Silence & Solitude

Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him. And he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” And they answered, “John the Baptist. But others say, Elijah, and others, that one of the prophets of old has risen.” Then he said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “The Christ of God.” And he strictly charged and commanded them to tell this to no one, saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

Luke 9:18-24 (ESV)

It turned out to be a silent retreat.

Many years ago, I volunteered with the Trinity Forum in the UK. I worked with friends to organise a conference where participants could engage with a variety of texts and ask big questions about life and faith. As part of the preparation, I suggested we go away on retreat, and I had in mind a location in the Austrian alps that served the ministry of a preacher I’d followed closely. We didn’t end up in Austria. We ended up at a Benedictine monastery called St Jacut de la Mer, just outside St Malo in France.

We showed up, only to discover it was a silent retreat. A silent retreat. I’d had visions of sitting at the feet of a great preacher, but found myself alone, looking down at my own feet. Silence was alien to me—it wasn’t something I’d practiced—and it was difficult for the others also. We decided upon a compromise: we’d talk at dinner time. There was a lot of talk at dinner time.

There were hours of solitude built into the retreat as well. As the name suggests, L’Abbaye de St Jacut de la Mer sits on the coast. At low tide you could cross the nearby inlet and walk to monoliths in the distance. At one point, during a time for solitude, a friend went out and climbed the rocks. I followed him out there and started talking with him. In all, it was a not-so-silent and not-so-solitary retreat.

What was the point of a retreat like this? What is the point of silence and solitude? That’s the question I want to explore. Silence and solitude are difficult, but the benefits are substantial. To help us explore this, I want to reflect on one passage in chapter 9 of Luke’s gospel while keeping the whole narrative in view. More particularly, in this short essay I want to do three things. I begin by noting how difficult silence and solitude are by exploring a tension between our need of others on the one hand, and yet our strong sense of individualism on the other hand. I then reflect on our passage and the relationship between prayer, silence and solitude in Luke’s gospel. Finally, I focus on silence and solitude. My goal overall is twofold: to understand silence and solitude, and to commend silence and solitude to you as means of transformation.

We find it hard to be silent and to be alone. We are relational creatures. We feel the need to be with others and to hear others. We want to be heard and seen too—validated and recognized. This desire appears unquenchable. We seem to need a continual feedback loop of recognition that secures us by affirming us in the face of teeming, tireless questions such as: Did she see me? What does he think of me? How did I do? What did they think of my last post?

As this last question indicates, it is especially difficult to enter silence and solitude in our hyper-connected world. There is a general pressure to be connected, and the impulse to take up our phones, say, feels almost like an imperative. Busyness is another feature of our world. There is much to do, and what is to be done presses upon us, advancing into our thoughts and affecting our emotional lives. Even when communications are not haranguing our senses, a buzz of sorts runs in the background and constantly seeks our attention. The buzz goes on within us, in our internal lives, as well as beyond us.

There are sometimes personal reasons why we find silence and solitude difficult. Perhaps we’re afraid we won’t like what we’ll see and hear going on within us if we let ourselves hold silence—troubling memories, pressing tasks, aspirations that are in danger of becoming broken dreams. Perhaps we fear loneliness and its threat we won’t ever be deeply known. Or maybe it’s not fear at what we’ll find. Maybe it’s fear at what we won’t find. Perhaps we fear no response, or a response other than that which we desire. Or perhaps we lack a vibrant inner life and are easily bored with those things we focus on or chance upon as we take time to ourselves. Even if we make the effort and rummage about within… Ding! Our phone notifies us, and that’s the signal to return to the virtual world (the world we, strangely, think of as “the real world”). About time!

Whatever the case, we like our own busy, buzzing worlds and the comfort, and sometimes recognition, they give us. Silence and solitude are to be endured and not willingly entered. Personal inhibitions can get in the way, while it seems our cultural context makes our need of others almost an obsession, by which I mean the need for others often serves my needs above all.

An emphasis on my needs distorts my basic relationality. We’ve spoken of how we are relational creatures, on the one hand, while cultural conditions take this constitution and shape it in certain ways. My mood lifts, for instance, as my phone notifies me of someone’s attention. On the other hand, I tell myself I am my own and my own alone. I don’t need others, or I only need others insofar as I determine and satisfy my needs. If we are to talk of needing others, we often prefer to talk of others’ need of us, rather than our need of them. Our notion of others’ dependence and our own independence is clearer when we think of ourselves as viewed through others’ eyes. On the one hand, we like to think ourselves indispensable to others. We like to be consulted, say. “She needs to consult me about her decision,” or “I should’ve been consulted.” On the other hand, I’m unattached. “I can make my own decisions.” My own need is re-packaged as others’ need, while I stand in apparently splendid isolation.

