Christine, a friend of mine, was introduced to silent prayer during a retreat in Wales at the age of 40 plus. Some time after returning home, she realised she was seeing herself and her life with new eyes. ‘The first thing that became clearer to me,’ said Christine, ‘was that, although I really did want a closer relationship with God, I was actually quite afraid of one.’

It was a fear of ‘being taken over’ and becoming a stranger, she said. Would she lose something of herself, or be asked to give up things that now seemed important to her happiness?

‘By the end of the retreat,’ she went on, ‘I was beginning to see that the Lord is not an entity outside myself, with whom I have to reconcile all the forces within my personality, but is somehow in the deepest part of myself. There is no real conflict between all that makes me what I am, and God. The problem is that I don’t really understand what my real self is, and haven’t therefore allowed it to grow.’

Another major change was in Christine’s way of looking at how the Lord works in our lives. Initially, the texts given her for prayer time during the retreat were about God’s fatherly love. It seemed a long time since she had felt that!

Recent years had not been happy ones. Struggling with the failing health of parents, for example, Christine had to abandon holiday plans three years in succession and seemed unable to find any way of recharging her batteries.

‘It sounds childish,’ she acknowledged, ‘but I suppose I expected God to intervene in some way, just to give me the chance to get on top of things, and yet the more I felt I needed his support and presence the further away he seemed.’

By the middle of the week, unwinding in the peace and silence, she was able to see it was not so much what had or had not happened in her life that got her down, but what she called her response of inertia and self-pity.

‘One of the prayer texts I was given was from Deuteronomy: “I set before you life or death.” And I realised that on so many occasions I had chosen death.

‘In the stillness I began to see that God works mainly not by manipulating circumstances and events to our advantage in response to our faith and petitions. Rather, a growing relationship with him in prayer gives us the strength to change the circumstances that can be changed, or to accept those we cannot, and to trust he will give us the necessary support.

‘I also began to see “sin” not as transgressions against the commandments, but as all the forces within me that deaden me, and make me negative and lacking in hope. And that the salvation Christ brings is not appeasement of his angry Father, but his ability to heal me and free me from all these negative forces.

‘My life had been handed back to me, to be lived in union with the Lord who is within me, and whom I could find and grow closer to if I made sufficient time to rest with him in prayer.’

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