Put a person in a bare room with nothing but their own thoughts and a button that delivers a mild electric shock they'd already said they'd pay to avoid. Leave them there for fifteen minutes. In a study published in the journal Science, a striking number of people chose to shock themselves instead of sitting in silence: two-thirds of the men, and a quarter of the women. When we've lost the capacity to be still, what happens to our prayer, and what happens to us?

In this episode, Graham explores contemplative prayer, the ancient Christian practice of silence and loving attention to God, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the practice from Elijah meeting God in the thin silence at Horeb, to the stillness of the Psalms and Jesus rising before dawn to pray in a deserted place, to Mary sitting at Jesus' feet and the Spirit who prays within us in Romans 8, and he grounds the whole thing in the gospel of grace and the life of the Triune God. He engages with voices like Evagrius Ponticus, who named our distraction seventeen centuries early, alongside Augustine, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, and Simone Weil, together with the research of Timothy Wilson, Byung-Chul Han, and Cal Newport on attention, distraction, and the machine built to capture it. He offers practices you can start this week, from two minutes of silence to lectio divina, the Jesus Prayer, and the daily examen, and he looks honestly at the evangelical worries about contemplative prayer before answering them from inside the faith. And he asks what we lose when we can't be still, whether the God who spoke to Elijah in the thin silence is still speaking, and how a distracted people might learn to listen again.

Book recommendations: "Invitation to Solitude and Silence" by Ruth Haley Barton, "The Way of the Heart" by Henri Nouwen, "The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry" by John Mark Comer, and "Digital Monasticism" by Graham Joseph Hill.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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