How we each find our own treasure is illustrated for me by a delightful story in Metropolitan Anthony’s School for Prayer. He tells about an old lady who visited him shortly after he became a priest in the Orthodox church. She wanted his advice about prayer. For 14 years she had been praying ‘the Jesus Prayer’ almost continually, she said, and had never experienced God’s presence at all.

‘If you speak all the time, you don’t give God a chance to get a word in,’ the priest responded.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked.

The priest advised her to go to her room after breakfast, put it right, and place her armchair in a strategic position that would leave behind her back all the dark corners into which things are pushed so as not to be seen.

‘Light the little lamp before the ikon that you have, and first of all take stock of your room,’ he told her. ‘Just sit, look round and try to see where you live because I am sure that if you have prayed all these fourteen years it is a long time since you have seen your room. And then take out your knitting and for fifteen minutes knit before the face of God, but I forbid you to say one word of prayer. You just knit, and try to enjoy the peace of your room.’

She didn’t think it was very pious advice, Metropolitan Anthony writes, but she took it. Some time later the old lady returned, saying she had done just what he advised. ‘It works,’ she told him. ‘I got up, washed, put my room right, had breakfast, came back, made sure there was nothing that would worry me, and then I settled into my armchair and thought, “Oh how nice, I have fifteen minutes in which I can do nothing without feeling guilty!” And I looked around and for the first time in years I thought, “Goodness, what a nice room I live in.”’

Then she said, ‘I felt so quiet because the room was so peaceful. There was a clock ticking but it didn’t disturb the silence. Its ticking just underlined the fact that everything was so still, and after a while I remembered that I must knit before the face of God, so I began to knit. And I became more and more aware of the silence.

‘The needles hit the armrest of my chair, the clock was ticking peacefully, there was nothing to bother about, I had no need of straining myself. Then I perceived that this silence was not simply an absence of noise, but that the silence had substance. It was not an absence of something but a presence of something. The silence had a density, a richness, and it began to pervade me. The silence around began to come and meet the silence in me.

‘All of a sudden I perceived that the silence was a presence. At the heart of the silence there was Him who is all stillness, all peace, all poise.’

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