The closing of our eyes in prayer

Last Saturday (during the Week of Pentecost 15) during Morning Prayer many of us read Chapter 8 of I Kings: it’s the story of Solomon’s dedication of the new constructed Temple. At one point, the story’s narrator says,

And when the priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said,

The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.
I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever.

This is a remarkable detail of the dedication story because it turns up-side-down and inside-out our usual thinking about God’s glory. Usually we imagine God’s glory as a great brightening Light, a kind of blinding whiteness that bursts radiantly from God’s presence. Here, however, the glory of God comes cloud-like, a foggy darkness so solid that the priests had to grope their way around, unsure about their whereabouts, unable to stand and do their work. In short, God’s glory is also an enveloping darkness.

Those who practice Centering Prayer know that teachers like Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington make it a point to recommend that we sit comfortably “with eyes closed” when introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within.

To close one’s eyes is one way we allow God’s darkening glory to come upon us. Jesus himself recommended such environmental darkness for prayer when giving us guidelines, he recommended that we into our closet, shut the door, and pray to our Father who sees in secret (Matthew 6). As I have said elsewhere, inasmuch as first-century Jewish homes had no closets as we know them, it likely that Jesus is suggesting that go off somewhere alone, pull a prayer shawl over our heads or at least pull down our eyelids so that we enter a personal darkness to be with God--or better said, that God may be with us.

That is the experience of many when God meets them: Moses on Mt. Sinai, Paul when struck blind, Joseph in his dreams. The fourteenth-century classic on contemplative prayer is titled The Cloud of Unknowing. The anonymous author of that book tells us that it is when we enter a "cloud" and remove as many distractions as possible, even to the diminishment of following thoughts themselves, that God speaks His healing silence.

Yet even in darkness one may experience what appears to be simply darkness. A friend of mine recently told me about his contemplative practice this way:

Having a subjective “felt experience of God” would be nice, but I don’t really don’t look for that. Just sitting for twenty minutes or so and then listening to the healing silence that dwells behind all of the noise and chatter in the world is enough for me! Centering Prayer is a tool which quiets the mind and then allows a person to rest in silence for a short period of time every day. And for me that silence is not empty -- but it’s alive and good and has something to do with eternity and with God. Perhaps we should not expect more than that.

In the closing of our eyes, in whatever darkness we enter, we always sit as the guests of God who comes as and when He wishes. Fr. Keating has somewhere noted that that he "continues to meet people who are very advanced in the spiritual journey who insist that they have never had the grace of contemplative prayer as a felt experience of God.” Certainly my own experience has been something of the kind. My “felt experiences” of God have been terribly (I use the word carefully) brief, sometimes awefully (again I use the word carefully) brief. More often in God’s silence I find myself almost always wrapped in some kind of pervasive Love, healed, cured of anxiety, dissipation, and worry. In my "unknowing," without words in some strange way I am aware of God’s presence. At the same time, like those priests at the dedication of the temple, I sit gropingly, many times unsure as to where to stand and go. Nevertheless, as I raise my eyelids and look around (sometimes to see the difference between night and dawn), I realize God in his great dark glory has been with me.

Isn’t it so with you?

Image: Jack Baumgartner, Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes