Closing the Door and Opening It

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I think God might be trying to draw my attention to an aspect of prayer I’ve been ignoring.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been using a study guide to go through The Imitation of Christ. In this morning’s reading was this: “Flee to the secret tabernacle of your heart and very earnestly implore divine help.” Then, tonight I read this, from the poem “This is a Beautiful Time” by Jessica Powers: “[the Holy Spirit] is crying to every soul that is walled: Open to me, my spouse, my sister. / And once inside, he is calling again: / Come to me here in this secret place. / Oh, hear him tonight crying all over the world a last desperate summons of love to a dying race.”

The idea that there is a “secret tabernacle” of the heart was scarcely a new idea when Thomas à Kempis wrote The Imitation of Christ in the early part of the 15th century. Jesus himself said “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), and for centuries mystics have been trying to find him there. Gregory Palamas, a 14th-century monk of Mount Athos who later became archbishop of Thessaloniki, used “close the door” as a metaphor for shutting out the exterior world and opening to God. He writes, “The closet of the soul is the body; our doors are the five bodily senses. ... Our senses become closed and remain closed when we do not let them be attached to external sensory things, and in this way our mind remains free from every worldly attachment, and by secret mental prayer unites with God its Father.”

In a similar way, the 16th-century Carmelite St. Teresa of Avila compared the soul to a diamond in the shape of a castle, with God dwelling in the very center. “If I had understood as I do now that in this little palace of my soul dwelt so great a king, I would not have left him alone so often,” she wrote.

Nor do Christians have a monopoly on this idea. In the 13th century, the Sufi mystic Rumi wrote:“Close the door of words / that the window of your heart may open. / To see what cannot be seen / turn your eyes inward / and listen, in silence.”

Silence and seeking the Almighty seem to go hand in hand; Psalm 46 commands, “Be still and know that I am God.”

For me, stillness is most easily found by literally closing the door to the outside world so I can be alone. St. Teresa was a great advocate of solitude as preparation for prayer. She wrote, “All one need do is go into solitude and look at him within oneself, and not turn away from so good a guest but with great humility speak to him as a father. Beseech him as you would a father; tell him all about your trials; ask him for a remedy against them, realizing that you are not worthy to be his daughter.”

Of course, the preeminent example of seeking solitude to pray is Jesus, who often went off by himself to speak to his heavenly father. What took me a long time to realize, though, is that Jesus always returned to the outside world to continue his ministry among the throngs that pressed about him. More than a century before me, St. John Henry Newman had a more personal revelation of this idea; he wrote, “I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: ‘Go down again – I dwell among the people.’”

More recently, Pope John Paul II combined these ideas of God dwelling within and the need to (in Jessica Powers’ words) “love a dying race” in his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (At the Beginning of the New Millenium): “A spirituality of communion indicates above all the heart’s contemplation of the mystery of the Trinity dwelling in us, and whose light we must also be able to see shining on the face of the brothers and sisters around us.” All of this brings me to the realization that yes, I need to spend more time in contemplation, but afterward I must reopen the door and go out to serve God’s people.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.