(New Beginnings, No.7)
Many people today live lives of tension and stress. Work is often pressured and the daily round of commuting can take a heavy toll on people’s energy and enjoyment of life. In some cases there may also be marital or family problems which add their own weight to the burden.
Against that background it can be almost impossible for people to pray or to be able to have a spiritual life that involves any kind of encounter with God. At the same time, the pressure of those problems makes a real inner life an even greater necessity if the person is not to become burned-out or to be reduced to the level of a soulless functionary.
What about the inner self? What about nourishing the hungry soul that needs sustenance? We all need to build up our inner resources. The inner world is more real than the mad rush, the competitiveness and the pressure of what we sometimes unthinkingly call “the real world”.
Can we do anything about this? Yes. We can create a quiet time and place for ourselves each day. It is a matter of creating it; it won’t come by itself. After all, we make time for meals, don’t we? It could be a matter of sitting in a comfortable chair in a quiet room at home (for example, a bedroom), or walking slowly in a park, or going to a church, and then gradually and gently calming down.
Relax your body first; then let your emotions and your mind calm down. Spend most of the time just calming down. That includes recognizing without anxiety the sources of your tension and just letting them be. This is not a time for solving problems – that comes afterwards. Leave aside books, words, and even thoughts as far as you can. (Keep a pen and paper nearby so that if you think, ‘I must phone Tom’, you just make a note of it and set it aside. That way it won’t continue to distract you.)
Recognize that you are in the presence of God; you don’t have to put yourself in it; you couldn’t not be in it. Try to come to this quiet time without an agenda, or even expectations. Just be quiet; be receptive. (This isn’t complicated, but it is not easy.) Let God lead you in his own way, perhaps enabling you to become aware of yourself, to discover what may have been staring you in the face for years. The challenge is to learn to listen to what God says in silence, that silence which is not simply the absence of noise, but an inner stillness.
Be prepared for surprises. The first may be that you like this and want to make more time for it. Another could be that you learn to appreciate the present moment. The present, the here and now, is a present from God. It is in the present that we begin to experience the Presence of God in a way that is intuitive and indirect but always gentle, freeing, and sometimes even funny.