A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation

“Prayer consists of attention,” and “the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer.”

Boredom heals by diminishing our reliance on this spiritual glitz that keeps us preoccupied with how our prayer is progressing.

Expansion of awareness does not mean that we become aware of yet more things. This book concerns the expansion that takes place within awareness itself, before awareness becomes awareness of this or that object.

The sculptor imposes nothing but only frees what is held captive in stone. The practice of contemplation is something like this. It does not work by means of addition or acquisition, but by release, chiseling away thought-shackled illusions of separation from God.

Only the person who has renounced obsessive thoughts is a true monk.”

“We are not referring to some dark corner, but to a vast inner space.”6 According to St. Augustine, this vast inner space of the soul, an “abyss” as he terms it, is completely open and porous to God: “Indeed, Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is naked.”

Saint Teresa wants to suggest that the manner in which we pray formal, vocal prayers changes and becomes the very doorway through which we move into the silence of contemplation.

Spiritual progress is learning to confront struggle in a new way so that we don’t struggle with the fact that life is fraught with struggle.

Contemplative practice proceeds by way of the engaged receptivity of release, of prying loose, of letting go of the need to have our life circumstances be a certain way in order for us to live or pray or be deeply happy.