In the sermon on the mount, Jesus teaches us to pray in secret, closed off from the outside world. This private room is called a cell in the monastic tradition. Just as we can retreat into the seclusion of a private room, we can also retreat into the hidden sanctuary of the soul. This is called the prayer of recollection. It begins by closing your eyes.
There is a place of eternal presence at the heart of everything, a point of pure nothingness, where no disorder can reach, wherein the fullness of all things can be found. Before we can orient ourselves completely towards God, we need to gather our wandering minds and collect our fickle emotions.
The world around us is full of multiplicity, pulling our attention in a myriad of directions, both wise and foolish. Our physical senses are the windows through which we perceive the world, therefore, they are a constant source of distraction. In the prayer of recollection, we close the windows of our five senses, shutting out all external stimuli. Not all distractions come from the outside, however – turning down the volume of our outer senses is only the first step in recollection.
Most people have layers of thought occurring simultaneously in the background. Memories, hypothetical scenarios, fears, joys, and all sorts of things. We are both one and many, a single identity who is also a community of many parts. While the diversity of our consciousness is a source of beauty, flourishing with the verdancy of relationship, if we forget our inherent unity in Christ, we lose harmony, descending into chaos and suffering.
In the prayer of recollection, the multiplicity of our being remembers the oneness of all things in Christ Jesus. We quiet the constant grasping and searching of our mental machinery, gathering all our awareness into the sacrament of the present moment. In the oneness there are no thoughts, all motions of body and soul settle into a state of rest. United in the depths of our nature, we remember the image of God in which we are created, joining with the songs of the angels, praising the unity of love in the secret home of divinity.
You can read an essay exploring the theological and philosophical aspects of recollection by clicking HERE.
The following chant, titled Cell of the Heart, is written to the tune of Greensleeves (without the chorus). I have been using a simple version of that tune to pray this chant myself over the last week or so. If another tune reveals itself to you, I would genuinely love to hear it!
Over the last few weeks I have been writing a collection of short chants. Each one is specific to a particular form of prayer or one of the virtues of the soul. The following quatrain (4 line stanza) is inspired primarily by Jesus’ teaching on prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, ending with an allusion to Psalm 46 “Be still and know that I am God.”
Go into a private room, closing the windows of your senses, singing this chant over and over again with a contemplative mind, drawing all your faculties inwards, placing all your attention upon the springs of life in your heart, encountering the fullness of everything in the depths of empty darkness.
Cell of the Heart
I go into my secret room
Draw inwardly and centre
No need to search for empty words
In stillness I remember
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