Becoming Prayer

There comes a point in the spiritual life when you cannot pray.  At least, you cannot pray in the way you would like. Perhaps you have been through this before and after awhile you discovered a new way to pray. But this time is different. This time nothing satisfies. This time there is no growth into a different way to pray; no growth into a different form of prayer. This time the experience is one of an endless, empty waste: a desert where you find no pillar of cloud by day nor a pillar of fire by night. There is only the vast emptiness of the desert, a desert in which you cannot find so much as a burning bush. The vast emptiness of this desert is complete. Everything you formerly used to pray–prayers, pslams, songs, scriptures, everything–absolutely everything–has turned to ashes. You can find satisfaction, consolation in nothing. No thing is of any avail. You are left with an empty heart, with only the faintest desire to pray, and the fear that that desire itself will soon go out. Everywhere you turn, there is emptiness.

The temptation to give up on the spiritual life or to seek solace in activity, work, or ministry is nearly overwhelming. Prayer, over the many long years you have devoted to it, now seems far too demanding, far too difficult, and far too fruitless to continue. You seem only to have succeeded at reaching a dead end. Yet, this place of dead end, this place of no where and no thing, is a place of rare and deep grace. Now you are in God-time and God-space. Prayer becomes less your work and more God’s work. God’s work in the depths of your heart–hidden, silent, unseen, unfelt. Here God is most at home.

God fills the heart that is empty, the heart that is silent. But even this emptying is not your work, nor your accomplishment, but God’s. Blessed are the poor in spirit. It is not your doing for you cannot do it. Not being able to pray is gift and grace. To accept this gift, to accept the Divine invitation to allow this to occur, is to become prayer, not pray-er. What you feared were dying embers now burst forth in brilliant flame. You no longer pray, rather you are being prayed. A living flame of prayer burns within, a lamp never extinguished, a perpetual sanctuary lamp in the heart.