Into the Silent Land

Martin Laird’s Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation (Oxford) is a strange little book. But it rewards careful attention.

“We are built for contemplation,” Laird writes. “This book is about cultivating the skills necessary for this subtlest, simplest, and most searching of the spiritual arts.”

The cultivation of these skills, we’re warned, “cannot be reduced to a spiritual technique.” And yet, throughout this book—which includes a detailed step-by-step guide to breath prayer—the word “technique” kept coming to mind. (One person’s cultivation of skill is another person’s technique, I suppose.) But as Laird is quick to clarify, he has something very specific in mind when he issues his caution:

Techniques are all the rage today. They suggest a certain control that aims to determine a certain outcome. They clearly have their place. But this is not what contemplative practice does. The difference may be slight but it is an important one. A spiritual practice simply disposes us to allow something to take place. For example, a gardener does not actually grow plants. A gardener practices certain gardening skills that facilitate growth that is beyond the gardener’s direct control. . . . And so it is with contemplative practice, not a technique, but a skill. The skill required is interior silence.

An important motif in this book is what Laird calls the “three doorways” a person passes through in pursuit of the “depthless depth” within—”but indeed I could have said 30 or 300 doorways, for they seem endless. But in truth there are no doorways.” (Cool? Cool.)

Rooted in the practice of breath prayer, Laird’s first doorway is to choose a prayer word or phrase, like the Jesus prayer. The second is “to become one with the prayer word, the way a weaver is one with the loom, or a dancer with the dance.” And the third is becoming aware of the thoughts that crowd out silence.

For Laird, who is both a scholar and an Augustinian priest, none of this is hypothetical. Rather, in guiding us through these doorways, he is drawing upon the sturdy wisdom of monks and other contemplatives down through history. He wants this stuff to be actionable for us.

I especially appreciate Laird’s insistence that there’s no such thing as “me and Jesus” spirituality, not really—we’re always in the company of the communion of saints. “Those who sound alarms regarding the realization of the contemplative path as being anticommunity,” he writes, “reveal a shocking ignorance of this simple fact: the personal journey into God is simultaneously ecclesial and all-embracing. This in part is why people who have gone fairly deeply into the contemplative path, become open and vital people (however differently they may live this out).”

Later, near the end of the book, Laird explicitly connects this cultivation of openness and vitality to lives shaped and marked by vulnerability:

We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why not a few abandon a contemplative practice like meditation as soon as it begins to expose this wound; they move on instead to some spiritual entertainment that will maintain distraction. Perhaps this is why the weak and the wounded, who know very well the vulnerability of the human condition, often have an aptitude for discovering silence and can sense the wholeness and healing that ground this wound.

The way of contemplation—that is, of silence and woundedness—will quite often be a lonely path. But walking by faith, by God’s grace, we may well discover a “reverent joy before our wounds” in company with the saints, fueling us for “loving service of all who struggle.”