It has been a great joy for me, translating Augustine over the years and finding words that do justice to the music of his Latin. There is a wealth of spiritual gold hidden among the five million or more words that he wrote. Hidden, because we come across it unexpectedly in his books, letters and sermons and in his commentaries on sacred scripture. Sometimes it is just a few nuggets, buried within a chapter. Augustine had discovered for himself, as no one in the West had before him, the mystery of God who hides himself within us. And he realised that silence reveals God to us as nothing else can. If we journey in stillness to the centre of our being, he tells us, we shall find our true selves and we shall find God who, to use Augustine’s own words, ‘is nearer to us than we are to ourselves’.

Augustine constantly calls us to return to our hearts and it is about this journey inward that I want to write. He has not written a book about the journey, though he wrote countless books. But if we sift through his writing and piece together the fragments of his thinking, he offers us a clear path to help us find our way to God, who is within.

At the time I discovered silent prayer, or the prayer of the heart as it is sometimes known, I was struggling with the round of prayer which was very much part of our lives as a community of priests. As head of a boys’ boarding school and of a large religious community I felt that the prescribed daily prayers were not giving me the strength to cope.

So I started to get up an hour earlier than I used to. Sitting quietly in a peaceful room looking out on the priory garden brought a peace that helped me face the day. In the evening, a quiet time in the school chapel helped dissolve the built-up emotions of the day and restored some sanity.

One evening, as I came out of chapel and greeted a group of the boarders heading for their dormitories, I heard one in a loud whisper say, ‘What’s got into old Ben tonight? He’s in a good mood!’

What I suspect had been happening in that time of silence in the chapel was that I had shed the day’s weariness and a kind of spontaneity had been recovered. After being an Augustinian friar for 27 years I realised that what was missing in my prayer was silence. A little late in the day I had at last started on the inward journey to my own heart.

John Chapman, who was Abbot of Downside in the 1930s, lamented that he had spent so many years knowing nothing about praying in silence. ‘I could have been in it, with immense profit, 22 years ago or more,’ he wrote in his letters, ‘but no one told me it was possible.’

I too regret that it took me so many years to find the gold of silent prayer. In the chapters that follow I shall try to share what, with the help of many teachers, I have since found at the heart of silence.

An extract from Finding Your Hidden Treasure

© 2010 Benignus O’Rourke OSA

Published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd

© Photo: Ian Wilson OSA

Get the book: www.theaugustinians.org