Then Jesus spoke of himself on the night before he died as the true vine in his Father’s vineyard, he promised to abide with us and to nourish us. He told his disciples: ‘I am the vine and you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty’ (John:15:5).

In our time of silent waiting we are allowing the sap, the life that flows in the vine, to flow through the branches. We are not seeking union with God. We already have that. Our task is to remain close to him and enjoy that union.

‘It is not that God comes to us, as if he were absent,’ Augustine reminds us, ‘or even that we “go” to him. God is always present to us but we, like blind people, do not have the eyes to see him.’

In order to see God we have to enter a new relationship with him, enter into a new place. ‘It was in my inmost heart,’ wrote Augustine, ‘it was there, Lord, that you made me begin to love you, and you made me glad at heart’ (Confessions 9.4).

The awareness of our union with the life-giving vine, the unknown sweetness that we find in our inmost heart, is not achieved without a struggle. It is a struggle between our surface self, the person on show to the world, and our deeper self.

It is what Paul, in one of his letters to the Christians in Rome, describes as the split between our spiritual and our unspiritual self. It is the conflict between the ego and what he calls ‘my true self’.

Thomas Merton writes that the aim of being still before God is ‘to set free the divine light which is mysteriously present and shining in each of us, although it is enveloped in an insidious web of the psyche’s weaving.’

This divine light is trapped in a web which our unspiritual self – to use Paul’s words – weaves around it. If we are to release that light and let it shine we have to free it from the tangled web we have wrapped it in.

In the struggle to discard the shell that life has created, or we have created, grace is working gently if painfully, inviting our true self to emerge from the womb into the fullness of life.

Our hours of prayer open us up to our deeper self. In that stillness we find the true self created in God’s image that life’s cares and sorrows and sins can never destroy.

We discover, like Augustine, that we are waking with a new vision. Our priorities are changing. Our fears are assuaged and our anxieties lessened.

We shall also find, as promised, that we have everything within us for our spiritual journey: the source of life, the wisdom we need.

Deep down we find our basic sanity and basic goodness. We discover our own deepest self.

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