After the Door is Opened
Whatever may lead us into the contemplative life, it is silence that meets us there.
While it may have been suffering that first opened the door, it was silence that greeted me with open arms once the door opened. — Peter Traben Haas
I once heard Richard Rohr give a talk in which I recall him suggesting that there are three reliable doorways into the spiritual life: great love, great suffering, and contemplative prayer. That was well over ten years ago, so even if my memory is faulty, I think this is a principle worth considering. It’s easy to see how love is a pathway into the healed and transformed heart, and of course suffering is a state that not only Jesus, but the Buddha, saw as an entry point to the interior life.
Contemplative author Peter Traben Haas seems to be speaking from the same playbook at Richard Rohr’s. Suffering can open the door to the soul, because it forces us to consider not only that life is both imperfect and impermanent, but that is part of the human condition to seek an end to suffering (both our own and the suffering of those we love). As difficult as physical pain can be, I don’t know of any trial worse that watching a loved one suffer, and not being able to help.
And as the Buddha pointed out, ultimately we can’t even help ourselves to end our own suffering. Like the first step in the 12 Steps of Recovery Programs, we have no choice but to admit our own powerlessness in the face of suffering.
But when suffering opens the door, silence greets us from within.
On the surface, this may seem like cold comfort: how can silence help, after all? But seasoned practitioners of Centering Prayer and other contemplative practices know that silence brings healing, often in very subtle ways, and it invites us into the serene place where the heart consents to the healing action of the Spirit, without noisy thoughts or ego-driven words getting in the way. Silence is the main nutrient, after all, in that third path to spiritual transformation (and I would argue that silence is never far away from true love or existential suffering either).
Silence cannot make suffering vanish, no more than an airplane could permanently defeat gravity. But silence brings us face to face with Divine love, and that is ultimately where all healing comes from.
Quotation source: Peter Traben Haas, Contemplative Church: How Meditative Prayer and Monastic Practices Help Congregations Flourish (Kindle Edition), p. 23.