In our deep resting with the Lord we, too, have the experience of awakening with a cleansed and healed vision. We see in a way that we have never seen before. We come to realise how unaware we have been. In ordinary life we are blind to much of what goes on in our lives and in the world around us. We live in a dazed state, as Bill discovered on a visit to Taizé.

Bill, who was a member of our community for six years and then left, told me what happened to him when, shortly after leaving us, he experienced the long silence during the evening prayer of the monastery. In Taizé worship, people are lulled into silence by the repetition of a few simple words chanted by the brothers and the congregation.

‘After 45 minutes, the chant was only just beginning to penetrate the hard little shell we carry around with us,’ Bill told me as we walked in the Clent Hills. ‘Something within was beginning to waken up. Like someone rousing from deep slumber, coming to consciousness, I came out after nearly three hours in that prayer and felt it was only just beginning to get through. I realised that I would have to do this every day for it to have an effect. And yet I could have talked about prayer with anyone!

‘It was all about being still and letting something happen. To let the prayer erode the resistance you put up without realising it. And you had to resist trying to understand what was going on, and articulating it and sharing it. The more I stayed there, the more the chant washed over me, the more it began to break through to me.

‘As I woke I prayed, babbled like a child. But as consciousness returned, I could not hold on to the child’s prayer. I realised that my ordinary, everyday self seemed to exist in a kind of coma.’

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