Perhaps then we have two working models of the self in apparent tension. First, we provide permanent ballast to others, like pig iron bars in eighteenth century ships. Without ballast, stability is radically in question. Second, we are something like a safe with a combination lock: the safe is isolated and distinct; each of us alone knows the combination to the safe. Not only so, this safe is strategically located at the centre of the world: the world is mine rather than ours, or it is at least ordered to me and not to us. From this centre, I opt into relationships; I rule on my attachments. I inevitably end up ruling on others’ needs too. For example, I followed my friend out to the rock while on retreat because I was uncomfortable with silence and being alone. I sought him out on my own terms. It suited me to have a conversation with him, to distract myself and to distract him. My friend served my needs, though I assumed I was serving him. I resolved the possible tension between the need for others and the belief that I am my own by wresting my friend to my ownmost self, as it were, by treating him as the salve for my discomfort.

Let’s now take up Scripture. “Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him” (Luke 9:18). That’s a strange statement: it seems that Jesus is both by himself—“alone”—and he is with others, and so not alone. What is being said here? We can we read this in at least two ways. We might say that Jesus is the only Son of the Father, and in his prayer to the Father he is necessarily alone.¹ We might also venture that Jesus’s prayer alone was silent or sotto voce. Silent prayer involves solitude. This makes sense: where we do not share language publicly, we are in a sense solitary. After all, language binds us together; language is the basis of relationship, and as some philosophers have said, language plays a constitutive role in our humanity.² Either way, Jesus was praying alone while disciples were close by.

Prayer is a key theme in Luke’s gospel. Pray and do so continually, the evangelist seems to exhort. For Luke, prayer is dialogue with God or, put another way, “the expression of a relationship with …God”. ³ Silence and solitude appear in the narrative, and we shall see how it serves the dialogue with God. Luke depicts the prayers of several characters, but we’ll focus on Jesus Christ. First, Jesus is the pray-er who intercedes for his disciples and the one they and us are to learn from and follow. Second, prayer lies at the heart of who Jesus Christ is. As one theologian puts it: “We see who Jesus Christ is if we see him at prayer”.⁴ Not only so, when we listen in to Jesus’s prayer or see him at prayer we “encounter something of God’s character and purpose”.⁵ Specifically, Jesus’s prayer precedes or accompanies significant events in the narrative. Jesus prays at his baptism, and he prays before the calling of the 12 disciples. In our passage, Jesus prays before Peter’s confession. In the following scene, Jesus prays at the transfiguration. Later, Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he prays on the cross.

Before the passion week, Jesus prays alone at three moments in Luke’s gospel:

1. In the midst of Jesus’s healing ministry, we read at 5:16: “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.”
2. And then, just before the calling of the 12, Luke writes: “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God” (6:12). Jesus prayed alone in the wilderness and on the mountain and, the language implies, he did so regularly.
3. 9:18, in our passage, reads: “Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him.” ⁶

Luke’s showing us something particular with his narrative. Jesus seems to be revealing who he is, and he is inducting or bringing the disciples into his prayer life. There is movement from Jesus’s solitude in prayer to him praying alone with the disciples to, then, the transfiguration scene where Jesus takes Peter, James and John up the mountain. There, Jesus’s glory is revealed in the radiance of his face and garments, and the Father speaks, “This is my Son, my chosen one, listen to him” (9:28-36). Soon afterwards, in chapter 11, Luke gives his version of Matthew’s Lord’s Prayer, which is Jesus’s explicit instruction in prayer. It begins: “Father, hallowed be your name” (11:2). So, when Jesus prays, he’s showing the disciples who he is. He’s also teaching the disciples how to pray. And, as part of this, he’s saying to them, pray in my place: pray, “Father, hallowed be your name.” In short, Jesus’s identity as the Son of the Father is central to his intercession on behalf of his disciples, to how the disciples in turn are to pray, and to what they’re doing when they pray.

