distress or anxiety, for any dis-ease within it, as well as for more positive "affect." There are burdens here which arguably need to be faced consciously and gently turned over to God rather than allowed to remain unmetabolized; this communal, intercessory action is one that has been felt strongly by a few members of the group but has yet to be articulated in any developed form.

Finally, it is worth stressing that many of the members of the group are students who are also engaged in field-work placements of the most demanding nature: work in Boston area jails and prisons, or with battered women, alcoholics, and homeless people, or in ministry to the dying in hospitals and AIDS hospices. (The group also, and interestingly—although I believe we have never explicitly talked about this—contains a high proportion of gay and lesbian students, those, that is, who have already had to struggle demandingly with features of their own inner life and identity.) It is a nice question what is the connection, exactly, between the sort of searing confrontation with one's own inner turmoil that the practice of silence engenders, and the equivalent turmoil of consciousness stirred by ministry with some of the inner city's neediest and most despised people. But this is a question that now presses on the group and will perhaps form its next moment of theological consciousness—charting the connection between the discipline of silence and the discipline of work for social, racial, and sexual justice. To force a disjunction between these two, as is so often encouraged, is clearly a false choice of some seriousness, as I think any member of this group would testify. Odd it may seem, to the as-yet uncomprehending skeptic, to see the practice of silence as the best preparation for a ministry devoted to speaking out against injustice in all its forms; yet if the deep capacity for attention is not formed first, and with discipline, we may wonder if we will rightly locate the means of countering that injustice at all.

It will be abundantly clear from what I have written that this group is very far from being a religious conventicle or holiness club; its boundaries are porous, its members changeable, its goals not strictly defined, and where it is going next not even easy to discern. The type of prayer engaged in is, after all, as John of the Cross himself says, difficult to distinguish in human terms from "wasting one's time." So it is not clear what will come next, and I dare say that one day the group will come to a natural end and give place to something else more needed at the time.

In the meantime I like to think of the group as providing an open-ended invitation to such "wasting of time" before God, in a School (and culture) of obsessive busyness; and even that its members may prove to be (as Augustine Baker says somewhere of such "consecrated" groups) "the chariots and horsemen, the strength and the bulwarks of the kingdoms and the churches where they live."