Hesychia, The Practice of Stillness

Weavings,  A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life,  weavings.org is a wonderful bimonthly publication by Upper Room Ministries.  The January/February 2007 issue was entitled "Be Still."  I want to share some excerpts from the contribution of Douglas Burton-Christie entitled Hesychia, The Practice of Stillness.

The ancient monks of the Egyptian desert had a name for this elusive but crucial aspect of the spirtual life: hesychia. The Greek word can be translated in different ways, depending on the context: stillness, quiet, tranquility, deep peace. In the monastic literature, hesychia is often synonymous with a certain quality of depth of prayer, or awareness of "God's presence.  John Climacus described hesychia as "worshiping God unceasingly...an inviolable activity of the heart." The simplicity of hesychia was, for the early Christian monks, part of its power, its meaning. In this place of stillness, everything other than God faded from consciousness.  God's touch, God's presence became palpable. One became conscious of living in God.

Late in his life, Thomas Merton traveled to California to spend time at Redwoods Monastery and to explore the Lost Coast in the hopes of finding a place where he could descend into greater stillness and authentic prayer.  He had arrived at a moment in his own life in which he felt the need to go deeper, to find a more honest way of living out his monastic vocation.  From his perch along the wild, craggy Northern California, he wrote:

    In our monasticism, we have been content to find our way to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed thoughtful life. And this is certainly good.  But is it good enough?

   I, for one realize that now I need more.Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure...There is a need of effort, deepening, change and transformation. Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must "work on myself." In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside.

   But I have a past to break with, an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification of mindfulness, or rather of no min ---a return to genuine peace, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the Spirit.

 This is an utterly personal statement, articulated by a man standing at a crossroads in his life, looking for a more authentic way of living. Yet it also speaks, I think, to a larger and more widely shared hunger - for honesty, open-heartedness, integrity, peace. Not any peace - certainly not a peace born of easy acceptance of conventions or evasion of the hard questions. Rather it is something closer to what the early Christian monks meant by hesychia ---a deep, abiding peace, born of struggle and relinquishment, issuing from the costly work of facing up to the truth of one's life. Few of us can deny the need for this kind of clarification and purification in our life, or the sense of relief that comes from finally giving ourselves to this work.Yet arriving at a place where this deep, cleansing work can begin to happen is itself a mysterious thing.  Something in us has to shift. We must become vulnerable. A space needs to open up within us, even a small space. It was here in this space of hesychia, the monks believed, that the need for "deepening, change and transformation" could take root within and begin to blossom.  Here in this stillness, one could begin to dream of entering into "the very center of the mysteries," into a simple awareness of God at the heart of one's life.  One could be reborn.