This reveals the person and character of God, and it is remarkable: Jesus, the Son of the Father, makes space for the disciples and us to pray in his place as adopted sons and daughters. We pray not on our own merits but on the merit of the one in whose place we pray. We so often use all the means at our disposal to fight for our place, whether it’s market share, career ambitions, key relationships… location, location, location. But Jesus does not fight over or for his place, defending it at all costs. No, he shares his place with us, and he eventually pays the full cost for his generosity. And, with the disciples, we are being brought into the place and the prayer of Christ—into intimate relationship with the living God.

As we attend to Luke’s Gospel, there’s another key point in this connection. The Holy Spirit is intertwined with the practice of prayer (e.g., Luke 1:15; 1:35-38; 1:41; 2:26-32; 3:21-22. Cf. Acts 2:1-4; 4:23-31 etc). The Spirit is the answer to prayer (11:13), and is present in and empowers prayer. Jesus’s prayer to his Father at his baptism takes place in communion with the Holy Spirit (3:21-22). Jesus’s prayer is the site of trinitarian communion. We commune with God in prayer: we pray to the Father, in the Son, by the power and love of the Holy Spirit.

If in prayer we commune with God, what does this mean specifically for silence and solitude as a mode of prayer? Simply, in silence and solitude, we are passing time with God and making space for him. Once we have been brought into Jesus’s prayer—when we pray “Father, hallowed be your name”—we are invited into the wilderness and up the mountain to spend time with the Father as his adopted children. In our lives with other people, we only develop relationship as we pass quality time together. And normally we only develop relationship as we make space for others. This is the case for our relationship with God also (even if we must be careful in using analogies and must never collapse the distinction between God and his creation). Passing the time may involve words. It may not. Silent prayer is a mode of prayer. The call is simply to be present to God. Silence hits pause on the incessant buzz and helps us make space for God by turning to the very centre and source of our being.

What do I intend by this? We need to take a slight step back first. As I alluded to earlier, there is a polarity entailed in being human. On the one hand, we are relational beings who exist in webs of connection to others. Scripture and the tradition of our church tells us we are made in and for relationship. God loved us first, John puts it, and he enables and calls out our love (1 John 4:7f). We are to love the Lord God and our neighbour (cf. Luke 10:27). Put in Paul’s language, our faith works through love (Galatians 5:6). We are intertwined with others constitutionally and as a matter of discipleship—it is who we are and who we are called to be. We are not first independent units who then opt into relations with others; from our first breath we are held by others and our relations with them co-constitute who we are. When others recognise us, they acknowledge our relationality and so acknowledge us and themselves. In the act of recognition we are constituted. The shared world denoted by “we” is made, in a sense, in this encounter. We are to live into this constitution, which is perfected in the love of the Christian life.

On the other hand, we are not solely who we are in relationship with other people; we are each ourselves as persons given to be who we are by God. This includes interiority, an internal life, which involves a perspective on ourselves and, more deeply, our relation to God. Part of Christian teaching on creation elaborates that God’s ongoing donation of being to us, his continual sustaining of our life moment to moment, involves deep intimacy with us. God’s transcendence precisely underwrites this intimacy. Augustine speaks of and to God: “Nor are you a soul…no, you’re the life of souls, the life of lives…the life of my soul.” (Confessions, 3.6.10). Soon after, he goes on famously to address God as “deeper inside me than my deepest depths and higher than my greatest heights” (3.6.11). God continually upholds my life in being, giving life, life, life with each passing second, and he does so most deeply and most intimately—“within”—whilst governing his creation from a height beyond the most capable altimeter. God is both beyond and in us and beyond and in all his creation.⁷

This might sound like self-centred navel-gazing. It would be, and indeed it would be much worse—it would be prideful self-aggrandisement—if we were in fact our own: autonomous units sufficient unto ourselves. But we are not that. When we turn within in prayer we find our centre, and our centre is not ourselves but God, the source of our being. Our centre lies within and yet excels us. When we pray in silence we come to see we are not our own, but are given to be by another, another who dwells within without being constrained, let alone controlled, by us.⁸ When we enter into silent prayer, we approach God and make space for him, entering into a way of “un-mastery”.⁹

Restated, then: silence hits pause on the incessant buzz and helps us make space for God. When we seek God in quiet places, we’re denying an aspect of who we are (being with other creatures, sharing language) and we’re resisting cultural and even personal pressures in order to focus on our most fundamental relationship—our relationship with God. We are in fact following the order of Luke’s double love commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself” (Luke 10:27). In the background of this text lies Deuteronomy 11:13b, “…to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul”, of which the Rabbis of the Talmud asked: “Which is the service of God that is performed in the heart?” (Taanit 2a) Their answer: prayer! ^1o Luke the Evangelist would likely agree.

