March 9, 2008

“When It’s Difficult to Pray”

Romans 8:26-27

The story’s told about two long-time, old friends who went hunting for moose in the forests surrounding Moose Head Lake in northern Maine. As the pilot of the small, chartered seaplane let them off on the shore of the lake, he said, “Now remember, I’ll return to pick you up in three days. But, like I said, this here’s a small plane. There’s just room enough for the two of you and one moose.”

Well, three days later when the pilot returned and taxied to the shore, he was aggravated to see between the two hunters, who were standing proudly with their rifles, not one but two moose, big ones at that. “Look,” the pilot said disgustedly, “I told you—the two of you and one moose!”

The old timers looked at each other with fake surprise and answered, “Funny, the pilot last year didn’t complain.”

Well, not to be outdone by competition, the pilot set aside his concerns and, grumbling, helped them pile both moose into the plane with the two old hunters laying on top of their game. The plane took forever to get off the lake, barely cleared the trees on the far shore, and about a quarter of a mile farther on, clipped a pine tree and crashed, sending pieces of its wings and moose antlers in all directions. Finally, one of the hunters came to, pulled his head out of the rubble, spied his companion a short way off and hollered, “Where are we?”

His friend replied, “About a hundred yards farther than last year!”

Spiritual progress can likewise be painfully slow as we all discover. Faith comes—and it also goes. Our commitment to Christ grows stronger and we’re ready to follow him anywhere—but temptation comes and dedication fades. Spiritual awareness and our prayer life come alive and we’re graced by the power of the Holy Spirit, but then a crisis breaks upon us and threatens our stability and sanity. Suddenly we feel very alone and empty. We reach out to God, but it seems no one’s there. We try to pray, but find we cannot. And so begins the desolation of the spirit many have experienced. C.S. Lewis discovered it during his wife’s suffering and death and wrote:

Meanwhile, where’s God? This is one of the disquieting symptoms of such a crisis. When you’re happy, God is always there, but go to Him when your need is desperate and what do you find? A slammed door and silence.

So what do you do when you can’t pray? Do you give up on praying when the words won’t come and the impulse is gone? How does one pray when there’s a lump in the throat and the soul feels hedged in by a bleak and empty landscape?

In this morning’s reading from the Bible, there’s a leading for us in those matchless words from Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome, where he shares what he’s discovered:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

What a wonderful, encouraging promise! To know that God’s Spirit languishes and grieves over our desolation when we cannot pray and responds with understanding power until we can pray again. To know that we’re being prayed for when we cannot pray ourselves—that saves personal agony from becoming final despair; it takes loneliness from complete abandonment; and it saves tragedy from interpreting life as totally absurd. This morning, I gladly share two realizations that come out of this faith conviction.

First, when we find we cannot pray, when it seems that God is absent, we wait in silence and in the silence we get in touch with our own deeper feelings, sort them out, and accept them for what they are and mean. This, because one of the reasons we cannot pray when our heart breaks and darkness falls around us, is that we find it difficult to relate our desolation, anger and fears with praying. We try to suppress our true feelings and conjure up what we think are “Christian” feelings in order to pray. It doesn’t work, however, and so prayer doesn’t happen. One pastor tells how he found this out:

I remember in seminary when my best friend accused me of some dark and desperate betrayal. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I was angry. I was bitterly angry at my friend who had rejected me. I tried to pray but I could not, for all I could think and feel was somehow hurting my friend. I wanted to destroy him. I savored my anger and then it began to turn sour. In the waiting silence, the anger began to subside and something else began welling up inside of me. And the something else was hurt, my own desperate hurt that my friend had rejected me, that I had lost someone I loved very much. And I wept uncontrollably. Then it happened. I found I could pray and I asked the Lord to give me back my friend.

When we can’t pray, we wait in silence so we can find out what’s really happening inside of us. We listen in the deepening quiet for God’s truth in our souls. We address what we don’t understand about ourselves and face up to what we’ve refused to acknowledge about ourselves. God, who searches our hearts, knows already, and waits for us to learn and accept it, so that prayer can once more connect us with God. God waits for us to discover how we actually feel, what we really want, what we yearn for, what we’re afraid to confess, what we need to do, where we need to go, and what we need to risk. The Psalmist saw this and cried out: “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” Jesus also sought to help us understand this when he declared: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

When we find we cannot pray, we can wait in silence. In that silence we listen to our hiding heart and sound out our deepest thoughts. In such self-encounter moments God brings us into a hush, a stillness so that the Holy Spirit can work an inner transformation upon the soul, and prayer once more links us with God’s near presence and power in Christ.

