When God seems silent
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
– East Coker, by T. S. Eliot
How do you feel when you pray? Joyful and uplifted? Transported by love? Or do you, like me, frequently feel nothing, with a side helping of doubt and guilt? Perhaps I’m exaggerating – there are times when I feel pierced by prayer, transfixed by a desire that comes from nowhere and departs without explanation, leaving me to wonder whether anything really happened at all. But in general, and especially when I first took up the habit of prayer, I’ve found that when I try to lift my heart to God, an overwhelming sense of nothing confronts me, a sense of reaching beyond the limits of myself and receiving no answer.
As a beginner in the spiritual life, I interpreted this lack of response as a personal failure. I thought that feeling nothing but boredom and irritation during Mass, and reluctance or even dread at every attempt at meditative prayer meant that I was missing some essential faculty that everyone naturally possessed. Prayer started to acquire a bitter flavour for me; I avoided reflection and contemplation because either I felt nothing – and so believed that I had ‘gotten nowhere’ – or I got trapped in a downward spiral of anger at myself for feeling nothing and at God for not helping me.
Hope for the wrong thing
When my spiritual dryness was at its worst, I would often go to my father, wailing about my feelings of emptiness in prayer, and my inability to ‘sense’ the presence of God in any particular way. His usual response was to push me to be more practical – not something that comes naturally to me, a drama queen right to my bones. ‘Why do you expect a special feeling in prayer?’ he would ask me. ‘If you’re a natural being, and God is supernatural, how could you possibly sense His presence, unless He deliberately revealed Himself to you? And why should God reveal Himself to you in particular?’
His questions left me confused; at an intellectual level, I had no reasonable arguments against them, but at an emotional level, I couldn’t shake the conviction that if I just tried hard enough, I could make my spiritual life into everything I wanted it to be. My spiritual life became even drier and more arid – I remember visualising my heart as a kind of concrete wasteland, ugly and lifeless – and I became ever more convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, something that made it impossible for me to pray ‘the way other people can’.
There is yet faith
It was around then that I started reading Story of a Soul, the autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Looking back, I can only call my picking up this book at that time Divine intervention, because I wasn’t particularly attracted to it; in fact, I was daunted by Thérèse’s reputation for holiness and almost expected her story to confirm the gulf between me and other, spiritually healthy people. However, what I encountered was quite the opposite: despite her nineteenth-century purple prose, St Thérèse proved to be a normal, sensitive young woman who went through astonishingly relatable problems in her spiritual life. When she reproached herself for going through all her prayers mechanically, and noted in a matter-of-fact way that retreats and spiritual reading generally left her cold and unmoved, I felt as someone who suffered from a rare disease might feel if a great athlete or a famous film star started talking about having the same symptoms – at each difficulty or trial Thérèse faced in her interior life, I found myself nodding and exclaiming, ‘Yes, yes, I’ve had that one too!’
Obviously, our lives are not comparable: among other things, I am not living in a monastery, and I did not suffer the kind of early losses that she did. Yet reading Thérèse’s account of her life finally made me realise that my problems with prayer were not unique, and that saints also found it difficult to pray. Perhaps this may seem obvious, but to me, it was an enormous revelation. I’d always subconsciously assumed that the saints had been magically given some innate talent for prayer, while I'd been thrown out into the world with nothing. Now, however, I began to see that my sense of futility in prayer was a relatively common experience, which could be overcome.
The comfort of knowing that I wasn’t alone in my difficulties helped me to regulate my unstable emotions to a certain extent, allowing me to consider my father’s advice more objectively. He had been right from the start, of course: I had to reevaluate my assumptions, especially my expectation that I should be aware of God in some quantifiable way during prayer. After all, the history of the relationship between God and humanity does not support the theory that we can somehow sense His presence without Him explicitly revealing it to us. If we could perceive God without His assistance, why would He have sent messengers to us in the form of prophets? Why would the Incarnation, the scandalous fact of God emptying Himself to take on the slavish form of man (Phil 2:7), have been necessary, if human beings could know Him by their own efforts? Gradually, it dawned on me that I had it all backwards. The whole pattern of salvation history is one of Divine action and human response – never the other way around. My mistake had been to think that I could take the initiative and force God to show Himself to me.
I said to my soul, be still
However, it was not enough just to know that God was the one in charge of my spiritual life; I had to actually start putting that knowledge into practice, and that meant shaking off old, destructive behaviour. In particular, I had to stop getting bogged down in what I thought I ‘should’ be feeling when I prayed, and trying to manufacture the right feelings. To break this habit, I needed to learn how to be honest in prayer, to simply accept my present internal state and to talk to God about it. In practice, that means that if I came to prayer feeling cranky and resentful, for example, I would try to simply tell the Lord that, apologise for it and pray for His help with it; then suddenly, I would find that I’d begun a genuine conversation with God, without analysing it from every angle to see whether I was responding correctly. As the Christian writer George MacDonald put it, ‘the door into life generally opens behind us’, that is, where we least expect it. It was only when I stopped chasing after joy, expecting it as my due in prayer, that I experienced any hint of it.
Vital as beginning this dialogue with the Lord may be, I know it is only the precursor to something more important, something that I am still struggling to learn: listening to the Lord. Rather than straining to produce some mystical effect, or imagining what He might be saying to me, as I used to do, this means quieting my tempestuous emotions and rambunctious imagination to create space for what St John of the Cross referred to as God’s first language – silence. It’s hard, of course, for a noisy creature like myself to achieve anything resembling stillness, but like everything in the spiritual life, it’s freely given to those who ask for it. The one thing I can do, however, is to consistently set aside a certain period of time every day to create this space.
The faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
I know from my own experience that this constancy in prayer is what you might call a ‘life hack’. Back when I was having all these struggles, numerous friends and advisors told me that I needed to spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament every single day – preferably at least fifteen minutes. I rebelled against their suggestions, feeling that going to church every single day was a ridiculous imposition, not something that could be expected of a busy person with a stressful job. But eventually, shortly after my encounter with St Thérèse, I gave in and began visiting a church for quarter of an hour a day on my way to work. I would sit there and look at the tabernacle, and feeling very stupid indeed, say ‘hello’. I would offer God my daily work, tell Him about my plans for the day, and ask Him for His help. Quite frequently, I would just ramble and get distracted, but all the same, I did this daily visit close to every single day for almost a year (until quarantine put an end to visiting churches).
I cannot say that the sensation of praying into nothing ever entirely went away, but these days I am noticing changes in my behaviour and my tastes. My old temptations attract me less and less, and that internal aridity has begun to sprout flowers; if you asked me to visualise my soul now, I would see the beginnings of a garden. The world seems far less bleak to me too – beauty assaults me everywhere, in books, in clouds, in the faces of my family and friends, at random unexpected moments during mass and in the words of Scripture – and in spite of my knee-jerk habits of suspicion and doubt, I have begun to put my trust in God.
I now believe something that a nun once told me: that the thing that matters most in prayer is actually just to show up. At the time, I was almost offended by how little she thought my own effort counted, but now, I realise that she meant to show how little is actually expected of me. Just to sit in a quiet place (ideally, but not necessarily, in church), to read a passage of Scripture slowly, to say hello, however silly or pointless it may seem, to the vast, attentive silence that I so often, so easily mistake for nothingness, and then to wait – this is all it takes to begin a relationship with God.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.– East Coker, by T. S. Eliot