In silence and solitude, therefore, we are turning to God our creator. We are also turning to God our redeemer. As we have seen, Luke displays who Jesus is when he is at prayer, and he gives us an example of the consummate pray-er. These two are linked theologically, as we adopted children pray in Jesus’s name and in his place. We receive his intercession, follow after his prayer and stand in his place before the Father, because he has stood and stands in ours.

To talk of all this is to press to and beyond the limits of language and of understanding. I’m pressed well beyond my own insight. Let it be said of me, hopefully, something like what Teresa of Avila wrote comically of her brother’s attempt to interpret a word she’d received from the Lord: “If he has spoken of more than he understands, we pardon him—because of the recreation he has given us…”.¹¹ Teresa rendered her own interpretation of the Lord’s word in verse. The final strophe runs in this way:

Outside yourself seek Me not,
To find Me it will be
Enough only to call Me,
And in yourself seek Me.¹²

Teresa can help us where we are at the limits of our understanding. She conceived of what she called “mental prayer” as “living out a friendship, frequently, one-to-one, being with the one who we know loves us” (Life, V:8.5).¹³ God with his love stretches out toward us, entreating our response, and when we respond, the drama of divine and human love plays out in several modes, but perhaps most foundationally in prayer. Prayer expresses the drama of friendship. Teresa’s prayer, for long stretches, involved her in the presence of Christ. As she put it, Jesus was “present within me” (V:4.7), and in particular:

…I would try to represent Christ within me, and it seems to me I got on better in those situations where I could see he was most alone. It seemed to me that being alone and afflicted, as a person in need, he had to accept me. I had many simple thoughts of this kind. I found the scene of his prayer in the garden, especially helpful; I set myself to be his companion there. (V:9.4)

Teresa was a socially marginal figure in early modern Spain in two ways: she was a woman, and she was a converso, a Christian with Jewish blood. She found herself insecure in the midst of a profoundly anxious society from which she sought rescue (but not disengagement). She found Jesus present to her in such a way that she could be found secure, needed and acceptable.¹⁴ Jesus, alone in the garden, must “accept her”. In “letting Christ be with her”, Teresa turns to the source of her life, the one who accepts her or recognises her definitively.¹⁵

If this is what is involved in prayer in silence and solitude, what can we expect from it? I don’t mean to reduce prayer to mere usefulness. Teresa was concerned to assert prayer was “for nothing” in the sense that it served only the intrinsic good that is dialogue and friendship with God. So often, she well knew, we want to derive some benefit beyond the friendship, or some significant “confirmation” of the friendship’s intimacy, such as a mystical experience. We want to see reward for our labour and sacrifice. We want return on investment. We want to drive efficiencies. Teresa knew how we almost instinctively want to leverage our prayer life and “holiness”, generally, into some measurable gain no matter what we tell ourselves and others (cf. Interior Castle, III). But friendship is more than enough.

Luke’s Gospel reveals additional insight. First, Jesus’s prayers in silence and solitude strengthen his relationship with the Father and ready him for his mission. The relationship, expressed in prayer, represents the root of Jesus’s strength.¹⁶ Second, Jesus seems to pray for discernment: prayer comes before decision.¹⁷ Jesus prays before the calling of the 12 disciples (6:12), and he prays in our passage, it seems, both for himself and for Peter. Peter thereafter confesses Jesus as “the Christ of God”. Clarity is one way to speak of discernment as a fruit of silence. Evagrius, a monk in the early church, spoke of how the grace of stillness enables clarity of mind and stirs the longing for God. He explains such stillness with this metaphor:

If a jar of wine is left in the same place for a long time, the wine in it becomes clear, settled and fragrant. But if it is moved about, the wine becomes turbid and dull, tainted throughout by the lees.¹⁸

Stillness in the desert, in the wilderness, and on the mountain, lead to settledness and clarity. In quiet places, we come before God and seek strength, and discernment and clarity. Such fruit serve God’s redemptive purposes and the disciples (and our) participation in them.¹⁹ Prayer presses God’s purposes forward.

