The Heartland of Prayer

There are two kinds of spiritual darkness: the darkness of the nearness of the presence of God, which is in reality a Light, but one too bright for our endurance; and the darkness of our blemished human nature, hiding from us that Light of the Spirit as it begins to permeate the higher levels of the mind. The first darkness is experienced only by those who are far advanced in holiness, the true saints whose number and identity are known only in heaven. Most of us are so very far from being saints that in our pride we may regard the slow and halting dawn of that Light as our own achievement; so we may think of the second darkness as being at the same time the consequence of sin and the dispensation of a loving Providence; for God in his mercy takes even our sins and uses them to make us humble and obedient. There is a sense in which, having sinned, we may be thankful for our sins. But the primary sin is pride: when this is dead, the soul returns to God. 

Acceptance of darkness, then, is an absolutely necessary condition of learning how to pray. In the darkness of our prayer, when we cannot even know if we are praying at all, our only source of reassurance is our faith; and faith has its dwelling in the heart, beyond the reach of the brain, inaccessible to psychological or neurological research. We cannot feel our faith in God. The Catholic priest and spiritual director, Father Vincent McNabb, arranged to have inscribed upon his coffin an alternative translation of the words addressed to Jesus by Peter on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias after the Resurrection: "Lord, thou knowest if I love thee" (John 21:17).

Lois Lang-Sims, 'The Mind in the Heart' 

The heartland of prayer is silence, which is darkness by another name: the darkness of cognition, the abnegation of "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." (Oxford Dictionary: cognition) It is only in this darkness, this absence, that we can know God as himself, and this only by means of the "sharp dart of longing love" of The Cloud of Unknowing. But we cannot speak of this, not even to ourselves. We are, like "Prufrock, unable to communicate not the doubting question 'What is it?' but the glorious answer." (Adrian Leak, Church Times)

All our efforts at prayer, in the end, are paths to silence, darkness, from contemplative disciplines to the sound and action of the liturgy, where, as one of my favourite Eucharistic hymns begins, "Let all mortal flesh keep silence/And with fear and trembling stand..."