The second realization is this: when we find we cannot pray, we can still live in trust. When the impulse to pray is gone, when the words don’t come and God seems very absent, we live “as if” God were still present until our faith awareness returns. Despite the desolation we experience and the desperation that overwhelms us, we remember other days when our spirits soared as we walked with the Lord and, remembering, we affirm those peak moments and trust. We reclaim the certainties that once centered us and we trust them enough to keep going on.

John Wesley experienced times when he couldn’t pray and even after his conversion at Aldersgate, faith subsided for him until he felt that he was losing his soul. During a certain anguish-filled crisis, Wesley sought out his friend Peter Bohler and told him that he was giving up the ministry because he could no longer preach a faith that he was losing. Bohler’s response was quick and wise: “Go back, John, and preach faith until you get it!” We live “as if” God were still present, “as if” we have not been forsaken, “as if” we have not been left alone, “as if” we are precious and worthy in God’s sight, until faith and certainty return.

At least it’s been that way for me in my spiritual journey. During several faith crises when prayer was no longer possible for me, I determined to keep on trusting even when I was no longer sure how much I believed and encouragement and inspiration had almost died inside of me. Through many a dark moment I held onto this promise in Romans 8, that while I might not understand or believe, Jesus understood and believed in me, and the Holy Spirit was praying for me the prayer I could not pray myself. With such trust I kept going on until that wonderful moment came when faith returned and God’s presence broke within me again like a spring dawning. It was Morris West who wrote:

I groped for (God) and could not find Him. I prayed to Him but He did not answer. Then one day He was there again. I never understood until then the meaning of the term, ‘gift of faith.’ I do now.

So do I! When our faith diminishes and we find we cannot pray, we must keep on trusting, believing that the Spirit helps us in and through such times, and that faith will return. And it does!

Some years back, a young American athlete was on his way to winning a gold medal as a member of the U.S. Track and Field Team. He was a sophomore at the University of Washington when he broke the world’s record in the pole vault at a track meet in Southern California. The Olympic qualifying trials were but a few months away. However, one month after he broke the world record, this young athlete sustained a severe spinal injury that left him paralyzed. When his uncle visited him in the hospital he said to the young man, “Brian, I wish I could change places with you, so you could have some relief from the pain.” Brian replied, “You couldn’t do it. I know, because I couldn’t either, if I didn’t have to.” The trauma of the accident and the paralysis, with its dashing of Olympic hopes, as well as the prospect of never being able to walk again, sent Brian Sternberg into a spiritual crisis, a desolate time of despair. But some months later, Brian Sternberg declared in a magazine interview:

I want to know that my life is being fully used to the glory of God. I don’t want my faith in God to be just the result of my wanting to get well. I don’t want to believe in God’s power for the wrong reason. If my reason is wrong, the belief will do no good. One big obstacle, I guess, is that I want to get well more than I want to have faith for its own sake. Having great faith is a necessary step toward one of two things: being healed is one of them; peace of soul, if healing doesn’t come, is the other. Either one will suffice.

Brian Sternberg won his gold medal in the Olympics of the Spirit. He learned what we all must learn. When faith leaks out and a crisis or tragedy brings a desolation of the spirit and we cannot pray, we wait in the silence and listen, sorting through our feelings, finding out who we are and what we want. We also live in trust, knowing that when we cannot pray the Spirit helps us in our weakness, that when we don’t understand, we are understood and loved by God in Jesus Christ, and the moment will come when faith returns—as it did for Brian Sternberg. We can face whatever we must as he did, and make the most of it through the power of Christ who struggles with us and is always beside us. Let us pray:

Loving and gracious God, when life is too much for us to bear and we feel life is against us, then where can we turn? To whom can we look for relief? You, O Lord, are our ever-present help in times of trouble and heartache. For you are the One who was broken that we may be mended. You are the One who was crucified in order for the powers of darkness to be destroyed. May we not forget the Lord of Love and Life. Help us to remember him in our suffering. For in remembering his grief, we know we have a friend in our sorrows; in remembering his death, we know we are not alone in our dying; in remembering his resurrection, we know that he can create victory our of disaster. As a people of his story, may we not forget the Author of Abundant Life, the one who writes the last word—the word of love eternal, love inseparable, love that prays in and through us. Amen.