As we’ve seen, prayer is a core part of following Jesus. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is showing the disciples who he is, he’s praying for them, and he’s teaching them to pray. This is a journey or a “way”. Luke later calls the Christian movement “the way” in Acts (e.g., 9:2). Our passage from Luke marks the beginning of Jesus’s turning, his own way, toward Jerusalem and the passion week. There is a cost to joining Jesus on the way. As we saw in our reading: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Luke refers not to spectacular one-off performances but to the daily disciplines of self-denial required in discipleship.

Silence and solitude involve self-denial. But we need not fear emptiness or loneliness as we enter silence before God. The Holy Spirit is present. The Apostle Paul speaks of the witness and inaudible groans of the Spirit (Romans 8:15ff). In and through the often difficult work of prayer, we are realizing, in concert with the Spirit, our most fundamental relationship as adopted children of the most high God, our creator and rescuer. We know ourselves as fragile created beings in need of rescue, yes, but more: we know ourselves as created beings sustained by our generous and good God, who is also our rescue—we know ourselves as we truly are, released into life indeed.²⁰ Simply, we forget our ourselves and remember God, and especially our utter dependence on God. “Be still and know that I am God”, the Psalmist sings (Psalms 46:10). In the hurly-burly of life, the wilderness and the mountain are never anything less than places to remember God. After all, we are forgetful creatures. Where there is less movement, no glitz, no external chatter, less distraction, there is space and quiet to know God and our dependence on him. When we get on with prayer—however we do it, whenever we do it—we are withdrawing from temptations to self-reliance, from the comfortable worlds of our own making. We’re also withdrawing from external relations that seem to ground and secure our identity: relations of recognition, honour, prestige. We’re pressing pause on our ambitions to be seen and accepted by others, to be seen as effective, efficient, competent, excellent. No, we are dependent on God and his rescue alone. We’re talking about silence and solitude as playing a role in becoming centred truly. We’re talking about silence and solitude as ways of self-denial that enable us to take up our lives and ourselves anew, faithfully, conformed to the Son, and in the Son, through the Spirit, the adopted sons and daughters of the most high God.

Finally, silence and solitude have tremendous implications not only for each of us but for our lives together. We have now arrived at the second clause of the double love commandment. Luke writes, remember: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself” (Luke 10:27). With prayer we are talking centring and renewal to the point of greater mutuality, deeper relationship: as we grow in love for God, we come increasingly to love what he loves, especially our neighbour. I’m saying: silence and solitude are not navel-gazing or escapism. They also have nothing to do with do-nothing passivity. Precisely the opposite. Silence and solitude underpin our service to God and to our neighbour. As we turn within, we find resource to turn from the inside out and express our agency harnessed by God’s vision and Spirit.²¹ Instead of wresting my friend to my ownmost self, as I did at St Jacut de la Mer, I hold him before the Lord and wait on the Lord as my agency is configured faithfully.

In brief, who is the neighbour we are to love, for Luke? Our neighbour is anybody, everybody, and especially the marginalised: children (who had low status in the Roman Empire), widows, the sick (even slaves and lepers), Samaritans (who were considered religious heretics by Israel’s religious aristocracy), as well as other social outcasts such as the demon-possessed, tax collectors and prostitutes, and of course, the poor. In short, silence and solitude can remind us, through renewing us, that our lives are not simply in the world but are rooted in God, through Christ, for the life of the world.

