Here is Truth knocking at our door...

These passages are from the beautiful website of St. Hugh's Charterhouse, near Horsham in West Sussex, where the Carthusian monks live a life, largely in solitude, devoted to contemplative prayer:

Our principal endeavour and goal is to devote ourselves to the silence and solitude of cell. This is holy ground, a place where, as a man with his friend, the Lord and his servant often speak together; there is the faithful soul frequently united with the Word of God; there is the bride made one with her spouse; there is earth joined to heaven, the divine to the human. The journey, however, is long, and the way dry and barren, that must be travelled to attain the fount of water, the land of promise.(Statutes, 4.1)...

Silence is the air the solitary breathes. The Fathers called it "the language of the world to come". From being an exterior discipline it is gradually interiorised, a mystery of awareness and communion with the Real that so surpasses our busy words and concepts.

Here is Truth knocking at our door, speaking of his Love....

The monk is moulded by this rhythm [of the liturgical hours] and his prayer is taken up into that of Christ and the Church far beyond the limits of his individual concerns. He stands before God with and on behalf of all. Like Christ, he assumes and sometimes experiences in the nakedness of his solitude their sufferings and weaknesses as well as their hope and faith. It is from this place that his prayer in Christ has redemptive power beyond his knowing.

This is from an essay by Br. Ramon SSF in Praying the Jesus Prayer Together :

The cosmic nature of the [Jesus] Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One believer's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation that has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the comic darkness, and enter into conflict with the dark powers... [Ephesians 6] The power of the Jesus Prayer is armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, "Pray at all times in the Spirit..."

St Theophan the Recluse said (in a passage referring specifically to the Jesus Prayer) "Prayer is to stand with the mind in the heart before God, and so go on standing before him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life."

Something is definitely going on here. If these folk, who have dedicated their whole lives to prayer, are to be believed, then prayer is possibly the most important thing we can do. God doesn't call everyone to the way of contemplative prayer, but those whom he does call - and I'm speaking quite strongly to myself here - must never succumb to the feeling that they are wasting their time, that they would be better employed doing something practical for their fellow men. That would be like Mary levelling Martha's criticism at herself, instead of allowing our Lord himself to explain things to her sister. We must never feel that our calling is a higher one than that of our more practical or didactic sisters and brothers, but neither should we allow ourselves to worry that it is different from theirs.

I'm sounding very serious here, but to be honest the whole thing is full of joy as well as sorrow, of laughter as well as tears... after all, what better or more cheerful company could we have, than his who walked with those two on the Emmaus road that afternoon?