~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)
Prayer is a lot like radio broadcasting. We sit alone—perhaps in a small room—and talk to the wall in the hope that someone, somewhere, is listening. Through a process and technology we barely understand we try to reach out to the unseen listener. Although we can prepare beforehand for the communication, as often as not it might be just as well to make it up as we go along. Perhaps sometimes the best arises from spontaneity. But on other occasions the progress is awkward, and we cannot even begin to imagine what might lie beyond the blank walls enclosing us.
Then, every so often, we receive a response, faint though it might be. A voice comes back--a message of encouragement or even criticism. The important thing is that it briefly reassures us that someone is out there. But that someone—or Someone—is all-important.
It is perhaps most difficult to reach beyond our tiny bare-walled rooms, to hope for anything or Anyone beyond them, during times of suffering and anguish. Then, even our prayers—our attempts to communicate with the “outside”—can add to our pain. Reflecting on his own experience of sorrow, C. S. Lewis comments: “And one prays; but mainly such prayers as are themselves a form of anguish” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer). When our prayers just seem to bounce back to us from the surrounding walls, the room feels smaller still and the ricocheting pleas wound us further.
While in some ways suffering is easier for people of faith—having a hope and strength beyond themselves—in other ways belief makes it more complicated and difficult. The problem of pain is also a problem of faith—but only for those who already believe. “The ‘hiddenness’ of God perhaps presses most painfully on those who are in another way nearest to God” (ibid.). For those of us who live in the expectancy of His presence and goodness, God’s apparent absence and silence compound our pain and fear.
And there come moments when we are simply unable to believe, when a primitive nothingness seems our only visible option. Even then, by sheer force of will or habit we still cry out, in the style of Job, David’s anguished psalms, and Jeremiah’s lamentations, and in some incredible way our cry of hopelessness is still a prayer.
Robert McCrum was a successful London publishing executive who suffered a severe stroke at just 40 years of age. Despite his avowed atheism, he found himself reaching out to something in his periods of greatest desperation. “I pray to a God I don’t believe in. But I had an absurd thought the other day, that the thing about God is that even if you don’t believe in him, he listens to you” (McCrum, My Year Off).
It’s a huge thought. Even during the moments when we are so hurt, grief-stricken, or frightened that we cannot see any way to reach out to God, He still hears those cries—and somehow, in His humility and graciousness, they can count as prayers. Maybe that’s part of God’s promise that “I will answer them before they even call to me” (Isa. 65:24). Before we are able to summon the willpower, the focus, the right words, or whatever we think we might need to pray “properly,” God is already answering. In prayer, it seems, His readiness to listen is infinitely more important than our readiness to pray.
In his novel Lilith George MacDonald has one of his characters discover a tiny flower he is unable to identify. The character asks his traveling companion about the mysterious bloom. The raven tells him it is a unique prayer-flower: “Not one prayer-flower is ever quite like another.” Its beauty, form, color, and scent overwhelm the story character. “I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever seen before,” he reflects. “Therefore I knew I must be seeing a shadow of the prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart listening to the flower.”
That heart is the heart of God. The heartbeat that sustains the universe pauses to hear our stumbling, desperate, and even doubting cries.
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