¹ T. Weinandy, Jesus becoming Jesus. A Theological Interpretation of the Synoptic Gospels (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 209-10. Weinandy speaks of “Jesus’s prayerful ‘aloneness’ with his Father and his incarnational ‘togetherness’ with his disciples” (210).
² E.g., C. Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
³ Bartholomew and Holt point out, for instance, that Luke’s Gospel narrative is framed by prayer at the beginning and at the close: “Prayer in/and the Drama of Redemption in Luke: Prayer and Exegetical Performance”, in C.G. Bartholomew, J.B. Green & A.C. Thiselton (eds), Reading Luke: Interpretation, Reflection, Formation (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Zondervan, 2005), 354. On continual prayer, see: P.T. O’Brien, “Prayer in Luke-Acts”, Tyndale Bulletin 24, 1 (1973), 119, 121. “The expression of a relationship with …God”: I. Howard Marshall, “Jesus—Example and Teacher of Prayer in the Synoptic Gospels”, in R. Longenecker (ed.), Into God’s Presence: Prayer in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 123.
⁴ J. Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, trans. G. Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 19.
⁵ J. Green, The Theology of the Gospel of Luke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60.
⁶ Cf. Marshall refers to Lukan themes of withdrawal (5:16; 6:12; 9:18) and intensity (6:12). Both of these are implied the Gethsemane passage (22:39-46) (“Jesus—Example and Teacher of Prayer in the Synoptic Gospels”, 116ff).
⁷ Cf. E. Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysik, Ur-Struktur und All-Rhythmus (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1996), 72. Przywara considers “God beyond-and-in the creature” (Gott über-in Geschöpf) the formal ground of Catholic theology. Rowan William reflects on the contemplative tradition and notes that its prayer “classically finds its focus in the awareness of God at the centre of the praying person’s being—and, simultaneously, God at the centre of the whole world’s being: a solidarity in creatureliness” (On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 76).
⁸ On the links between contemplation and the doctrine of creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) see B.D. Robinette, The Difference Nothing Makes: Creation, Christ, Contemplation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), esp. 41-77.
⁹ S. Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 43.
¹⁰ Taanit 2a. Accessed 2 October 2024 at: https://www.sefaria.org/Taanit.2a.11?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
¹¹ “A Satirical Critique” in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol. 3, trans. K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1985), 361.
¹² “Seeking God” in ibid., 385.
¹³ Translated by Iain Matthews. See: “St Teresa: Witness to Christ’s Resurrection”, in P. Tyler & E. Howells (eds), Teresa of Avila: Mystical Theology and Spirituality in the Carmelite Tradition (London: Routledge, 2017), 82-95.
¹⁴ For Rowan Williams, an animating question for Teresa is the following: “What might it be to be secure, not from a worldly perspective, but in the sense of an unbroken awareness of being needed and acceptable?” (“Mysticism and Politics: Some Thoughts about St Teresa of Avila”, Lecture before the Wolfson College Humanities Society, 25/2/2015. Accessed 20 September 2024 at: https://archive.org/details/88ykfk5wrb1axqx0hk1vutqtj9xyelbogqlrdqq0). See also Williams’s further reflections on Teresa, especially: Teresa of Avila (London: Continuum, 2003).
¹⁵  “Letting Christ be with us”: Matthews, “St Teresa”.
¹⁶ Green speaks to Jesus’s strengthening in prayer (59). “Root”: R.H. Rengstorf, Das Evangelium nach Lukas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1949), 75.
¹⁷ D. Crump, Jesus the Intercessor: Prayer and Christology in Luke-Acts (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 106f:
Luke associates the prayers of Jesus with the acquisition of spiritual insight at key locations throughout his gospel… Luke presents Jesus primarily, though not exclusively, as an Intercessor whose prayers on behalf of the disciples serve to accomplish all that is required for successful, obedient discipleship — including their calling, illumination and perseverance…
¹⁸ Evagrius Ponticus, “Outline Teaching on Asceticism and Stillness in the Solitary Life”, in The Philokalia, Vol. 1, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, & K. Ware (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 35.
¹⁹ Bartholomew & Holt, 356, 359, 362, 365. Cf. O’Brien, 127.
²⁰ Sarah Coakley emphasizes the person and work of the Holy Spirit in this way:
Strictly speaking, it is not “I” who autonomously prays but God (the Holy Spirit) who prays in me, and so answers the eternal call of the “Father,” drawing me by various painful degrees into the newly expanded life of “Sonship.” There is, then, an inherent reflexivity in the divine, a ceaseless outgoing and return of the desiring God; and insofar as I welcome and receive this reflexivity, I find that it is the Holy Spirit who “interrupts” my human monologue to a (supposedly) monadic God; it is the Holy Spirit who finally thereby causes me to see God no longer as patriarchal threat but as infinite tenderness; but it is also the Holy Spirit who first painfully darkens my prior certainties, enflames and checks my own desires, and so invites me ever more deeply into the life of redemption in Christ. In short, it is this “reflexivity in God,” this Holy Spirit, that makes incarnate life possible. (55-6)
²¹ According to Joel Green: “prayer and world-engaging life are woven into the same fabric of life in the Spirit” (152).