Prayer: Waiting For the Lover Who Often Doesn’t Come

The day before Thanksgiving, I went to a used bookstore in Sulphur Springs, Texas. It was mostly filled with harlequin romance novels and Tom Clancy thrillers. I couldn’t find any of my usual go-to authors. So I randomly picked out a book called The Spoils of War by Thomas Fleming. It’s a historical novel about a Yankee general who marries a Southern Belle right after the Civil War. They have a lavish lifestyle which includes annual summers in Europe. But they’re both miserable in their marriage. The husband is absorbed into political shenanigans; the wife has a couple of affairs. Demoralized, the wife Cynthia ends up in Venice with her granddaughter. And she discovers prayer at a Catholic chapel there. This passage completely undid me when I read it.

The Contessa Rospigliosi sat down beside her. “How do you pray?” Cynthia said. “I’ve never really tried it.”
“It’s a little like making love. You give yourself to God. You wait for Him to enter you. Often He chooses not to come. It can be somewhat humiliating.”
“I’m used to that. After so many years of a husband who…”
“Yes,” the Contessa said, making it clear how much she knew.

You give yourself to God. You wait for Him to enter you. Often He chooses not to come. It can be somewhat humiliating.

Yes. That’s what it’s like. I fast every Monday and Friday because of what has happened on rare occasion: an incredible connection with God in which I am brought into perfect sync with the universe. But usually it’s like waiting for a lover who doesn’t show up.

For many people, the question about whether prayer works has to do with whether a prayer was “answered,” i.e. some life circumstance changes, cancer gets healed, etc. I don’t know that I’ve ever really viewed prayer as transactional. To me, prayer works when God “shows up,” when I have those goose bumpy moments where I feel some kind of mystical light being poured into me. I don’t usually have epiphanies that can be put into words. It’s more a sense of radical belonging that makes all the crises of my life completely irrelevant because I’m in the eternal space that matters. When anything happens, that is.

I don’t say anything profound to God. Usually just several dozen iterations of “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” or a line from one of the psalms or “Destroy the works of the devil,” which has been my mantra this fall, since Satan has had me in a choke-hold for most of it.

And yet, most of the time, God “chooses not to come.” I realize in a cognitive sense that God is always actually there. I’m sure it’s just my inner noise. But I experience nothing. And I feel like one of the prophets of Baal that Elijah taunted at Mt. Carmel. How can I flail myself any more thoroughly at your feet? How can I let go and surrender any more absolutely? How much harder do I need to scrape my forehead against the concrete while I say “Just show me your will so I can do it”? If I scrape hard enough to draw blood, will there be a voice that gives me some kind of explicit instruction that is distinct enough from my stream of consciousness to be God’s voice?

The strange thing about prayer is the pain of the absence is what makes space for the sweetness of the presence. At least that’s what I’ve always said as part of my testimony. I want it to be true. Mostly I just want God to tell me what to do right now. I’m lost. I’m disgusted by all the farcical ways in which Christians around me are virtue signaling in the name of God. I’m disgusted by my own farce.

I don’t have a vision. That’s really the one thing I desire more than anything: a vision from God for how I’m supposed to do ministry that I can grab hold of with confidence. I have to believe that one day he will choose to come and all this waiting will have been the means by which he prepared me for whatever I receive when he does.

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