When we were young novices the obligation to keep silence at meals or between certain hours, and the great silence after night prayers until morning recreation, seemed a kind of restriction, a penance. How little we understood the great value of silence!

The aim of keeping silent while we pray is so that our minds become still and our hearts awaken. It is as if our hearts are usually in a kind of trance. While the mind is processing a million thoughts and words the heart remains numb.

If we could, as it were, put a blindfold around the eyes of the mind while we are communing with God we would be forced to develop that faculty which can really communicate with him, our heart. And if our heart were awake, alert, we would find ourselves continually drawn towards God.

For this to happen we need to clear the dross, the debris which clogs the heart, the vast number of words, thoughts and fantasies that constantly get between us and God while we are trying to be with him.

Seeing with the heart is a rare gift. Talkers and thinkers greatly outnumber those who can see properly. ‘The mind has a thousand eyes, the heart but one,’ writes the poet Bouillon. In our silent prayer the thousand eyes of the mind are closed and the eye of the heart is opened.

To see only with the eyes of the mind is to be misled by our prejudices, our fears, our anxieties. To see with the eye of the heart is to see clearly. This is surely what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote, ‘We worldly men have miserable, mad, mistaking eyes’ (Titus Andronicus Act V, Scene iv).

Resting in the Lord is the way by which the weary eye of the heart is cleansed and refreshed. We begin to see from somewhere deep within. We see with the inner eye, the eye of wisdom, the eye of love. We realise what Jesus meant when he said, ‘If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light’ (Matthew 6:22). Augustine goes so far as to say: ‘Our whole task in life is to heal the eye of the heart so that God may be seen.’

What happens when our vision is changed happens without any effort on our part. Once the eye of the heart is opened then we see God.

And we see the beauty and the wonder of the world.

But first of all, we begin to see our true selves, our own beauty and who we really are.

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